Lecture: Psycholinguistics Professor Dr. Neal R. Norrick _____________________________________

1. Psycholinguistics Universität des Saarlandes Dept. 4.3: English Linguistics SS 2009 Lecture: Psycholinguistics Professor Dr. Neal R. Norrick_____________________________________

2. 5. First Language Acquisition Natural acquisition with no special learning necessary critical period resulting from a combination of factors: • development of connections between nerve cells • myelination of nerve cells

3. lateralization of brain functions • dominance of left hemisphere • corresponding development of motor skills • general cognitive stages of development (Piaget)

4. 5.1 Developmental sketch Age Language General (months) 9 babbling crawling 10 first words standing, precurrent, maintained claps hand, (ba)nana(na) for holds spoon 'banana, food, mama'

5. Age Language General (months) 11 5-10 recurrent words first steps, fulfills requests like: recognizes bring me the blue ball pictures in show me the big red dog books 12 5 distinct vowels starts walking 5 distinct consonants

6. Age Language General (months) 13 recognizable words running, daddy nein ball climbing furniture allgone 14 imitations: horse, train simple puzzles, reduplications: turns book pages choochoo, byebye, taktak ‘clock’

7. Age Language General (months) 16 recognizes own name points to himself: 20+ words Where's Nicky? 18 vocabulary explosion climbs stairs 2-word units: without rail ducky allgone Nicky haben

8. Age Language General (months) 20 3-word units: hangs on monkey Nicky cookie haben bars, points to also: eyes, nose, mouth haben Nicky cookie

9. Age Language General (months) 22 verb + particle: dramatic lock up/deck zu play, 4-word units: stuffed Mami Auto fahren kauft animals, Inni gute Nacht sagendolls

10. Age (months): 24 Language General verb endings: Inni spuckt bisschen kicks soccer ball statement: Nicky auch essen plays hide-n-seek question: Nicky auch essen, ja? draws details: command: Nicky auch essen ears, tails, wheels word-formation: cutter ‘knife’ auskleben ’tear apart’ umwärts

11. Age (months): 26 Language General participles: Mami ist weggegingt draws objectively das ist runtergefallt recognizable figures, recognizes colors comparison: Pferdchen ein kleineres Mond grösser als Daddy Monologues/ Mami kommt darein, tic-tac stories: Danke, Post schickt Daddy

12. Age Language General (months) 27 future orientation: sings melodies Let's build a castle I'll put it in 28 recursive structures: counts to 5 Ich weiss nicht, wen recognizes letters: der Deckel verloren hat N, C, O questions with when, how

13. Age Language (months) 30 conditionals: ich suche, ob ich den Hasen finde Timmy ist traurig, wenn das Osterhäschen hier schläft plans: I want to read a book about a story

14. Age Language General (months) 32 first real narrative: builds Legos It was a wooden lamby draws people and it was on the floor and house in a barn with chimney and they took it home and windows and they washed it and it wasn't ugly

15. Age Language General (months) 34 reports on TV program: learns to Plötzlich kamen zwei peddle trike Krokodile und haben das Kälbchen ge'essen reports on activities: I'm pretending this is a castle

16. (continued: 34 months) explains actions: I break it that I can make it new predicts: It's gonna be real beautiful, you're gonna love it

17. Age (months): 36 Phonetics • voiced th: initial okay in the this etc • medial v in other • voiceless th: initial s in sing • final f in both • vocalizes final l and r • mispronunciations: amimals, cimamon, pasketti

18. Morphology • double plurals: mens, feets, mices • double preterites: sawed, standed • regularized preterites: goed, sitted • reverse word-formations: popcorner, mowgrasser Syntax • negation: I see it not, That doll sits not right • questions: What it did? What the lady said? • counting: 1 2 3 4 5 6 20 14 fiveteen 16

19. Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) as standard measure of first language development as opposed to age

20. 5.2 Natural order of acquisition: 5.2.1 "Why mama and papa?“ Jakobson's order for phoneme acquisition • in babbling, children produce all kinds of sounds and sound combinations; many children produce imitations after babbling • but around age 2, children narrow their sound repertory and begin to produce sounds of their language in fixed order

