Language Development

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

1. What are the challenges?2. Two competing approaches (Chomskyan

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 iosity. 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 HeavenIncredible proof of reincarnation

Life 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 the hall. “ 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.

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

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?

CausativesBlack Black-enRed Redd-enWhite Whit-enGreen ?Dark ?Light ?Highlight ?Grue ?Drick ?Quiet Quieten (Guardian Unlimited 9/26/05

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

Language in normal humans: irrepressible

Language creation situations:

Nicaragua sign language of deafBedouin sign language

Enculturated creatures: not irrepressible, but …

Kanzi (pygmy/bonobo chimp)

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 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, bonbobos 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

PhonologyThe 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.

Mismatch 2:Syntax vs. Phonology

Syntactic (Word combination)

Structure

Prosodic (Sentence melody) Structure

Mismatches between Syntax vs. Phonology

The best motivated representation of sentences as composed of phrases differs from the best representation of these phrases from the perspective of the organization of how they are grouped into units of sound.

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

QuestionsWhat 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.

Major Issues

It’s mostly Nature

Nativism (Plato 4th BC; Kant 18th c.)

Chomsky (1957, and more recent formulations):

• Rapid and effortless acquisition

• No explicit instruction

• Poverty of stimulus

It’s mostly NurtureEmpiricism (Locke 17th

c.)Behaviorism (Skinner

20th c.) • Gradual (and

effortful?) acquisition• External stimulus

leading to appropriate responses.

• Sufficiently reach stimulus

Major Issues

It’s a balance between Nature & Nurture: contra Chomsky, it’s the Nature of Nature that is the question

– Interactionism (Braine 1994)/Social Interactionism (Snow 1989), Constructivism (Piaget 1926) Emergentism, Neuroconstructivism (MacWhinney 1999, Elman et. al. 1996, Karmiloff-Smith1995 )

There are no innately given language specific (= domain specific) capacities, but rather there are innately given language relevant (= domain general) capacities which conspire over time to produce language.

(Dis)Continuous Knowledge (Aitchison1976:127)

Chomskyan: language specific structures and categories of adult endstate are refined versions what’s at the infant startstate.

Constructivist: language specific structures and categories of adult endstate are possibly radically different from those infant startstate.

Noun Coordination and Questions (Doctor Doolittle’s Dilemma Stephen

Anderson 2004:224)(

3) Pat is majoring in [Linguistics and Philosophy].3’) What is Pat majoring in [Ø and Philosophy]?3”) What is Pat majoring in [ Ø ]

4) Pat is majoring in Linguistics [along with Philosophy].

4’) What is Pat majoring in Ø [along with Philosophy]?

Sentence Coordination and Questions SA 2004:224)

1) Fred bought too many expensive presents and the bank cut off his charge card.

1’) What did Fred buy Ø and the bank cut off his charge card?

2) Fred bought too many expensive presents, [so the bank cut off his charge card].

2’) What did Fred buy Ø,[so that the bank cut off his charge card]?

Observation

Declarative sentences with very similar meanings, I.e., 1 versus 2 and 3 versus 4, behave very differently when you try to form questions.

Since you cannot form a question about only one conjunct in a coordinated phrase, but you can form a question from a single element when it’s not in a coordinate phrase, the difference in behavior isn’t likely to be sensitive to meaning. Instead, it’s possible that there are some structure based restrictions.

Empirical research and an interpretation

“Several decades of investigation support the claim that they [restrictions like the coordinate structure constraint) are true of all languages…This kind of knowledge could not plausibly have been acquired on the basis of experience. Therefore it seems likely that these aspects of syntactic organization are as much a part of the biologically determined human language faculty as the structure of the vervet monkey calls is specific to animals of that species.” SA 2004:229

A (proposed) universal property of grammar

Coordinate Structure Constraint

A single conjunct in a coordinate structure cannot be questioned alone.

XP

XP1 and XP2

Bever’s Syllogism: Representational

InnatenessTo be proven: Language is innate.1. The essence of Language has

property Pi (Coordinate Structure Constraint).

2. Pi cannot be learned by any (known) (conceivable) theory of learning.

3. Therefore, Pi is innate.4. Therefore, the essence of Language

is innate (and caused thereby).

Bever’s Syllogism: Developmental

To be proven: Language is learned.1. The essence of Language has property

Pi (Coordinate Structure Constraint).

2. Pi cannot be transmitted by any (known) (conceivable) genetic mechanism.

3. Therefore, Pi is learned.4. Therefore, the essence of Language is

learned (and caused by how it is learned).