Language Development

Big Goal : Provide a sense of the mystery and promise in child language research.

1. What are the challenges? What’s language?

2. Two competing approaches (Chomskyan (nativist) and (Neuro)Constructivist)

3. Poverty of the Stimulus Hypothesis - What are our capacities and what information is in the environment?

Learning to recognize what we don’t know

“The more we learn, the more we

are - or ought to be -

dumbfounded. Our proper

business is to learn more and

more and thereby separate our

mere ignorance from genuine

mystery.” Lewis Thomas

Yearning and Learning

“ In science, learning means trying as hard to prove that something is false as to prove it is true, even if that something is a cherished belief…

Yeaning is curiosity. Yearning is the driving force of science, art, and religion…Yearning without learning is buying tabloid newspapers with headlines announcing `Newborn baby talks of heaven.’”

- Chet Raymo Skeptics and Believer 1998:60

Why is this implausible?

Baby Born Talking - Describes Heaven

Incredible proof of reincarnationLife in heaven is grand, a baby told an astounded obstetrical team

seconds after birth. Tiny Naomi Montefusco literally came into the world singing the praises of God’s firmament. The miracle so shocked the delivery room team, one nurse ran screaming down thehall. “ heaven is a beautiful place, so warm and so serene,” Naomi said. “Why did you bring me here?” Among the witnesses was mother Theresa Montefusco, 18, who delivered the child under local anesthetic…”I distinctly heard her describe heaven as a place where no one has to work, eat, worry about clothing, or do anything but sing God’s praises. I tried to get off the delivery table to kneel down and pray, but the nurses wouldn’t let.” Sun 5/25/1985 cited in Steve Pinker 1994:262.

Some simple facts

• Though various creatures have communication systems, only humans have Language.

• There are approximately 6,000 languages in the world.

• Any normal child growing up in any language environment will eventually master the local language(s).

More Simple Facts

• Many exceptional children, i.e. blind, deaf, cognitively deficient, neurologically impaired, etc. may exhibit essentially normal language development. (spoken or signed)

• Masterful competence in Language is achieved without explicit instruction.

Language Development

Montefusco’s Moral: Infants don’t begin life with language, but over time develop an impressive command of words, grammar, and discourse skills.

So,

How can we characterize the infant startstate(s) and how can we can characterize the adult knowledge state(s)?

How do we get from there, i.e., the infant startstate, to here, i.e., the adult state?

What we don’t know we know(from Pinker, Word and Rules 1998)

Consider when we use irregular, not regular forms:

Prefixing: overate/*overeated, overshot/*overshooted, preshrank/*pre-shrinked.

Compounding: workmen/*workmans, superwomen/*superwomans,stepchildren/*stepchilds, strawmen/*mans, snowmen/*snowmans

More regulars to consider

The Toronto Maple Leafs/*Leaves (a hockey team named after Canada’s national symbol, The Maple Leaf).

Renault Elfs/*Elves (cars).

Michael Keaton starred in both Batmans/*Batmen (movie titles).

We’re having Julia Child and her husband over for dinner. You know, the Childs/*Children are really great cooks.

But, some words only display

regular marking: -s & -ed

All my daughter’s friends are low-lifes (*low-lives).

I’m sick of dealing with all the Mickey Mouses in

this administration (*Mickey Mice).

Boggs has singled, tripled, and flied out (*flown

out) in the game so far.

What else don’t we know we know? Causatives

Black Black-en

Red Redd-en

White Whit-en

Green ?

Dark ?

Light ?

Highlight ?

Grue ?

Drick ?

Quiet Quieten (Guardian Unlimited 9/26/05

The Perception of Speech Sounds: Coarticulation

Coarticulation – early movement of articulators in

anticipation of coming sounds

Identifying sameness despite differences

The acoustic properties of individual sounds are affected by the neighborhood in which they occur.

Sometimes there are little differences between different sounds and big differences between the the same sound

in different contexts

A Paradox

“Normal” adults have great difficulty achieving moderate competence, let alone fluency, in a second Language, despite:

– Greater cognitive sophistication than infants or older children

– Explicit instruction in classrooms

The role of timing: Critical Period Effect

While environmental input/experience is necessary for normal development, biology determines when the organism is responsive to that input/experience.

Normal development in specific domains must occur at certain times; if it doesn’t, then there are problems.

Critical Periods

• Monkeys reared in darkness the first 6 months take time to distinguish circles from squares -normal monkeys can do this easily.

• “ Without visual experience for the first few months of life, the brain cannot interpret what the eye sees. A Critical period has passed.”Ridley The Agile Gene 2003:164

• “The brain is open to calibration by experience in the early weeks of life, after which it sets.”Ridley 2003:165

Critical periods and plasticity

• Imprinting in geese -

“Lorenz noticed that imprinted goslings not (and

other birds) not only treated him as a parent but

later became sexually fixated on him as well.

