1. PSYC 206: Life-Span Development Lecture 8 Aylin Küntay
Language Development
PSYC 206: Life-Span Development
Lecture 8
Aylin Küntay

2. Language has levels… Phonology (sounds)
Morphology (words and meaningful subword units)
Syntax (arrangement of words in sentences)
Pragmatics (use of language)
And meaning and communicative function

3. Phonology
The study of speech sounds and the rules about combining them
Phone: speech sounds
Phoneme: sounds that differ and make a difference in meaning in a particular lang
Minimal pairs: pat vs. bat; /p/ and /b/ as two phonemes
Examples in Turkish: yar vs. kar; al vs. ar

4. Morphology Morpheme: the smallest meaningful elements in a lang
English plural: -s
Turkish present progressive: (i)yor
words: wall+paper

5. Syntax: phrase structure
Sentences can be divided into phrases, i.e., groups of words (constituents)
e.g., The little child likes colorful balloons.
Constituents (words) can be combined into phrases and phrases into sentences
Phrase structure rules:
1. S  NP + VP
2. NP  det + (adj) + N
3. VP  V + NP (likes colorful balloons)
4. N  child, balloon
5. V  likes
6. adj  little, child
7. det  the

6. Pragmatics: Use of Language
Using language appropriately in a given context
making requests
apologies
how to open and close phone calls
etc. etc.

7. 3 problems of language Problem of reference Problem of grammar
has to do with discovery of what words mean
Problem of grammar
has to do with arranging morphemes and words into well-formed utterances
Problem of pragmatics
has to do with figuring out how to use language appropriately in a given context

8. Problem of Reference How do children discover what words mean?
“Smotri sinochik! Tam sidit ptitsa.”
“Look, son! There sits a ptitsa.”

9. “Look, Sarah! That’s a _________.”
Problem of Reference
“Look, Sarah! That’s a _________.”

10. Problem of Grammar
How do children learn to arrange words and parts of words in a way that has meaning to others?
Grammar: Rules of a given language for the sequencing of words in a sentence and the ordering of parts of words
7 months: Sensitive to ordering of words in simple sentences and can abstract patterns of word usage from such sentences
Later: “My doggy runned away” – significant, because have not been taught to say this and have not learned it from imitation

11. Linguistic productivity
Syntactic productivity: Ability to generate, understand, and produce an infinite number of novel utterances using a limited set of rules
The man saw the girl who sat on the sofa which is above the table which was built by the man who is married to the woman…
Recursive rules: embedding
Bill thinks Allen is a genius; Roger said Bill thinks Allen is a genius; Mary suspects Roger said….
Morphological productivity
plurals of Turkish noun-- any new noun can be pluralized
but English past tense: spill-ed, but *goed
some aspects of language are not productive and need to be rote-learned

12. Prelinguistic communication
Snow: infants and mothers engage in prelinguistic conversations
Mothers interpret the smiles and vocalizations of babies as social
culturally different: attributing intentionality to prelinguistic infants
Cries and gurgles (when infants are not distressed)
Cooing: mostly vowel-like sounds or sequences of sounds
Babbling: 5-8 months: syllabic combinations of vowels and consonants
allows practice with sounds before use them communicatively
Development of pointing
12 months point at object, then check adult’s focus of attention
18 months  check adult’s focus of attention, then point at object

13. Prelinguistic gestures
Gestures: actions and vocalizations which are produced with deliberate intention to communicate, but which do not take the form of recognizable linguistic units
start around 8 months of age
Bates et al.: 2 communicative/pragmatic acts (e.g., in pointing)
Proto-Declaratives (Assertions): the use of an object as a means of obtaining adult attention
Proto-Imperatives (Requests): the use of adults as a means to an object

14. Phonological development
Eimas et al., Jusczyk: infants as young as 4 months old can perceive phonemic distinctions
Not only from the native language, but also from other languages
Categorical sound perception is innate
but after 8 months or so: ability to distinguish nonnative contrasts diminishes
Phonological reorganization: phones are organized into the phonemic categories of the native language

15. Lexical development
Clark: on the assumption that children start building their vocabulary at around 18 months, on average, 8-9 new words a day!
Collected in diary studies and checklists that include words that the children are likely to acquire and that are filled out by parents
e.g., MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI)

16. Vocabulary Development

17. What kinds of words are first words?
Bates et al., Nelson: nearly 40-65% of child’s first 50 words are common nouns
verbs, adjectives, other words each account for less than 10%
How about research in non-English languages?
Chinese and Korean children have as many or more verbs in their early speech
Noun bias vs. verb bias languages

