LANGUAGE LEARNING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

CHARACTERISTICS OF FIRST LANGAUGE ACQUISITION

high degree of similarity in the early language of children all over the world

Developmental Sequences: every child goes through similar stages of acquisition while s/he is acquiring their first langauge

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DEVELOPMENTAL SEQUENCES

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EMERGENCE OF GRAMMATİCAL MORPHEMES (BROWN, 1973)

In his study on three children acquiring English as their first language, Brown has found that the grammatical morphemes appear in the following order in all three of them:

Present progressive Plural –sIrregular past forms environmental frequency?Possesive ‘s cognitive complexity of meaning?Copula difficulty of pronunciation?Articles (the & a)Regular past Third person singularauxiliary

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NEGATION (BLOOM,1991)

Stage 1“No. No cookie. No comb hair”

Stage 2Daddy no comb hair.Don’t touch that.

Stage 3I can’t do itHe don’t want it.

Stage 4You didn’t have supper. She doesn’t want it. I don’t have no more candies.

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QUESTIONS (BLOOM, 1991)

Appearance of wh- wordsWhat, Where ,Who,Why,When ,How

Stage 1Cookie? Mummy book?Where’s Daddy? What’s that? (learned as chunks)

Stage 2 (statement with rising intonation)You like this? I have some?

Stage 3Is the Teddy is tired?Do I can have a cookie?Why you don’t have one?Why you cathced it?

Stage 4Are you going to play with me?Do dogs like ice cream?Why dogs like ice-cream? 6

THE PRESCHOOL YEARS

By the age of four, children acquire all the basic structures of their language, can use language for very different functions and purposes in a variety of settings, and have a rich vocabulary.

Metalinguistic awareness Complex grammatical structures (can produce about 6 word utterances) Extensive vocabulary (4000-6000 words)

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THE SCHOOL YEARS

Continued growth of vocabulary (due to reading; terminology; different states of affairs)

Understanding the difference between form and meaning

Different registers of speech

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BEHAVIORISM

B. F. Skinner, «Verbal Behaviour»

Is originally a psychological theory invsetigating animal behaviour in lab environment

Is empirical in theory, focusing on stimulus-response pairs

Argues that language acquisition follows the process of imitation-positive reinforcement-habit formation

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IMITATION The conversation between Peter (24 months) and two adults (Patsy, Lois).

Peter: Get more.Lois: You’re gonna put more wheels in the dump truck?Peter: Dump truck. Wheels. Dump truck.

Patsy: What happened to it (dump truck)?Peter: Lose it. Dump truck! Dump truck!Dump truck!Lois: Yes, the dump truck fell down.Peter: Dump truck fell down. Dump truck.

The conversation between Cindy (24 m) and Patsy.

Cindy: Kawo? Kawo? Kawo?Patsy: What are the rabbits eating?Cindy: They eating…kando?Patsy: No, that’s a carror.Cindy: Carrot (pointing to each carrot on the page). The other…carrot. The other carrot. The other

carrot.Patsy: What does the rabbit like to eat?Cindy: eat the carrots. He east carrots. The other one eat carrots. They both eat carrots.

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IMITATION

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A REVIEW OF SKINNER’S “VERBAL BEHAVIOUR” BY CHOMSKY (1957)

B.F. Skinner

Noam Chomsky

WHERE IMITATION FAILS

There are certain linguistic phenomena that “behaviourism” alone cannot explain.

Creativity in Uttterances

Mother :Maybe we need to take you to the doctor.Child :Why, so he can doc my little bump?

Father :I’d like to propose a toastDavid (5 y.o) : I’d like to propose a piece of bread.

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WHERE IMITATION FAILS

Question formation

Randall (2;9): Are dogs can wiggle their tails?Are those are my boots?Are this is hot?

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INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1965)

INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1965)

Language acquisition is similar to other biological functions.

It is a part of children’s biological endowment, people are biologically programmed to acquire language as long as they adequate input is provided for them in the environment.

The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition

The Innate Program

Principles of Universal Grammar

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INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1959)

The Logical Problem of Language AcquisitionHow comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?

BERTRAND RUSSELL, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and

Limits, 1948

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The Logical Problem of Language AcquisitionChildren come to know more about the structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis of the samples they hear.

Example: Coreference

(a) John saw himself.(b) *Himself saw John.

(c) John said that Fred likes himself(d) *John said that Fred likes himself.(e) John told Bill to wash himself.(f) *John told Bill to wash himself.

(h) John promised Bill to wash himself.

(g) John believes himself to be intelligent.(f) *John believes that himself is intelligent.

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INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1959)

The Poverty of the Stimulus Argument

Children cannot simply be learning by the environmental stimuli and positive evidence. The environmental stimuli is incomplete in many ways, full of performance errors, false starts, and half-sentences. Children have no access to the complex structures of language via environmental stimuli.

They have no access to negative evidence.

INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1959)

the composition and production of an utterance is not simply a matter of stringing together a sequence of responses under the control of outside stimulation and intraverbal association, and […] the syntactic organization of an utterance is not something directly represented in any simple way in the physical structure of the utterance itself. (Chomsky, 1959: 21)

John is easy to please John is eager to please

Who climbs the Grammar-Tree distinctly knowsWhere Noun and Verb and Participle grows.John Dryden

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INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1959)

I had intended this review not specifically as a criticism of Skinner'sspeculations regarding language, but rather as a more general critique ofbehaviorist (I would now prefer to say"empiricist") speculation as to thenature of higher mental processes.

