Pinker, S. Language Acquisition. in L. R. Gleitman, M. Liberman, and D. N. Osherson (Eds.),
An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd Ed. Volume 1: Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
The topic of language acquisition implicate the most profound questions about our understanding of the human mind, and its subject matter, the speech of children, is endlessly fascinating. But the attempt to understand it scientifically is guaranteed to bring on a certain degree of frustration. Languages are complex combinations of elegant principles and historical accidents. We cannot design new ones with independent properties; we are stuck with the confounded ones entrenched in communities. Children, too, were not designed for the benefit of psychologists: their cognitive, social, perceptual, and motor skills are all developing at the same time as their linguistic systems are maturing and their knowledge of a particular language is increasing, and none of their behavior reflects one of these components acting in isolation.
Given these problems, it may be surprising that we have learned anything about language acquisition at all, but we have. When we have, I believe, it is only because a diverse set of conceptual and methodological tools has been used to trap the elusive answers to our questions: neurobiology, ethology, linguistic theory, naturalistic and experimental child psychology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of induction, theoretical and applied computer science. Language acquisition, then, is one of the best examples of the indispensability of the multidisciplinary approach called cognitive science.
Harnad, S. (2008) Why and How the Problem of the Evolution of Universal Grammar (UG) is Hard. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31: 524-525
Harnad, S (2014) Chomsky's Universe. -- L'Univers de Chomsky. À babord: Revue sociale es politique 52.
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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
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Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
I am not an expert on child development but could it be possible that it is easier for children to learn a language because it's one of the only tasks they are able to perform without any adult supervision? The life of a child normally consists of eating, sleeping, and learning new associations and categories each day. They depend on their parents for survival yet they are capable to learn how to speak on their own.
ReplyDeleteSince language is also not associated with levels of intelligence, to me it really seems like it is an independent ability that we develop as children because it is the time in our lives where we have great stores of energy, encounter new experiences daily, and have no responsibilities to worry of (except eating, digesting and eating), hence more time to learn derive meaning from new experiences on our own.
I would imagine the reason why it's easy for children to pick up a language is because, as we've been seeing, there's something *innate* about language. Children aren't coming into the world as a blank slate and have to pick up every single detail about language... But they do still need supervision in a sense to learn an actual language. Didn't we mention in class some philosopher guy who said we can't learn a language alone on an island? So it's not really fair to say children can learn language "on their own" without adults(/others). I imagine that a child's environment is fairly rich linguistically but: 1) rich for specific kinds of languages 2) they can make use of that because they already have something going on inside their brains ("language organ" and/=/or UG?). And as you say, it seems like its independent from other cognitive skills we have (as made apparent by those stroke studies where there are language deficits but other faculties are spared and vice-versa). But the Pinker article seems to start looking at how we acquire a *specific* language as children without looking too deep at what actually allows us to do so in the first place (that language organ business).
DeleteThere are plenty of things children learn on their own, through exploration, but language is not one of them. Even for unsupervised learning it takes at least one other. (But "language" is not the same as "UG.")
DeleteI agree that the reason children appear to learn language so much easier is due to certain circumstances of being a child – like as you mentioned less strenuous daily life and so more time to learn. However, while children are seemingly born with this innate ability to learn language and recognize the rules of that language (universal grammar) they are not born with the ability to speak, which means they are unable to get their needs or wants across or to engage with those around them as efficiently. What I’m trying to say, is that as such a social species, who communicate largely through language, a baby is much more motivated to learn as it needs these skills. Of course, there is also a biological/neurological explanation (involving the structure of the brain and development), I’ll save that for someone who know more than I do – but just to say there is a key point in development that is optimal for language learning, which certainly helps explain the disparity in language learning efficiency of children versus adults. Also, as Hugo mentions, this propensity for language learning is not set for any particular language but that babies draw from their environment more specific rules for the language being used. That is to say, that by the time you are an adult you’ve already learned all these specifics about that language’s syntax, morphology, and phonology and I’d imagine it would be difficult as an adult who has kind of hardwired these rules through daily use to try to make space for new ones (compared to a baby who is learning its first).
