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SOME ISSUES IN THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE BY CHILDREN
Questions from the beginning of the film
- “How do you think kids learn to talk?” Answers given by people in the film:
- “By imitating their mothers and people around them.”
- “I guess their parents teach them.”
- “Children learn language from their parents or whoever’s rearing them.”
- “I think that a baby would imitate what he hears.”
- “How do children acquire language without seeming to learn it?”
“In advance of experience, the child is already equipped with the basic structure of any human language.” (Chomsky)
- “How do they know so many things without life experience to go on?”
- “How do they know how to walk around?”
- “How to use their fingers?”
- “How to use grammar effortlessly?”
At age 3, there are many things children can’t do, but they already can use language. Just as birds do not teach their young to fly, mothers do not teach children language. (Lasnik)
CHOMSKY HAS NEWLY RAISED THE ISSUE OF WHETHER LANGUAGE IS
INNATE ORLEARNED FROM A BLANK SLATE
Chomsky—There are two views on how language is learned:
(1) Humans have general problem solving abilities applied to all sorts of tasks, including language.
(2) The brain is like every other system in biological world—it is highly differentiated into systems of special design and structure, one of which is language.
Language is encoded in DNA, which is why we are good at it, like being “good” at having two arms. (Lasnik, Fodor)
- Walking is encoded in DNA, it is part of innate program of development— humans are good at it but are not taught it (as opposed to, say, climbing).
- We are designed to walk, we are not taught; likewise for language, one cannot prevent a child from acquiring language [if exposed to it in the normal way]. (Chomsky)
The controversy over Chomsky’s approach arises in assuming either (1) language is wholly built in, like birdsong, or (2) wholly learned by exposure to specific properties of the environment.
“Why can’t it be both? In fact I take it that this is the question of modern linguistics: how much of language does a child have to learn and how much is built in?” (Gleitman)
IMITATION THEORY OF ACQUISITION VS. INNATENESS THEORY
Experiments showing that children know things about language use that could not result from imitation nor have they been explicitly taught. (de Villiers)
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.”
Question 1: “When did the boy say he hurt himself?”
Both small children and adults accept two answers: • “in the bathtub”
- “when he fell from the tree”
Question 2: “When did the boy say HOW he hurt himself?”
Small children and adults accept only one answer: • “in the bathtub”
not • “*when he fell from the tree”
Nobody taught the child that the presence of the word how blocks one answer.
- “People ask, ‘What’s the problem? Don’t children just imitate and get reinforced one way or the other?’” (Slobin)
- The common sense theory is that children listen to and imitate parents. (Pinker)
- “If we don’t learn by imitation how do we learn?” - Don’t we learn language like other difficult things (pictures of a boy playing the trombone, learning to ride a bicycle)
BUT
- A child can produce sentence never before heard. (Lasnik)
- Listen to a 3-year old for a few minutes to know they are not imitating: “my nose is crying”, “I holded the baby rabbits”, “I’m barefoot all over” (Pinker)
- Children systematically ignore attempts by parents to correct them. (Sells) “jimamas” for “pajamas” (“It doesn’t matter how often I correct him—he likes jimamas ”). “It’s not ‘weewee’, it’s ‘urinate’.’ “OK, ‘you’re a nate’, ‘I’m a nate’.”
BUT
based on “Taro ate his shoe.” we CANNOT, by analogy say “*Taro ate.”
Based on “John eats tomatoes.” we can say “John eats,” meaning “John eats something .”
BUT
based on “John grows tomatoes.” we CANNOT , by analogy, say “John grows,” meaning “John grows something .”
The analogy is “wildly broken”, yet we all interpret such sentences correctly instantaneously, the implication being that we somehow, innately , recognize various word categories. (Chomsky)
AT WHAT AGE DOES A CHILD BEGIN TO ACQUIRE GRAMMAR?
When does child know difference between “subject” and “object”? For example, in ‘the cow kicked the horse’ the cow does the kicking and the horse gets kicked. (Gleitman)
Experiment at Temple University—Small infants with little or no active language see two TV screens with two characters in opposite roles as subject and object. The children hear utterances such as, “Find Cookie Monster washing Big Bird,” or “Where is Big Bird feeding Cookie Monster?” Children as young as 16 months with only a two word active vocabulary were found to stare at the correct TV screen on hearing the utterance. (Hirsh-Pasek
& Golinkoff)
When a child learns language, the child is creating language, language is growing in the child’s mind. (Chomsky)
This may hold for grammar, but child does not “create” WORDS. Can this concept of creativity be applied to words?
HOW DO CHILDREN LEARN THE MEANINGS OF WORDS
It cannot be a satisfactory hypothesis to say that a child learns the meaning of “car” because the mother points to a car and says, “Car.” (Gleitman)
“Nunu” (furry dog with black, shiny nostrils); de Villiers’ son used this word to refer to
- family dog
- picture of Cocker Spaniel
- black and white cow
- pink furry slippers
- salad with olives in it
The trick of word meaning is correctly applying it to things other than original referent—“dog” correctly applies to Fido, Rex, etc. but not to Felix (who is a cat). (Gleitman)
Aronoff—A word applies to a concept ; but what’s a “concept”
- “house”—we see pictures of a lighthouse, a doll house, an outhouse, etc.