The conclusion that I hoped to establish in the review, by discussing thesespeculations in their most explicit and detailed form, was that the generalpoint of view was largely mythology, and that its widespread acceptance is notthe result of empirical support, persuasive reasoning, or theabsence of a plausible alternative.

(Chomksy, 1959:1-2)

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INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1959)

THE INNATE MECHANISM:

The child is assumed to be biologically equipped with knowledge of universalgrammar—the basics of lang. structure. The child has blueprints for all thepossible types of lang. in her head. In the course of lang. development shesettles on the particular grammar of the lang. surrounding her.

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INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1959)

THE INNATE PROGRAM (has two sides to it)

Principles (Rules that are universal; Parameters the Universal Grammar (UG)) (Rules specific to a given

language)

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INNATISM (CHOMSKY, 1959)

THE UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR:

Premisethe linguistic system involves rules too abstract and complex to be learned without the aid of innate knowledge about the nature of the system . . . The child is equipped with a set of blueprints that define and limit what a human language can be like.

Hypothesis: The child is assumed to be biologically equipped with knowledge of universal grammar—the basics of language structure. The child has blueprints for all the possible types of language (principles) in her head. In the course of language development she settles on the particular grammar of the language (parameters) surrounding her.

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PRINCIPLES

An example of “principles”:

SubjacencyA. “No constituent can be moved over more than one bounding category.”

B. It can move only from a layer that is subordinate and adjacent.

PRINCIPLES

Bounding category: S (sentence) and NP (noun phrase) in English

e.g.1: What did Sue destroy? (a correct sentence?)

S Ø What [did Sue destroy t] ?

e.g. 2: What did Sue destroy a book about? (correct?)

S NP Ø

What [did Sue destroy (a book about t)]

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Principles

s[(That all of us but you were upset) is obvious.]

S[(That all of us were upset) but you is obvious.]

S S*[(That all of us were upset) is obvious] but you.

Parameters

Definition: Any of the established limits within which something must operate.

[dictionary definition] Strictly defined possibilities of variation across languages. A range of possibilities and languages choose within that range: every

language must set its parameters.

Parameters

An example: Pro-drop (an overt pronominal subject is dropped/optional): subjectless

sentences

English: I am going to the cinema. *Am going to the cinema.

Spanish: “Yo voy al cine.” “voy al cine.”

Italian: Io vado al cinema. (I go to the movies.) Vado al cinema.

Spanish + Italian= pro-drop languages. (but English is not)

Principles and Parameters in Language Acquisition

The primary role of UG in language development is to limit the hypotheses that a child can form concerning the rules of speech and ease with which language is acquired.

INNATISM: The Critical Reception

Usually criticized by the Cognitive Grammarians on the following grounds:

The theory cannot be empirically tested. Is not psychologically plausible Underestimates the role of experience in learning The stimuli is not as impoverished as Chomsky has assumed Children are exposed to many chances in the language around

them that help them develop their grammar.

The Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives: Cognitive Grammarians

No seperate “module” of grammar in the mind. Language acquisition is another example of children’s general ability to

learn from experience. What children need to know is available to them in the language they are

exposed to as they hear it used in thousand hours of interactions Develoment of cognitive abilities (object permanence, stability of

quantities, logical inferencing etc.) play an important role in language development

The Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives: Cognitive Grammarians

Connectionism

Children acquire links or “connections” between words and phrases and the situations in which they occur.

Any characteristic of the object or the event associated with each other may trigger the associated word or phrase from memory.

Connectionism is not only a process of associating words and phrases with other words and phrases that occur with them, it is also a process of associating words with grammatical morphemes and other phrases that occur with them, and attributing some meaning to them. (How?)

The Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives: An example of Cognitive Grammar: Construction Grammar

Developed by Ronald Langacker (2008) Constructions are main carriers of meaning. Constructions are stored pairings of form and

function. They are stored in memory as patterns. Grammar is symbolization; learning grammatical phrases is similar to learning vocabulary

items and doing some abstraction.

Example(1) We laughed.

John sneezed.

(2) We laughed our conversation to an end.John sneezed his tooth right across the road.

(3) She dragged the child into the car.He wiped the mud off his shoes.He pushed the book down the table.

Form: V Xn in/off Xn Meaning: caused motion

The Interactionist/Developmental Perspectives: An example of Cognitive Grammar: Construction Grammar

How are Constructions Learned?

if mental constructions are the basis of grammar, then the task for the language learner is to make abstractions and to arrive at schematic mental representations of meaningful grammatical forms. Children can do this with the help of three basic cognitive skills (i) pattern-finding, (ii) entrenchment, (iii) analogy.

the ability to form perceptual and conceptual categories of “similar” objects and events.

the ability to form sensory-motor schemas from recurrent patterns of perception and action.

the ability to perform statistically based distributional analyses on various kinds of perceptual and behavioral sequences.

the ability to create analogies (structure mappings) across two or more complex wholes, based on the similar functional roles of some elements in these different wholes.