DeleteI’m not making an argument about space in the brain for language, but more about how it might be conflicting to try to learn new rules when old ones have become so ingrained.
Regarding learnability theory:
ReplyDeleteIs learnability theory a form of unsupervised learning? Otherwise I’m unsure why (1) a class of languages that include the target language is unknown to the learner. If this were the case, then this theory does not apply to adults acquiring a second language, for it’s explicit which language they wish to acquire. Additionally, I’m not even sure how children don’t know which language is to be attained. It’s obvious that it’s the same one their community speaks.
Regarding positive and negative evidence:
This evidence offered in this section seems incomplete to substantiate the claim that negative evidence is not crucial for the acquisition of language. For example, Pinker referenced Stromswold (1994) who studied only studied one child and drew the conclusion that that negative evidence isn’t crucial. This hardly seems to provide substantial evidence for such a conclusion. Additionally, Pinker referenced studies concerning Skinner’s behaviorism, but never gave the criteria for what counted as negative and positive evidence. There are such cases where parents mix both positive and negative reinforcements. For example, responding to a child with the corrected grammar. They don’t explicitly correct the child, but provide the correct grammatical string. Pinker also posits that a child would have to repeat a particular error “hundreds of times to eliminate the error”, but we know that children can learn passively (hearing and not speaking).
From what I remember of my Language Acquisition course, parents don't usually provide an alternative to the child's utterance unless what they're saying is factually incorrect, they're not likely to repeat a grammatical form in response to an ungrammatical utterance that is true. Even in cases where they provide an explicit correction, the child will often ignore it if they haven't reached that stage of development. My favorite example is the following from Braine 1971
DeleteChild:Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Father:You mean, you want the other spoon.
Child:Yes, I want other one spoon, please Daddy.
Father:Can you say "the other spoon"?
Child:Other . . . one . . . spoon.
Father:Say "other".
Child:Other.
Father:"spoon".
Child:Spoon.
Father:"Other spoon".
Child:Other . . . spoon. Now give me other one spoon?
Regardless, These aren't the types of mistakes linguists are really interested in when they mention lack of negative evidence, since these mistakes don't actually violate anything in UG.
A better example is the "Auxiliary Initial Clause" that is discussed in the next reading. Children make mistakes with these utterances, but they don't make the type of mistake that would violate structure dependency. Since they never make the mistake to begin with, there's no room for a correction
Amber, Learnability theory applies to both unsupervised and supervised.
DeleteAs Oscar notes, we need to distinguish (learnable) OG errors from (unlearnable) UG (no errors, no correction).
It is being stated in both Pinker and Chomsky's arguments that children's abilities to simultaneously learn how to correctly speak a language without much negative feedback is puzzling. Therefore Chomsky argues that universal grammar is innate. What puzzles me most is that essentially what is universal grammar? Is it the readiness of infant's brain for language acquisition?
ReplyDeleteAccording to Pinker's example: "It is hard to think of a reason how this law would fit in to any universal law of thought or memory: why would the concept of two ideologies based on one Darwin should be thinkable, but the concept of one ideology based on two Darwins (say, Charles and Erasmus) not be thinkable (unless one reasons in a circle and declares that the mind must find -ism to be more cognitively basic than the plural, because that's the order we see in language)." The ability to classifying Darwinism as Darwinism but not Darwinsism is an example of universal grammar, which I totally disagree. The example itself should be OG, because it can be learned, like other grammatical linguistic conventions. In my opinion, universal grammar is not a rule, but more like a cognitive ability that uniquely inherent in human species. It must be related to the highly plastic neurophysiology of children, specifically in auditory stimuli processing, in order to segregate stream of inseparable auditory inputs into chunks.