- “clothespin”—we see a big clothespin sculpture vs. pencil (an object closer in size and materials than the sculpture); how does child pick out things which are “relevantly alike”? (Gleitman)
- “alive”—Is a dog alive? (yes, wags tail, has eyes, legs, etc.); is a worm alive? (yes, it moves); is a car alive? (after all, it moves) (Cary)
THE GAVAGAI PROBLEM (see The Language Instinct , p. 151)
Interviewer asks people in the street what she means when she points to a billboard with a big picture of a rabbit and says, “ Gavagai .”—most say “rabbit”
Other concepts such as rabbit parts, rabbithood, ears, fur, etc. do not come to mind. (Gleitman)
“flimmick”: child assumes that the object is called a “flimmick” regardless of its current state, e.g. whether opened or closed (Pinker)
“For a child to learn a meaning, it would be help to have certain inherited assumptions.”
“Children are biased learners. They are not open minded considering all the possible hypotheses about what a word could mean and waiting for the evidence to come in. One of the assumptions that they make about what words could mean is that they start out expecting that object labels refer to the whole object.” (Markman)
Two such assumptions are
- THE WHOLE OBJECT ASSUMPTION: gavagai will mean the whole rabbit, not some of its attributes or parts
- THE MUTUAL EXCLUSIVITY ASSUMPTION: objects have one and only one name; if two names are given to
identical objects, e.g. “spud” vs. “flimick”, the assumption will be that either only one of the names is correct or that there is a difference between the objects. (Pinker)
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Eskimo obscures the point that this language is governed by grammatical structure, like
all others, but that in the repertoire of possible grammatical structures, this language
exploits one aspect of grammar—adding affixes to words to change meaning—to a
greater extent than most languages]
Slobin again cites the “two great ground plans” (see notes on first Human Language Series film) in the way languages are structured in order to convey meaning: (1) ordering words to show who did what to whom, (2) marking individual words with affixes to show on the words themselves who did what to whom.
“In advance of experience, the child is already equipped with the understanding of the basic structure of any human language. So we know even in advance of inquiry that there’s going to be a fundamental invariant core to language.” (Chomsky)
SOME EXAMPLES OF FUNDAMENTAL PROPERTIES OF HUMAN LANGUAGE (Gleitman, Elgin, Slobin) [One could add many more]
- things that are “nouny” and “verby” [a basic division of words into those which refer to objects and those which refer to actions]
- way to make things negative (a little boy says “no way Jose”)
- way to ask a question (an example from American Sign Language, showing that these characteristics are part of a general language ability, not just speech)
- a distinction between one and more than one (an example in Eskimo, which has distinct forms for one object, two objects, and more than two objects)
- each language has obligatory distinctions (masculine/feminine, singular/plural, definite/indefinite, past/present, etc.); this is the stock of categories used to schematize experience.
[The last point is not well explained. The idea is that there are many distinctions which are “natural” and are found in many languages around the world. The fact that they pop up independently in far-flung languages spoken in vastly different cultures shows that they must be part of human cognitive structure, not accidental similarities or features imposed by culture. Not all languages have ways in their grammars or vocabularies to make all such distinctions overtly, but they would seem “natural” to any human who is learning languages which make them. One could also imagine “unnatural” distinctions which no language would be likely to make, e.g. special “tense markers” for verbs depending on whether they are spoken in the light or in the dark, different Word orders depending on whether the “subject/actor” is a four-legged or two-legged]
Chomsky asks why are all languages cut from the same mold; [answer] the brain is prewired to accept onlycertain properties. (Newmeyer)
“Those things which are true of all languages are the candidates for what the child comes into world knowing about the NATURE of the language to which he is being exposed.” (Gleitman)
What children have to pick up is not the fact that languages have rules, but rather the particular versions of the rules the language they are acquiring has, e.g. whether the ordering of words put the verb before the object or the object before the verb. (Pinker)
CHILDREN’S ERRORS—are they really errors
Children are very good at finding the rules in the data around them and overgeneralizing them. (Lasnik)
Children will try to make a language follow a system. (Slobin)
- (children are given pictures and one child is asked) “What did your person do before they went to school?”; the child responds, “They drived to school.”
- (flock of geese fly by and little girl is asked) “What’s going overhead?”; she responds “ Geeses .”
- (adult says to child) “Ruth says that they’re foots , I say that they’re feet. What do you say they are?”; child responds, “I say they’re foots .”
- Deaf children learn at the same age as hearing and make the same kinds of overgeneralizations (sign “two ducks” using two hands rather than one hand combining the sign “duck” and “two”). (Bellugi)
“[Children] are looking for some deep principles. They follow those principles. If the language chooses to violate those principles now and then, so much the worse for the language.” (Gleitman)
Yet children never make mistakes that seem very reasonable that they might make. (Lasnik)
- Children might ask the question, “What did you eat your eggs with?” but no child has ever asked “*What did you eat your eggs and?”, which is a straightforward extension of “I ate ham and eggs.” 1 (Pinker)
- I baked a cake for Mary. or I baked Mary a cake.
I painted the house for 6 hours. but never *I painted 6 hours the house. 2
Question: Why does the child not make these leaps?
Answer: “When we imagine a reasonable sort of mistake for a child to make but never find a child making it, we assume that the mistake would violate some
(2) This ability must be shared across the species because children, regardless of culture environment, etc. All acquire language in the same way and at the same rate without instruction.
This ability is deeply ingrained as species regardless of environment. (Slobin)
Acquisition takes place regardless of circumstances, e.g. abuse, deafness, neglect, etc. (Gleitman)