18. Cross-linguistic studies
Tardif (Mandarin Chinese), Gopnik & Choi (Korean), Clancy, Fernald (Japanese)
these languages are different than English
rich verbal morphology, verb-final, allow noun ellipsis (i.e., dropping) where context is clear
Korean& Japanese-speaking mothers used fewer nouns than English-speaking mothers
Kor and Jap children use verbs earlier than English-speaking children but use fewer and less varied nouns

19. Why a noun bias?
Why should nouns be acquired more rapidly than other types of words?
Gentner: the concepts referred to by nouns are clearer, more concrete, and more readily identifiable than the concepts referred to by verbs
verbs are conceptually and linguistically more complex
Clark: early verbs tend to be general-purpose verbs such do, make, go, and get
Goldfield: child-directed speech has a bigger range of nouns (i.e., object labels) than words for activities, properties, or relations

20. Noun bias: challenges
Bloom, Gopnik: early words also include lots of relational words such as gone, up, there, more, uh-oh, again and social/performative words such as hi, bye
cross-linguistic challenges-- e.g., Chinese and Korean

21. One-word utterances: ¨Holophrases¨
one-word utterances are used with communicative intent
parents place interpretations on one-word sentences such as up as ¨take me up¨
how can we attribute meaning to such brief and unstructured utterances?
What are the communicative functions of these utterances? RICH INTERPRETATION
researcher looks at nonverbal context to make rich interpretation
Daddy
when pointing to a picture of daddy ==> NAMING
after finding daddy’s tie ==> POSSESSION
offering bottle to daddy ==> DATIVE, GOAL
one-word utterances express underlying relational notions

22. Overextensions and Underextensions
Unconventional word/meaning mappings
Overextension: when a child uses a word in a context or manner that is inconsistent with, but in some way related to the adult meaning of the word
term is extended to concepts beyond the adult concept
daddy for adult men
cat for all four-legged animals
bye-bye to greet visitors
Underextension: when a child uses a word for only a limited subset of the contexts used by the adult
cat for the home pet only
truck for the toy truck only

23. Semantic development: how?
The gavagai problem: how do children map words onto observations about the world?
Infinite number of possibilities
how does the learner zero in to the right meaning?
has come to be known as the mapping problem
Constraints or Principles
children entertain working hypotheses about the meanings of new words
the meaning of new words involves some process of comparing new to old semantic knowledge

24. Principles or constraints
whole object constraint (Macnamara, Markman): when a new label is introduced, assume that it refers to the whole object rather than its parts
novel name-nameless category principle (Golinkoff): new labels are mapped onto previously unnamed concepts
principle of contrast (Clark): the principle that no two words have exactly the same meaning
principle of mutual exclusivity (Markman): no overlap between words, assuming that an object can only have one name

25. Early Syntax: Two-word utterances: Telegraphic speech
after a period of holophrases, children start putting words together to form the first sentences
underlying relational meanings
show evidence of syntax: the child combines words following certain rules rather than in random fashion
more cereal, *cereal more
with development, more linguistic elements
measuring morphological and syntactic development: MLU (mean length of utterance)
research finds that early word combinations express common semantic relations such as recurrence, disappearance, possession, agent-patient relations

26. Syntax: combinatorial language
MLU: used as an indicator of early syntactic development
observed in 100 spontaneous speech utterances
length is determined by the number of meaningful units, or morphemes
include both content words such as dog, and function words such as the
the addition of each new morpheme reflects the acquisition of new linguistic knowledge
better indicator of the level of linguistic development than age, although positively correlated
a lot of individual variation among children of the same age
remains useful up to MLU = 4

27. Rapidly Increasing Complexity

28. Acquisition of morphology
Brown: the 14 morphemes observed in 3 American children
common order of acquisition: 1. present progressive, 2-3. prepositions in and on, 4. plural, 5. irregular past tense, 6. possessive, 7. uncontractible copula, 8. articles, 9. regular past tense, 10. regular third-person present tense, 11. irregular third-person present tense , 12. uncontractible auxiliary, 13. contractible copula, 14. contractible auxiliary
de Villiers & de Villiers: found the same order of development in a larger sample of 21 children

29. Productivity in morphology
Overregularization errors
use the plural morpheme on irregular nouns such as mans, mouses
use the past tense morpheme on irregular verbs such as broked, falled, goed
evidence of the productivity of the child’s morphology
the Wug test (Berko)
an elicited production task in which children were shown novel creatures and actions that were given invented names

30. Morphological Rules Berko (the Wug test)
How do children know the pluralization rule?
This is a Wug
Now there is another one.
There are two of them.
These are two …?

31. Morphological Rules Berko (the Wug test)
Do children know the English plural rule with segments (non-words) that they have never encountered before?
Children do not memorize each plural but they have internalized a rule for it
This is a Wug
Now there is another one.
There are two of them.
These are two …?