As for the poverty of negative feedback, universal grammar might work in a way that instantly strengthen the conventional ways of language production from their parents, but inhibit anything that is outside of this convention. Therefore after receiving finite set of input, their neuro-networks will be altered in a way that certain connections(way of expressing) are inhibited, leaving only a handful of possibilities to utter a sentence. Throughout development, when they receive further correct input, the neural connections are gradually shaped and trimmed to form a stable mechanism for correct language production, answering the question why you do not need that much negative feedback to acquire a language.
To avoid just speculating, you need to take a syntax course to learn what is and isn't UG.
DeleteWhen it comes to learning a language, children seem to be the most adept at doing this. After a few years, they develop much of the basic structures needed to communicate and they do so without much foreign accent if any. Over time, this ability seems to disappear where older learners are a lot less likely to acquire native-like proficiency in a language especially in their accent. As the article mentions though “it can’t be across-the-board decline” and it isn’t. As the article says there is no evidence to suggest that vocabulary learning ability declines in early adulthood but studies on child learners of multiple languages can give us some interesting insights into the benefits and pitfalls of early language learning.
ReplyDeleteStudies have demonstrated that later acquisition of a second language is not necessarily impossibly compromised but might actually be more successful in certain ways. For example, as children age they develop cognitive mechanisms that may actually help them acquire language more efficiently than younger children. Other research has suggested something quite interesting about simultaneous bilingual children (ie: they learn two languages at the same time), in school-age they actually need more input in order to attain the same level of proficiency as a sequential bilingual who started learning the second language when they started school. Based on these experiments we can see that early acquisition of language by children isn’t the only way to acquire a language and that the issues surrounding language learning are very complex and occurs differently depending on the nature of the language skill being acquired. Early learning is optimal for having no foreign accent but in other domains learning is not necessarily compromised. Thus our perception of “early is better” for language learning must be modified somewhat.
Yes, some people become very proficient in later-learned languages. But the substantive issue is UG, which is not learned either for L1 or L2.
DeleteIn his paper, Pinker mentions that UG needs to be able to account for linguistic universals and for things that are specific to each different language. If we are trying to develop an evolutionary theory for language learning, how could we possibly account for an evolved tendency to be able to learn all language-specific tendencies? For example, why would someone born in London who learns English as a first language need the ability to learn gender-specific pronoun rules for a language like Hebrew? It seems evolutionarily unnecessary to program all language-specific tendencies into UG. If those things were learnable through trial and error with feedback, it would make much more sense.
ReplyDeleteLanguage differences are either OG differences (learned, not evolved) or differences in UG-parameter-settings (also learned and learnable).
Delete“A grammar is not a bag of rules; there are principles that link the various parts together into a functioning whole. The child can use such principles of Universal Grammar to allow one bit of knowledge about language to affect another.”
ReplyDeleteFrom what I understood from Pinker’s article, he doesn’t distinguish UG from OG learning. In the above quote, he speaks of using the principles of UG to expand the child’s knowledge about language (and I may be very wrong here), which is missing the point of UG, as we don’t know what the exact principles are. We don’t know the reasons behind the functioning of UG, how it is acquired by children. We thus couldn’t possibly use the principles of UG to expand our knowledge of grammar in general (OG, I presume).
Moreover, he wants to put OG principles such as conjugation rules surrounding regular and irregular verbs in the same basket as UG, which (again, from what I have understood) is not correct at all! These are learnable principles, without a poverty of stimulus. When a child says ‘I gived’ instead of ‘I gave’, the child will be corrected until it learns that the correct word is ‘I gave’. It is a very explicable part of learning, and I don’t understand why Pinker confuses it with UG.
You are right...
Delete“Do children learn language using a "mental organ," some of whose principles of organization are not shared with other cognitive systems such as perception, motor control, and reasoning (Chomsky, 1975, 1991; Fodor, 1983)? ”
ReplyDeleteI think it is an interesting idea that children could have a “mental organ”, but I don’t necessarily think this is the case. There are so many other parts of the body and cognitive systems that contribute to the experience of language, so I do not think it is isolated. For example, “shape of the human vocal tract seems to have been modified in evolution for the demands of speech”, suggesting that there is a connection between the motor elements of the larynx and our language capabilities. Something that could support this claim is that babies can think before they can speak, perhaps suggesting they are using their “mental organ”, but I don’t think this is enough to prove that it exists or is the correct theory. It is also interesting to note that babies seem to acquire the ability to speak around the same age, which might also be supportive evidence for this theory.