They would ignore members of their species and

court human beings.” Lorenz (Ridley The Agile

Gene 2003:165)

Language in normal humans: irrepressible

Language creation situations:

Wild child

Pidgins and Creoles

Wild (Feral) Children

Tall tales: Tarzan, Mowgli (The Jungle Book), Nell,,,,

True tales: The Wild Child - 18th century(Francois Truffaut), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - 19th century (Werner Herzog)

A Sad Case

Genie (1970s Los Angeles, Ca.; 13 yrs. old)

Isolated at home by an abusive father; likely brain damage.

Learned vocabulary, but limited (if any) syntax, I.e., didn’t seem able to gain command over the principles for combining words with one another.

Language processed in the right, rather than the left hemisphere.

Pidgins and Creoles

Pidgin: a structurally-simple language that arises when people who share no common language come into contact, e.g, colonial contexts

• Restricted vocabulary shared among native speakers of mutually unintelligible languages.

• Often limited to specific situations in goal-directed activities (frequently commercial situations)

• Un(der)developed grammar

Examples:

• Hawaiian Fish Market Pidgin

• Chinese-English Pidgin

• Russenorsk

Creoles

Creole: a language that develops when children acquire a pidgin as their native language. (e.g. Swahili, Tok Pisin, Nicaraguan Sign Language…)

• Development of grammatical complexity; as time goes by, more speakers acquire it…but, they jointly create it as they acquire it, since the `target’ doesn’t exist independent of learning. The language acquires speakers as it develops. – Grammatical properties of the creole don’t have to

look like any of the “parent” languages.

Tok Pisin (New Guinea)

Jargon

⇓

Stabilized Pidgin

⇓

Expanded Pidgin

⇓

Creole

Language Creation

• Claim (Bickerton): All creoles share some

grammatical properties, regardless of

how/when/where they were created; this

implicates the existence of universals.

Where would this come from?

1. Innately given domain specific properties of

humans? 2. Innately given domain relevant properties of

humans in conjunction with social/cultural conditions in which languages are used?

How does this happen?(Two competing views)

Nativist

• All humans have an

innate “linguistic

bioprogram” or a “core

grammar” which allows

them to learn or (in

some cases) create

languages based on

the input they receive.

(Neuro) Constructivist

• Creoles get to be more complex grammatically because they are used in a wider variety of communicative situations – these new uses are enabled and modified by language relevant general abilities.

Enculturated creatures: not irrepressible, but …

Kanzi (pygmy/bonobo

chimp)

Animal Communication Systems

A goal of some researchers:

Establish that there is less of a categorical/radical difference between humans and other creatures.

A hypothesized distance is lessened by demonstrating that some property, contrary to belief, is not unique to humans.

Lexigrams

English Comprehension: Child vs. Chimp

(Savage- Rumbaugh et. al. 1993)

Task: Compare language development in a normal child (Alia 2;0) and normal bonobo (Kanzi 8;0), based on responses to 660 spoken instructions.

Kanzi: Exposed to spoken English and lexigrams from 6;0 mo.; exhibited speech comprehension at 2;0 and spontaneous use of lexigrams at 2;5.

Alia: Exposed to spoken English from birth and lexigrams from 3 mo.: comprehension of 32 spoken words at 13 mo. and spontaneous use of lexigrams at 11 mo.

Some Results(Savage- Rumbaugh 1998:71)

“Rarely did either Kanzi or Alia make mistakes that indicated a lack of understanding of the basic grammatical structure of the sentences. Both of them readily differentiated between requests to retrieve objects from locations (Go to location X and get object Y) and requests to take objects to locations (Take object X to location Y). They also understood the difference between sentences that required them to move through space in addition to acting on objects and sentences that required them to act on objects without moving about.”

Interpretation(Savage- Rumbaugh et. al. 1993)

“… under relatively similar rearing conditions and virtually identical testing conditions, they could comprehend both the semantics and the syntax of quite unusual English sentences.”

So, bonobos appear to perform some extraordinary

“language” feats - well enough to even be mistaken for a young human child, for a short time.

But, bonobos reach a threshold early on, while the child keeps developing.

A View From a Primate Researcher

(Sue Savage-Rumbaugh 1996 Discover Magazine)

“Now I understand in ways that I cannot fully describe that language isn’t a matter of learning little building blocks like words and stringing them together in some kind of hierarchical structure and then going out and kind of throwing these out to the rest of the world so that ideas jump from my mind to yours. Language is a matter of me learning to coordinate my behavior with all of the other individuals in the world around me and that much of this initial coordination is through glances, through patternings of behavior together, through joint understandings of how the world works, and joint constructions of how we’re going to operate in this world together.”

A View From a Developmental Psychologist

(Annette Karmiloff-Smith 1992:63)

Child: “What’s that?”

Mother: “A typewriter.”

