Homework #11

Assignment on Language Acquisition

This 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 23rd; due in class on Thursday December 3rd. Will be discussed in section meetings on December 3rd-7th.

we'd like to gather some feedback on a couple of aspects of this course -- this information will be very useful to the Linguistics Department in planning its future course offerings. Please answer these questions either on a separate sheet of paper from your Homework #11, or by sending an email message to colin@udel.edu. We are gathering this information just to help in planning future courses -- anything you say will not be used against you!

a. Tutoring service.

Did you make use of the Linguistics tutoring service in the Academic Services Center? If so, did you use it often or just rarely? Did you find this to be a useful service? Any comments you have on the linguistics tutoring service would be appreciated.

b. Course books.

Two books were ordered for this course: Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" and Fromkin & Rodman's "Introduction to Language". We would appreciate any comments on what you found to be the most helpful or least helpful parts of these books.

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1. Phonological Differences between Children and Adults

Exercise 6 on pp.359-360 of Fromkin & Rodman.

Pay attention to the following:

• Remember not to confuse standard English spelling with the standard pronunciations that the child will hear from adults. So, if you're writing rules to convert adult pronunciations into child pronunciations, take care not to make these rules for turning adult spellings into child pronunciations.
• In evaluating the child's changes, distinguish between omissions of sounds and substitutions.
• Try to see how far you can go in writing (maximally general) rules for converting adult pronunciations into child pronunciations).

2. Syntactic Development

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.

• Dataset 1: Adam at age 2yrs 6months
• Dataset 2: Adam at age 3yrs 6months

Read through the conversations and make notes on (a) how Adam's speech differs from adult speech at each of the two stages; also, look out for (b) 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])