I think by "organs" Chomsky means the parts of the brain that generate our capacity (and motivation) to learn speech, vocabulary and OG as well as the parts that already encode UG so we can comply with it without needing to learn it.
DeleteFor a child to learn grammar, I wonder how much stimulus is needed? In the article it explains that the “vast majority of the speech they hear during the language-learning years is fluent, complete, and grammatically well formed”, but what if for example the child is living in poverty and left alone most of the day or is neglected and does not receive a lot of interaction with parents or adults. Do these children still develop proper grammar or is there a developmental delay here? This relates to the idea of Universal Grammar and is a question that is still unanswered.
ReplyDeleteThere is a case of a child, Genie, who was neglected and abused by her parents. She was locked in a room and socially isolated from the world and thus did not receive much language input until she was 13, which is when she began to acquire language.
DeleteFrom what I remember, Genie was able to acquire English very quickly. Even so, she never reached native-like proficiency in syntax so it shows that there is a developmental delay that occurs if children are not exposed to language earlier on.
Remember to distinguish OG and UG in these questions...
Delete"Children do not hear sentences in isolation, but in a context...That is, before children have learned syntax, they know the meaning of many words, and they might be able to make good guesses as to what their parents are saying based on their knowledge of how the referents of these words typically act."
ReplyDeleteSection 6.5 of the Pinker paper discusses how young children understand a sentence based on a combination of the input sentence, a representation of the meaning of the sentence, as well as their knowledge of the meanings of each individual word that make up the sentence. 'Representation' is one of the words that we are retiring in this class as it simply refers to feeling. This section reminded me of the symbol grounding problem, so I think we can simply reword the explanation for child language understanding as symbol grounding. In this case, the words of a language are the symbols, which must be grounded into a context containing referents. Once the child has a minimum set of symbols grounded, they can combine what they already know to reach all other words by definition alone, thus allowing them to infer the meaning of a sentence even before their syntactic capacities have been fully developed. Symbol grounding is definitely necessary for L1, but I wonder if it applies for second language acquisition? Pinker's paper states that no child has learned language from the radio or television, but in my experience I know quite a few others who have learned a second language exactly through those methods. My hypothesis is that since referents will already exist in our heads after grounding symbols in our native language, we can connect the referents through definition from the second language without having to go through the whole grounding process again. Would love to hear all of your thoughts about this matter.
("Representation" is retired because it is vague and homuncular: representation of what, where, how, by whom and for whom?)
DeleteProposition meanings can be guessed from the word meanings alone, but you can't get far without some syntax -- but mostly OG syntax. At least enough to figure out what's subject and what's predicate!
L2 meanings are grounded in L1 meanings (at least some of which are grounded directly; sensorimotor categorization).
(Some L2 can be learned from passive exposure -- unsupervised learning. I used to think that wasn't possible for L1, but it seems it is...)
It seems the big problem with the Pinker article is not that he is saying anything thats not true but that he just does not distinguish between UG and OG. He therefore puts both of them both in the same basket. By grouping them together he is doing nothing more than just stating the obvious with OG, saying its learned, uses trial and error or just receptively learning it from adults. The problem though and the primary concern is that he does not distinguish and explain that UG isn't learned and doesn't need to be corrected (poverty of the stimulus).
ReplyDeleteThat's it.