Child: “No, you’re a typewriter, that’s a typewrite.” (Yara, 4.0)

“Thus, even if the chimpanzee were to have an innately specified linguistic base, I speculate that it would still never go as far as the human child. It would never wonder why “typewriter” isn’t used to refer to people. It would simply repeat the linguistic labels that it was given. But children doi not simply reach efficient usage; they subsequently develop explicit representations which allow them to reflect on the component parts of words to progressively build linguistic theories.”

“… a crucial difference shows up when we look at what happens beyond successful mastery. Chimpanzees do not go beyond behavioral mastery.” Karmiloff-Smith 1995.

Ignorance v. Mystery: Complexity of Language

“… for a few domains, like puddings, one can assume a sample anywhere is as good as a sample elsewhere. But, in complex systems, this is not true. For example, it is a general fact that the human body is 86% water. But from this it would turn out to be foolish to make inferences such as `the body is 86% water; water is chemically simple; so, the body is basically chemically simple.’…Such inferences and strategies are, of course, obviously wrong when one knows the falsifying counter-information in advance. But when one has very little knowledge of the domain, they are commonly recruited.” - M. Maratsos 1999:192

If language is a complex system, then it is an incoherent question to ask: How do children learn language?

The Main Subsystems

Sound:

• Phonological system (what is contained in language particular sound systems, I.e., sounds, how they combine)

Lexicon & Grammar:

• Morphological system (how words are formed)

• Syntactic system (how words combine into phrases and sentences )

• Semantic system (meanings of words and larger expressions)

Communication:

• Pragmatic system (how language is used in different contexts)

• Discourse system (connecting utterances/sentences into a coherent narratives)

What linguists tell us about Language

Language = def A complex system made up of

independent, but interacting, subsystems (or

modules or components) coordinated with one

another, creating the appearance of a single,

unified entity.

These structures in these independent subsystems

need not neatly and straightforwardly

correspond with one another, I.e., the

subsystems can display mismatches.

Mismatch 1: Phonology vs. Morphology

Phonological (Sound) Structure

Morphological (Word) Structure

Mismatches between Morphology and Phonology

The most well-motivated representation of the internal structure of words from the perspective of the meaningful pieces from which they are composed differs from the best representation of the same word from the perspective of the organization of the sounds it consists of.

The Main Subsystems: Developmental Milestones

The Central Mystery

How do children acquire the subsystems that

make up Language?

How do children acquire the sound system, word shape system, word combination system,

word meaning (and sentence meaning) system -- and come to coordinate all of these

systems together?

Necessary Questions

What is Language? In what ways are all natural

languages alike? What ways are they different?

What distinguishes natural languages from

animal communication systems and artificial

languages and even programming languages?

How can we characterize the adult’s knowledge

of his/her native language(s)?

This is the domain of LINGUISTS.

More Necessary Questions

What is learning? How do children develop

mastery in non-linguistic domains such as facial

recognition or object recognition or concept

formation? What is the time course of learning

and are there correlations between learning in

different domains? What are the mechanisms or

processes that facilitate or impede learning?

This is the domain of DEVELOPMENTAL or COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGISTS.

Resulting Interdisciplinary Questions

What is language learning? How do children develop mastery of their native language(s)? Do they rely on the same operations as in non-linguistic skills? What are the biological bases and the actual learning patterns of the language development process? How does learning in normal and special populations differ and how is it similar to language learning and learning in other

cognitive and social domains? What is the relation between the adult’s knowledge and the child’s knowledge, I.e., what is the relation between the infant startstate and the adult endstate?

This is the domain of Developmental PSYCHOLINGUISTS.

Alternatively put…

“The most fundamental question in the study of the

human language faculty is its place in the

natural world: what kind of biological system it is,

and how it relates to other systems in our

species and others.

A second question is what parts of a person’s

language ability (learned or built-in) are specific

to language and what parts belong to more

general abilities.”

- Jackendoff & Pinker 2005

The third question is which aspects of the language capacity are uniquely human and which are shared with other groups of animals, either homologously, by inheritance from a common ancestor, or analogously, by adaptation to a common function…As with the first two questions, answers will seldom be dichotomous. They will often specify mixtures of shared and unique attributes, reflecting the evolutionary process in which an ancestral primate design was retained, modified, augmented or lost in the human lineage.” 2005:3

The “answer”

Nobody knows...but we have gotten increasingly

interested in:

• The types of methods used to explore key

areas of language,

• The types of models proposed by researchers,

• The types of questions that need to be asked

to ultimately arrive at satisfying and compelling

“answers”.

Some Consequences of Answers

Help us to understand the nature of the human mind.

Help us to understand the relation between human behavior in relation to the behaviors of non-human primates and other creatures: What’s our place in the biological world?

Help to understand the role of language in human culture

Help to address issues in special populations, I.e., deaf, neurogenetic disorders, etc.