Language Acquisition

1. Language Acquisition 5. Elena Lieven, MPI-EVA, Leipzig School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

2. UG Predictions U-B Predictions Grammatical Development across the board emergence of abstractionswithin the domain of a certain parameter abstractions initiallylocal - then gradual, piecemeal abstractions based on specifiable characteristics of input LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

3. Factors affecting learning • Token frequency • Type frequency • Consistency • Complexity • Prosodic information • Semantic information • Pragmatic information BUT HOW ARE THESE INTEGRATED? LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

4. BOY GIRL GIRL BOY NOVELACTION 1 NOVELACTION 2 She’s blicking him Preferential looking vs Act-out or Production Children aged 1;9 and 2;1 look longer at a picture that matches the correct agent of a novel action that at another picture in which the same noun is used for the patient but with a different novel action Gertner, Fisher & Eisengart, in press LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

5. Does this conflict with the verb island hypothesis? YES, in its strongest form Does this reflect early and fully abstract knowledge of linking? Not necessarily LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

6. No verb is an island![McClure et al. in press] • MLU of utterances with verbs in Stage 1 • MLU of utterances with old verbs in Stage 2 • MLU of utterances with new verbs in Stage 2 MLU old verbs stage 2 > MLU verbs stage 1 DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWN VERBS MLU new verbs stage 2 < MLU old verbs stage 2 NEW VERBS HAVE LESS DEVELOPED ARGUMENT STRUCTURES MLU new verbs stage 2 > MLU verbs stage 1 VALUE ADDED!! NEW VERBS HAVE GAINED SOMETHING FROM THE KNOWLEDGE OF OLD VERBS LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

7. Auxiliary provision for BE and HAVE [Theakston et al, 2005] Mcr corpus: 2;0 – 3;0: provision still only a mean of 50% at 3;0 Specific subject-auxiliary combinations, e.g. : NP’s, he’s, it’s, Proper-Noun’s, they’re, they’ve, I’m, I’ve, you’re, you’ve • Frequency in M’s speech predicts order of acquisition – except for you, which is acquired late despite very high input frequency • Early acquired, high frequency, forms show higher levels of provision – • except for I, which is acquired early but shows very high omission LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

8. It’s, He’s : - modelled frequently in input - can be used in same way as adult I/you: - have to be reversed - child is more interested in talking about Ithan you - maybe this overrides relative frequency of you But why are there such high rates of omission with I ? LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

9. Maybe children learn early on that Ican substitute for you in patterns with you learned from questions in the input Mother:What’reyou doingnext? Child:pink, orange,I doingorange Mother:Are you drawing? Child:I drawing LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

10. Strengthening representations[Chang, Dell & Bock, in press] Discrimination task Model could reliably (though not 100%) discriminate after 4000 epochs - can be done with partial representations Production task Model could produce transitive with novel verb after 20,000 epochs - needs a full representation LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

11. Methodologies LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

12. Experimental methods • Allows us to pit one hypothesis against another • Allows us to test children’s abstract knowledge (with novel or low frequency items) • One experiment never answers the question! • Impossible to control everything in an experiment • What about the children who are dropped/don’t respond? LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

13. Novel transitives in 2-year-olds • Experiments give different ages for children’s ability to deal with novel verbs • in transitive constructions • Fisher et al. Preferential looking • Dittmar et al. Pointing and preferential looking • Smith et al. Weird linking • Chan et al., Preferential looking and Act-out • Wittek & T Novel transitive production • These differences should be explicable by: • partial representations being enough for some tasks but not others • different tasks requiring different strengths of representation • irrelevant task demands (often called performance limitations) LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

14. Modelling • Allows us to investigate distributional properties • Allows us to play with the interaction between different sources of information • A lot depends on the precise way in which the information is given to the model • The model almost certainly doesn’t do it the same way as the child • So far not much modelling of semantics LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

15. Naturalistic methods • In principle, the participants are not constrained • Allows for detailed developmental analyses • Recording situations may be too limited • One needs to use sophisticated analytic tools to get beyond description LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

16. Construction grammars Advantages: • Form-meaning mappings integral • Cline from idiomatic through to abstract • Explicit attempts to develop theory of inheritance links between constructions LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

17. Some issues Are children learning constructions? • Start with sub-parts [e.g.SV, VO, NPs] • And perhaps with supra-parts [Discourse pairs] Must children always learn form with function? • Correct ungrammatical to grammatical but semantically wrong: • Kidd et al: Complement taking verbs • Matthews et al: Conjoined NPs to correct WWO • Abbot-Smith et al: weird VS intransitives to semantically anomalous SVO LOT 5: 16-20 jan06

18. Finally……. • There is no doubt that frequency of various kinds plays a role throughout learning and in the adult system • There is no doubt that children’s language develops in abstraction and complexity • The relationship between characterising the adult system (linguistics), explaining grammaticalisation and explaining language development are in an increasingly healthy relationship • There is real hope of moving this scientific endeavour forward in an exciting and productive way Thank you! LOT 5: 16-20 jan06