Assignment #10Assignment #10This is the final homework assignment of the semester, unless you want to do the extra assignment to replace the score for one of your earlier assignments. In order to complete this assignment you will need to use the two datasets for Question 2, so if you want to work on this while you're away for Thanksgiving, be sure to print out the datasets as well as this page. Note that the relevant sections of chapter 10 of the textbook may be useful for both of these questions.
Posted Monday November 24th; due in class on Tuesday December 2nd. Will be discussed in section meetings on December 4th-5th.
Exercise 6 on pp.434-435 of Fromkin & Rodman.
The following two files contain about 200 lines each of conversation between a young boy known as Adam and a couple of adults: the first file is an excerpt from a recording made when Adam was two-and-a-half years old; the second file is an excerpt from a recording made one year later. These speech samples are taken from the Childes database, a 500 megabyte database developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University containing transcripts of hundreds of children speaking 22 different languages. The Adam transcripts were collected in the 1960s by Ursula Bellugi, then a graduate student at Harvard, now a well-known neurolinguist.
Read through the conversations and make notes on how Adam's speech differs from adult speech at each of the two stages; also, look out for differences in Adam's language between the first and the second recording sample. In particular, look out for the following features:
You do not need to worry about Adam's pronunciation of specific words for this question: just focus on his morphology and syntax. (e.g. don't worry about the fact that "this" is often pronounced as [dis])