DeleteI didn’t get the feeling Pinker was just lumping the two, UG and OG, into the same basket – he appears to acknowledge that they are different. While it may not have been as obvious in the article, he does clearly warn against lumping them together in a video lecture I watched of his (Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain – youtube). I do agree, however, that Pinker does not go beyond stating the obvious about OG being learned, using trial and error or just receptively learning it from adults. I would just say that it seems more like Pinker acknowledges that humans have evolved this ‘language organ’ or ‘mental organ’ that allows for our propensity for recognizing, learning, and then using grammatically complex language, UG, but he does not go beyond saying we evolved it because it was adaptive with regards to an explanation.
Delete"The use of part-of-speech categories, phrase structure, and meaning guessed from context are powerful tools that can help the child in the daunting task of learning grammar quickly and without systematic parental feedback (Pinker, 1984)."
ReplyDelete"Indeed, if children are constrained to look for only a small number of phrase types, they automatically gain the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences, one of the hallmarks of human language."
The method that Pinker proposes in how children acquire semantics and syntax (through bootstrapping) is interesting. It seems like children are able to categorize different phrase types and hierarchically organize them in order to acquire the sentence structure of their language. In this case, children must be very good at detecting certain categories of phrases. I am a proponent of Chomsky’s UG, but it makes me think that maybe language acquisition is not a result of a “language acquisition device”. What if it is built on this spectacular ability to categorize and then to compute these categories into their respective hierarchical levels to form well-formed utterances?
In spite of this proposal, I still see how it would be problematic when facing the argument for the PoS because to be able to categorize, you need feedback of whether you are doing the right or wrong thing with these categories.
It's OG that can be learned unsupervised. UG cannot be, but children comply with it anyway, so it must be inborn.
DeleteAfter reading through this paper, one question is still really bugging me: why, as adults, can we not fluently learn another language? Is the critical period for language acquisition stable regardless of a potentially complete immersion in the language culture? Does it have to do with brain plasticity and learning capacities that taper off after a certain age that simply cannot be reversed or altered? And finally, what would the evolutionary advantage of such a phenomenon be (if there even is need for one in this context)?
ReplyDeleteSecond language can be learned after the critical period, but the critical period is optimal for language learning. (What you should be asking is what would be the evolutionary advantage of extending the optimal period life-long: It's costly, it's mostly unnecessary, and evolution is lazy.)
Delete“[…] the errors occur in anywhere from 0.1% to 8% of the opportunities for making them; more than 90% of the time, the child is on target.”
ReplyDelete“Some have found small statistical contingencies between the grammaticality of some children's sentence and the kind of follow-up given by their parents; for example, whether the parent repeats the sentence verbatim, asks a follow-up question, or changes the topic. But Marcus (1993) has found that these patterns fall far short of negative evidence (reliable information about the grammatical status of any word string).”
“Stromswold (1994) has an even more dramatic demonstration that parental feedback cannot be crucial. She studied a child who, for unknown neurological reasons, was congenitally unable to talk. He was a good listener, though, and when tested he was able to understand complicated sentences perfectly, and to judge accurately whether a sentence was grammatical or ungrammatical. The boy's abilities show that children certainly do not need negative evidence to learn grammatical rules properly, even in the unlikely event that their parents provided it.”
These quotes all appear to relate to OG, as opposed to UG. We’ve established clearly that an understanding of UG rules must be innate (because the lack of negative evidence about their constraints means they can’t be learned). These passages seem to suggest a near-innate ability to conform to the rules of OG as well. Is this because innate UG-conformation accelerates our acquisition of OG rules? Is that the essence of the innateness of language acquisition? How can we reconcile that with what’s been said in class, which is that (from what I understand) there’s little to no overlap between OG and UG?
Another question: Are the parameters of a language equivalent to its OG rules? For example, is the “null subject” parameter a feature of OG or is something superordinate to the rules of OG–a way to group languages (i.e. pro-drop languages vs anti(?)-drop languages).
Unsupervised learning of OG does not mean it's near innate.
DeleteUG parameters are not OG, but, like OG, they are learnable, and learned.