21. order reflects an attempt to create the clearest possible set of distinctions at any given point, within the given physiological limits • this order of acquisition also reveals parallel • between different languages • most salient distinction is between Vowels (V) and • Consonants (C)

22. Vowels are characteristically open and resonant: • the prototypical V is a • Consonants are characteristically closed and obstruent: • stops are prototypical Cs • the prototypical stop is p • the prototypical syllable is CV: maximizing the C-V distinction, a child's first syllable should be pa •  given children's tendency to reduplication, • a child's first real word should be papa

23. the first division within the class of Cs is that between oral and nasal; the nasal counterpart of bilabial p is m •  maximizing the p-m distinction and reduplicating, • the child's second word should be mama • (actually initial nasals often appear first, because • of the association with sucking; and mama is • often first word recorded, because of the • centrality of mother for the child)

24. major divisions within the class of Vs are those between front and back, high and low, spread and open; the vowel most distinct from a along all these parameters is i  again maximizing the a-i distinction (and reduplicating), the child's next words should be pipi and mimi

25. extending the pattern of Vs, always seeking to maximize distinctness, the child should move to a triplet: a u i

26. after the Cs p and m , the child usually acquires t , then the third voiceless stop k and so on: • p m t k • child moves on to ever larger patterns with increasing numbers of distinctive features

27. only when child controls the individual consonants can they occur together in 2-consonant clusters: • then word-initial clusters like pl- and st- precede • final clusters like -lp and –st • later come initial 3-consonant clusters like • spr- and str- • and then word-final 3-consonant clusters like • -rst and -sks • of course, kids don't learn sounds in isolation, but only in words and syntactic structures

28. 5.2.2 Order of acquisition for syntax at first, kids produce: • one-word utterances with holistic meaning • two-word utterances with no fixed word order • three-word utterances without inflections, • prepositions or other markers then they begin to acquire syntax

29. Brown's (1973) order of acquisition for syntax: 1. present progressive girl playing 2. prepositions ball in water 3. plural toys, dishes 4. irregular past tense went, told 5. possessive Ann's toys 6. articles a dog, the dog 7. regular past tense jumped, hugged, wanted

30. 8. regular 3rd person she goes, talks, watches 9. irregular 3rd person she does, has 10. auxiliary be: I am, you are, she is 11. contracted auxiliary I'm, you're, she's  order of acquisition as reflecting general learning strategies and stages of development (Piaget) or as evidence of innate language acquisition device (Chomsky)

31. 5.3 Piaget language as product of intelligence, not behaviorist learning rational origin of language presupposes fixed nucleus, i.e. structures common to all human languages like subject-predicate, hierarchical organization but no specific language-learning device (despite Chomsky)

32. Piaget assumes child language development reflects species development; no innateness assumption is necessary, given sensorimotor intelligence in human development • language as a special case of general symbolic behavior • developmentally, each stage prepares for the next, but each new stage requires a reorganization

33. e.g. infant recognizes caregiver as separate from continuum caregiver as recurrent/stable entity self as separate self as entity like caregiver

34. e.g. kid recognizes human sound separate from continuum language sound as separate from babbling discrete word as separate from continuum discrete word as recurrent/stable entity word + word as unit hierarchy within word + word unit etc

35. Piagetian stages in general cognitive development 1. Sensory-motor stage (birth to 2 years) • child notices objects as separate from self and permanent • manipulates objects as chief contact with environment

36. 2. Preoperational thought 2a. Stage of symbolic thought (age 2-4) • symbolic play, pretending and language acquisition • child recognizes social nature of language. 2b. Stage of intuitive thought (age 4-7) • child begins to think in language, but thinking is still egocentric and centered on one relationship at a time

37. 3. Stage of concrete operations (age 7-11) • child can vary two or more relationships independently solves conservation problem by compensation

38. 4. Stage of formal operations (age 11-15) • hypothesis formation and testing. rational consideration of the form of an argument, e.g. All three-legged snakes are purple. I am hiding a three-legged snake. What color is it?