Language Acquisition Theories, Slides of Linguistics

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Linguistics 101

Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition

• All (normal) human children...
  • learn a language.
  • can learn any language they are exposed to.
  • learn all languages at basically the same rate.
  • follow the same stages of language acquisition.

Language Acquisition

• What must a child learn?
  • The sounds of a language (phonetics)
  • The sound patterns of a language (phonology)
  • Rules of word-formation (morphology)
  • How words combine into phrases/sentences (syntax)
  • How to derive meaning from a sentence (semantics)
  • How to properly use language in context (pragmatics)
  • Lexical items (words, morphemes, idioms, etc)

Innateness Hypothesis

• Living organisms have innate behaviors:
  • newly-hatched see turtles move toward ocean
  • honeybees perform dance for communication
  • birds fly
• The ‘Innateness Hypothesis’ argues that our ability to acquire

(human) language is innate (genetically encoded).

• not simply derived from other human cognitive abilities
• Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Universal Grammar

• Universal Grammar (UG) refers to the “set of structural

characteristics shared by all languages”

• Innateness Hypothesis takes UG to be innate.
• UG is not, however, dependent on innateness hypothesis.
• The goal of theoretical linguistics is to discover the properties

of UG.

Sign Language - Innateness of UG

• Overview of sign languages:
  • have gesture system (cf. phonology)
  • have morphology rules
  • have syntactic rules
  • have semantic rules
  • have dictionary of arbitrary signs
• Support for innateness:
• acquired without explicit instruction
• acquired in similar stages as spoken language

Theories of Acquisition

1. Imitation

2. Reinforcement

3. Active Construction of a Grammar

4. Connectionist Theories

Imitation

• Main idea: children imitate what they hear
• Evidence:
  • Specific languages are not transferred genetically.
  • Words are arbitrary, thus children must hear them to ‘imitate’ them.

Reinforcement

• Main idea: children learn through positive and negative

reinforcement

• Evidence:
  • very little

Reinforcement

• Problems:
  • ignores how children initially learn to produce utterances
  • rarely occurs
  • fails when it does occur
  • fails to explain
    • children’s own grammar rules
    • why children seem impervious to correction
• Role of reinforcement limited to ability to be understood or

not.

Imitation / Reinforcement

Child: My teacher holded the baby rabbit and we patted them. Adult: Did you say that your teacher held the baby rabbit? Child: Yes. Adult: What did you say she did? Child: She holded the baby rabbit and we patted them. Adult: Did you say she held them tightly? Child: No, she holded them loosely.

Active Construction of a Grammar

• Children invent grammar rules themselves.
• Ability to develop rules is innate.

Active Construction of a Grammar

• Explains what imitation/reinforcement can’t:
  • children are expected to make mistakes
  • children are expected to follow non-random patterns
  • regression
• Explains why children fail to accurately produce adult forms
  • child grammars differ from adult grammars
• Problems:
  • says nothing about what patterns are learnable

Connectionist Theories

• Claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens

neural connections.

• Higher frequency → stronger connections
  • allows for exploitation of statistical information
  • ‘rules’ derived from strength of connections
• Evidence:
  • there are clear frequency effects in some aspects of language
    • e.g. ‘blick’ tests conforming to frequency of sound sequences
  • there are clearly neural connections
    • e.g. easily seen with linguistic priming tests
  • predicts ‘errors’ based on frequency effects
    • e.g. sing-sang-sung, ring-rang-rung → ding-dang-dung