PSY 369: Psycholinguistics Language Acquisition II

PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

Language Acquisition II

Language Sponges

About 3,000 new words per year, especially in the primary grades

As many as 8 new words per day

Learning words

12 ms first words

2 yrs 200 words

3 yrs 1,000 words

6 yrs 15,000 words

How do they do it (and what are they doing)?

Language Sponges Learning words

General patterns and observations Proposed Strategies

Fast mapping Whole object Mutual exclusivity

Learning Syntax Learning Morphology

Early word learning

Developed in systematic ways Not simply imitation, rather are creative Learned importance of consistency of names

First words (Around 10-15 months) Emergence of systematic, repeated productions of

phonologically consistent forms Idiomorphs - personalized words

Typically context bound (relevant to the immediate environment)

Important people, Objects that move, Objects that can be acted upon, Familiar actions

Nouns typically appear before verbs

Semantic Development

1-general names “dog”

2- specific names “mommy”

3-action words 4-modifiers

“red” 5-personal/social

“yes, no, please” 6-functional

“what”

Naming “Explosion”

Semantic Development Word Invention

to broom (to sweep) to fire (to burn) to scale (to weigh) a fix-man (a mechanic) a tooth-guy (a dentist) a locker (a lock) bum wiper (bathroom tissue) yester-minute (a minute ago)


Extension Finding the appropriate limits of the meaning of

words Underextension

Applying a word too narrowly Overextension

Applying a word too broadly

Applying the words to referents


Later words: Children come to use words in more adult-like ways

Words start to be used in wider range of contexts Children use wider range of word types:

referential words (ball, doggie, chair) proper names (Mummy, Spot) actions (open, wash, tickle) properties, states, qualities (more, gone, up, on, dirty) social-pragmatic words (no, please) few ‘frozen’ phrases (all gone, what’s that)

Extensions of meaning

“tee”


“tee”1:9,11


“tee”1:9,111:10,18


“tee”

“googie”

1:9,111:10,18

1:11,1


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24

1:11,25 “tee/hosh”


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24

1:11,25 “tee/hosh”1:11,26 “hosh”


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24

1:11,25 “tee/hosh”1:11,26 “hosh”1:11,27 “pushi”


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24

1:11,25 “tee/hosh”1:11,26 “hosh”1:11,27 “pushi”2:0,10 “moo-ka” “hosh”


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24

1:11,25 “tee/hosh”1:11,26 “hosh”1:11,27 “pushi”2:0,10 “moo-ka” “hosh”2:0,20

“biggie googie”


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24


“biggie googie”

One-word-per-referent heuristic If a new word comes in for a referent that is already named, replace it Exception to that was “horse,” but it only lasted a day here

Strategies for learning

1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24


“biggie googie”

Expansion and contraction can occur at the same time


1:9,111:10,18

“tee”

1:11,1

1:11,2“googie”

1:11,24


“biggie googie”

Child tries different things, if a word doesn’t work then try something else

e.g., hosh didn’t for for the large dog, switched to biggie doggie

Indeterminacy: Frog

FrogFrog?

Green?Ugly?

Jumping?

Quine’s gavagai problem The problem of reference:

a word may refer to a number of referents (real world objects)

a single object or event has many objects, parts and features that can be referred to

FrogFrog?

Green?Ugly?

Jumping?

Learning word meanings

Fast mapping Using the context to guess the meaning of a word

Learning words

Please give me the chromium tray. Not the blue one, the chromium one.

All got the olive tray Several weeks later still had some of the meaning

Constraints on Word Learning

Perhaps children are biased to entertain certain hypotheses about word meanings over others

These first guesses save them from logical ambiguity Get them started out on the right track

Markman (1989)

Object-scope (whole object) constraint Taxonomic constraint Mutual exclusivity constraint

Object-scope (whole object) constraint Words refer to whole objects rather than to parts of

objects


Dog

‘Show me another lux’

‘Here is a lux’

Taxonomic constraint Words refer to categories of similar objects Taxonomies rather than thematically related obejcts


But in ‘no-word’ conditions, they would be shown the first picture

See this? Can you find another one?


4 and 5 year olds' choice of theme vs. category

-20

10

40

70

100

No word condition Novel word condition% Theme / Category

ThemeCategory


they choose the corkscrew because it is a less well known object for which they

don’t have a label yet.

‘Show me a dax’:

Mutual exclusivity constraint (Markam and Watchel 1988)

Each object has one label & different words refer to separate, non-overlapping categories of objects

An object can have only one label


Problem with constraints

Most of the constraints proposed apply only to object names.

What about verbs? (Nelson 1988) There have been cases where children have been

observed violating these constraints Using for example the word ‘car’ only to refer to ‘cars moving

on the street from a certain location’ (Bloom 1973) The mutual exclusivity constraint would prevent

children from learning subordinate and superordinate information (animal < dog < poodle)

The language explosion is not just the result of simple semantic development; the child is not just adding more words to his/her vocabulary.

Child is mastering basic syntactic and morphological rules.

Language explosion continues

Proto-syntax (?) Holophrases

Single-word utterances used to express more than the meaning usually attributed to that single word by adults


“dog” might refer to the dog is drinking water

May reflect a developing sense of syntax, but not yet knowing how to use it

Controversial claim (e.g., see Bloom, 1973)

Syntax Basic child grammar (Slobin, 1985)

Similarities across all languages Mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes

Take 100 utterances and count the number of morphemes per utterance


Daddy coming. Hi, car. Daddy car comed. Two car outside. It getting dark. Allgone outside. Bye-bye outside.

# morphemes: 3, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2, 2‘-ing’ and ‘-ed’ separate morphemes‘allgone’ treated as a single word

MLU = morphemes/utterances = 20/7 = 2.86


0

1

2

3

4

5

6

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

age (months)

MLU

Syntax Roger Brown proposed 5 stages

Stage 1: Telegraphic speech (MLU ~ 1.75; around 24 months) One and two word utterances Debate: learning semantic relations or syntactic (position rules)


Children in telegraphic speech stage are said to leave out the ‘little words’ and inflections:

e.g. Mummy shoe NOT Mummy’s shoe Two cat NOT two cats

More than two words Stages 2 through 5

Stage 2 (MLU ~2.25) begin to modulate meaning using word order (syntax)

Later stages reflect generally more complex use of syntax (e.g., questions, negatives)


Syntax Roger Brown proposed 5 stages

Innateness account Pinker (1984, 1989)

Semantic bootstrapping

How do kids learn the syntax?

Child has innate knowledge of

syntactic categories and linking rules

Child learns the meanings of

some content wordsChild constructs some semantic representations

of simple sentences Child makes guesses

about syntactic structure based on surface form and semantic meaning

“It is in the stimulus” accounts Children do not need innate knowledge to learn grammar

Speech to children is not impoverished (Snow, 1977) Children learn grammar by mapping semantic roles (agent, action,

patient) onto grammatical categories (subject, verb, object) (e.g. Bates, 1979)

How do kids learn the syntax?

Documents

PSY 369: Psycholinguistics Language Acquisition II