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

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

3. 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?

4. LOT 5: 16-20 jan06 4 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 She’s blicking him GIRLNOVEL ACTION 1 BOY NOVEL ACTION 2 GIRL Gertner, Fisher & Eisengart, in press

5. 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

6. 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

7. LOT 5: 16-20 jan06 7 Auxiliary provision for BE and HAVE 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 [Theakston et al, 2005]

8. 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 I than you - maybe this overrides relative frequency of you But why are there such high rates of omission with I ?

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

10. 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

11. LOT 5: 16-20 jan06 11 Methodologies

12. 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?

13. 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)

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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!