LING 101: Language Acquisition

This page was prepared by Tom Purnell and William Idsardi as a study resource for their LING 101 courses at UDel. You may find it useful when pareparing for exams. Note that the material covered by these notes may not exactly match the topics covered in LING 101 when taught by other instructors. To return to the "Study notes" page use the navigation bar at the left.

Objectives

• know the stages of acquisition.
• be familiar with the acquisition of each module.
• know the difference between human language and other forms of communication (especially. animals).

Three Big-Picture questions

1. What do children know (unconsciously) about language in advance of language learning?
2. That is, what is Universal Grammar?
3. How do they use Universal Grammar to construct a mental grammar?

• now that we have examined the modules that make up the innate part of our mental grammar, in particular our endowment for language, we can begin to address the question of nurture, or acquiring a particular grammar.

What is Universal Grammar?

• UG, we saw, was composed of modules:
  • morphology
  • syntax
  • semantics
  • phonetics and phonology.
• Each module has its own function or role in using language.
• Furthermore we noticed throughout that there were things that were common to all languages (grammatical categories, distinctive features, theta roles, etc.)
• But that the instantiation of these common things were language specific.
• We can use this fact to begin to understand how children learn their various languages

How do children acquire a language?

• Theories of Language Acquisition
  1. Imitation
  • kids reproduce what they hear
  • problem: kids have a difference between production and perception, and cannot account for why kids can produce novel sentences
  1. Reinforcement:
  • kids learn by
    • positive reinforcement when right,
    • negative reinforcement when wrong
  • problem: why would kids make utterances in the first place, and cannot account for the fact that negative evidence fails
  1. Innateness:
  • kids are born 'ready' for language;
  • exposure combined with general grammatical principles helps kids discover the structure in their mental grammar
  • can account for:
    • why kids produce novel sentences (UG) and
    • why negative evidence fails (kids are programmed for stages)
• We can label the common things in kids' grammar as principles of UG.
• The things that vary, we can postulate, are chosen by the environment.
• We can further constrain our understanding of the mind and claim that these language-by-language variations are due to parameter settings, i.e., languages have a limited number of options for variation.
• UG is present in the child's mind as a system of principles and parameters.
• In response to evidence from the environment the child creates a core grammar that assigns values to all the parameters, yielding one of the allowable human languages--French, Arabic, etc.
• acquiring a human language entails setting all the parameters of UG appropriately.
• The child does not consider all theoretically possible rules but settings for parameters, which, interacting with the network of principles, creates a core grammar.

What helps in learning a language?

• The thing that helps most in learning a language is being human.
• This facility is unique and common only to humanity.
• This helps in understanding why acquisition is as easy as breathing; we're programmed to learn a language.

Animal Languages

• the point about birds acquiring bird songs is that the variety we see is based upon the biological parameters that can be set in a particular bird (species specific)
• for example, the cuckoo (sings a full song even if never exposed to the song) contrasts with the bullfinch (learns any song it is exposed to). The cuckoo has fixed principles of song,ly has pae set by the environment. Them is not as fixed as the cuckoo, being able to pick up a 'dialectal' difference.
• the point about primates not acquiring human language shows that they lack the ability to acquire a complex linguistic system similar to humans.
• we know that primates cannot learn a human language because
  • their signals are highly stereotyped,
  • they fail to undergo the same/similar steps of acquisition that kids go through, and
  • they are limited to the kind of sentence they can produce because they are limited on the type and number.

We can't speed up acquisition

• We might wonder whether anything other than being human causes us to learn a language.
• negative evidence: no; parents don't overtly teach grammar
• parentese: no; may help in some ways (with modals) but it doesn't account for the child learning a language
• imitation: no; from which adult would a child have heard 'Cat stand up table.'
• what makes learning a first language so facinating is the small range of evidence and the incomplete evidence children are exposed to.
• if universal grammar is innate, then we might expect the language ability to grow like our arms or legs.

Stages of acquisition

1. (prelinguistic stage) crying/cooing/vocal play (0.0-0.6)
2. babbling (0.6-1.0)
3. one word/holophrastic (1.0-2.0)
4. two words (2.0-2.6)
5. telegraphic speech (2.6-3)
6. essentially adult-like speech

• some say that a child's learning is complete by 5.0, but there is some evidence that this is not so: around 3 child learns how to use multipled sorts around 7 child uses sophisticated connectors (rather, actually).
• stages of the following modules exhibit stages of
  • over-generalization (over application of a rule) and
  • under-generalization (failure to apply a rule)

Morphology Module

• acquire plurals early (e.g., wug > wugs), evidence of word formation rules
• nouns first, then verbs; function words later

Syntactic Module

• one word sentences first, then two words then over three
• follows proper phrase structure rules displaying consistent word order although the phrase structure rules are abbreviated
• rely on intonational patterns for questions (e.g., Mommy cup? more ride?) rather than movement of words

Semantics Module

• meanings of early words
  • over-extention (dog = all animals)
  • under-extention (dog = just family dog)
  • mismatch (telephone = tractor)
• content (focus is on what is going on around kids)
  • nouns - people, food, body parts, toys, clothing, household goods, etc.
  • verbs - actions and activities in their day
  • locations - there, up
  • social words - yes/no

Phonetics and Phonology Module

• during babbling stage child makes sounds of all human languages
• weeds out non-native sounds
• most sounds produced by 2 years of age (may be as late as 4)
• substitutions - stops for fricatives and alveolars for velars
• avoid or reduce consonant clusters (sky -> [kaj])
• delete unstressed vowels (banana -> [nana])
• production falls behind perception