32. Communicative/Pragmatic competence
vs. linguistic competence: mastery of phonology, syntax, and semantic
Hymes (1972): ¨we have to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner.¨
skill in adapting linguistic competence to the social and communicative demands of the situation
pragmatic uses of language

33. Conversational repairs
monitor partner’s miscomprehension and make a retry-- repetition or rephrasal
around 12 months, children show a tendency to repair by repeating their original utterance, or augmenting it gesturally or with vocal emphasis
by about 16 months, children do rephrasals by keeping the same communicative intent but changing the grammatical form
very young children treat their mothers not as omniscient, but as communicative partners who might need more info
if listener doesn’t now about “Kaan”, introducing him, for example, as “my friend Kaan”

34. Listener orientedness
Shatz & Gelman: looked at the differences in the speech of 4-year-olds to adults vs. 2-year-olds
to 2-year-olds, they used shorter and simpler sentences
code-switching according to the conversational partner
Referential communication tasks
being able to package the info in a way that takes into account the perceptual and informational status of the listener
shows development throughout preschool ages
need to take into account children´s developing theory of mind

35. Requests Bates: protoimperatives (one type of early illocutionary act)
use adults to get out of reach objects
two-word utterances such as my rabbit, more swing, mummy read, no ride
many early utterances have the illocutionary force (IF) of requests of goods and services
as children grow older and linguistically more sophisticated, interactants demand clearer articulation of desires, greater politeness, greater awareness of status differences

36. Requests: Control Acts
Early requests are direct: bare imperatives such as in sit, more
Ervin-Tripp: indirect requests such as ‘Would you like to play doctor?’ and ‘You could give me one’ develop later
politeness forms: addressing the preferences or the ability of the hearer, rather than making a request of what is wanted
4-year-olds tend to use polite forms such as `Can I have…’ when they are not sure of the listener’s compliance
use a bare imperative when compliance is assumed
But understands indirect commands such as “is the window open?” by two years

37. Learning-Theory Explanation
Major causal factor
Environment (nurture)
Mechanisms
Conditioning: Classical (sum of all experiences) & operant (parental enthusiasm over closer approximations to correct sound of the word)
Imitation: Abstract modeling (Bandura) for grammar
Major phenomenon explained
Word meaning

38. Nativist Explanation Major causal factor Mechanism
Heredity (nature): Innate ability (Chomsky)
Mechanism
Triggering: Via Language Acquisition Device (LAD) programmed to recognize the deep structures that underlie any particular language that the child may hear
Major phenomenon explained
Syntax

39. Interactionist Explanation
Major causal factor
Cognitive hypothesis (derived from Piaget’s constructivism): Interaction of social and biological factors
Cultural-context approach (based on Bruner’s formats – peekaboo & routines): Cultural mediation of social-biological interaction
Mechanisms
Cognitive hypothesis: Assimilation-accommodation
Cultural-context approach: Cultural scripts – Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)
Major phenomenon explained
Language-thought relationships

40. Vocabulary Size & Grammatical Complexity Linked
The fact that grammatical growth is more closely correlated with vocabulary growth than either of those are with age lends support to the constructivist framework.
Bates & Goodman, 1999

41. Essential Ingredients for Acquisition
Biological Prerequisites
Role of the Environment
Language Requirements

42. Biological Prerequisites
Chimpanzees
After years of hard work, chimpanzees can learn several dozen signs, in combinations similar to a 2-year-old; but children with no special training learn thousands of words in a relatively short time span
Down syndrome
Restricted vocabulary and simple grammar suggest that normal language development requires normal cognitive function, at least in certain key areas
Williams syndrome
Although mentally retarded, relatively normal vocabulary and grammar use suggest that at least some aspects of language develop independently of general cognitive function

43. Role of the Environment
Deaf children (whose parents won’t sign or who “home sign”) and hearing children raised by deaf parents
Develop basic rudiments of grammar (2- or 3-word phrases), but not more complex ones
Fast Mapping
Children hear an unfamiliar word in a familiar, structured, and meaningful social interaction (e.g., taking a bath routine)
Whole-object principle: Assume word (“cup”) applies to whole object
Categorizing principle: Assume that object labels (“dog”) extend to classes of similar objects
Mutual-Exclusivity principle: Assume that an object can have only one name (“zebra” refers to the animal that’s different in a group of cows – “cow” already known)

44. Language Requirements
Biologically programmed sensitivity to language present at birth, which develops as the child matures (Nativist view)
Ability to learn from and imitate the language of others (Environmental-learning view)
Acquisition of basic cognitive capacities – schemas for actions with objects, ability to represent the world mentally, presence of lexical principles (Interactionist view – Constructivist version)
Inclusion of children in familiar routines in which language is one of many forms of interaction (Interactionist view – Cultural-context version)