1. An army of strawmen Input vs Nativism in language acquisition
Dr Robyn Orfitelli
University of Sheffield

2. ELL226 Language Acquisition
Possibly also: L2 Syntax, Semantics, Phonology, and/or Phonetics
ELL226
Language Acquisition
Structures of English
Also:
L1 Varieties of English, History of English
Sounds of English
Research methods in Linguistics
A-Level English Language
(maybe)

3. How can we avoid turning theories of acquisition into strawmen?
Today
Overall structure of the class
Lectures
Seminars
Workshops
Assessment
Teaching students about extremely different approaches to acquisition…
without giving them the answers…
while encouraging them to be critical thinkers…
but still suggesting they not reject approaches out of hand…
Is a pedagogical rat’s nest.
How can we avoid turning theories of acquisition into strawmen?

4. Things to teach students
CONTENT
Data/Stages of development
English
Cross-linguistically
Explanations for content
Overarching theories
Specific theories
SKILLS
Critical thinking about data
How do stages interact?
Identifying gaps in our knowledge
Critical thinking about the explanations
Identifying the predictions made by theories
Mapping acquisition data onto these predictions.
Designing an original study

5. Topics from this year
Does plural omission in Bokmäl Norwegian differ from that English, and what does this tell us about theories of plural omission?
Elephant-s vs Elefant-er
How do children with ASD acquire the prosodic cues that help distinguish between ambiguous sentences?
I saw the man with the binoculars.  I saw him.
I saw the man with the binoculars.  I did so with the binoculars.

6. The black box Input Output Limited sentences Errors Variable
Unlimited sentences
Error-‘free’
Uniform
Output

7. Behaviourism Input Nothing Output BF Skinner
(Including Positive/ Negative feedback)
Input
BF Skinner
Nothing
Output

8. Child Directed Speech Input
Input to children in structured in a way that facilitates acquisition
Nothing?
Output

9. Cognitivism Input General intelligence, spatial reasoning… Output
Jean Piaget
General intelligence, spatial reasoning…
Output

10. Nativism Input General intelligence, spatial reasoning…
Noam Chomsky
General intelligence, spatial reasoning…
Universal Grammar
Output

11. Universal Grammar A biological blueprint for learning language.
A set of universal rules that interact with the linguistic environment (input) to determine a particular grammar in the mind/brain of an individual.
Not everything will be part of UG! Even the staunchest nativists believe that as little as possible should be encoded in UG – only the most basic, fundamental, and demonstrably universal principles of human language.

12. No negative evidence Nothing CH: Mamma isn’t boy, he a girl.
M: That’s right.
CH: And Walt Disney comes on Tuesday.
M: No, he does not.
no correction - parents correct utterances for their truth value, not for grammar
Nothing

13. Poverty of the Stimulus
(de Villiers et al 1990) A child is told a story of a boy who climbed a tree and fell out. That night, while he was taking a bath, he saw a large bruise on his arm and said to his dad, “I must have hurt myself when I fell this afternoon.”
a. When did the boy say he hurt himself?
b. When did the boy say how he hurt himself?
Poverty of the stimulus: there are many things we know about our language for which there is no evidence at all in the input data

14. “Motherese” hypothesis
Newport, Gleitman & Gleitman (1977)
Child Directed speech is not simpler than adult directed speech: NGG found that 70% of sentences to children are complex, including negatives, questions, commands, embedded sentences, passives. Adult language is significantly more complex than the child's at any level in development.
No correlation between simplicity of mother's speech and overall grammatical development as measured by vocabulary size, length of sentences, use of complex grammar…
Prosody?

15. Take-home message
Input and nativism aren’t incompatible; it is entirely possible that both work together to explain different parts of the acquisition puzzle.