Pinker’s article on language acquisition focuses on positive and negative evidence as the two main forms of language. They are discussed in the context of language acquisition in children. The first main form of language, positive evidence, is largely influenced by parental presence because it takes place during language-learning periods. Positive evidence is information that informs what constitutes a grammatical sentence. This kind of evidence is environment-based and exposure to language is critical. On the other end of the spectrum, negative evidence is information that informs what does NOT constitute a grammatical sentence. This information can come in the form of corrections/feedback from parental figures. Pinker posits that negative evidence is not fully necessary for a child to learn language. This is supported by evidence claiming that parents don’t understand well-formed questions better than ill-formed questions and parental feedback actually does not change much for the child. This is because feedback is given for both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, so there is little differentiation. Based on this, we can assume that there must be a different mechanism that prevents children from overgeneralizing a language.
ReplyDeleteMotherese is a way of speaking used by parents and guardians in which speech is “slower, shorter, in some ways (but not all) simpler, higher-pitched, more exaggerated in intonation, more fluent and grammatically well-formed, and more directed in content to the present situation, compared to speech among adults” (Snow & Ferguson, 1977). Although this is commonly used, it is not meant for instructional purposes; it is not feedback for a child’s speech. This is evidenced by the fact that children exposed to motherese don’t actual develop language any faster or better than a child who is not. I propose that the function of motherese is more social than instructional. For example, parents who use a higher-pitch speech often do so automatically, as it is a large western cultural facet in parent and child interactions. Learning language is about exposure to speech, not how it is presented to us.
ReplyDeleteProsody refers to the patterns of language used by parents when they speak to their children. This prosody might be universal, as discussed by Fernald (1992), and it is also shown that children may pay more attention to this kind of speach. Therefore, prosody of parental speech may be a way to ensure that children are exposed to language.
Context expresses the idea that children hear language in specific contexts. Exposure to language is important, however, it cannot just be exposure to any kinds of language. For example, a child cannot learn from the radio, or at least no child ever has. The problem with trying to learn language from radio or TV is that there is no feedback from these language sources.
While motherese may not be intended to be an instructional tool, it is often used in the western world and is sometimes seen to be useful for babies. Neonates preferentially respond to "motherese" (aka child- or infant-directed speech) because it is more interesting and draws their attention more. When presented with simple words either spoken in a monotone voice or in infant-directed speech, the babies responded preferentially to the words in infant-directed speech. While there are some societies and cultures that do not use child-directed speech, many of these cultures also keep infants in close proximity such that they are exposed to a very large amount of language which is not addressed to them, unlike how in western society babies pretty much only hear speech that is directed towards them. For example, in Mayan societies the child is carried on their mothers back from birth until the child can crawl and the mother and child adopt a sort of basic understanding of the noises/grunts that the child produces such that the mother is able to respond correctly to her baby's needs. The baby in this scenario is not just a passive bystander, they are actively involved in conversation even though it is before the one-word stage of production. In some societies a baby is also not treated as a conversational partner until they are able to produce a specific set of words which means they get no feedback at all until that point. The child only has to be actively engaged in their environment to be able to acquire language.
DeleteI found several aspects of the notion of ‘Motherese’ (which refers to the deliberate modification of mothers’ and caretakers’ speech to be slower, simpler, shorter, higher-pitched etc. when talking to young children) to be very interesting. Firstly, Pinker highlights that ‘Motherese’ speech is far more complex than it is often perceived and despite this, infants are still able master these complex constructions presented by their mothers/caregivers. The examples provided in the article really illuminated to me just how complex ‘simplified’ speech is.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, a study by Newport et al. (1977) revealed that infants and children spoken to with this simplified and slowed form of speech do not reach linguistic developmental milestones any sooner than children who are addressed with more adult-directed language. It is interesting then as to why our culture chooses to engage in ‘Motherese’, when there is no benefit to linguistic development. In other cultures, children are exposed to language in vastly different ways (i.e. learn language with a third-party present, or by mostly overhearing the speech of their elders) and attain linguistic fluency at a comparable pace.
While “motherese” may not actually help children learn words faster, it has been shown that they are more drawn to it than adult-directed speech. In some societies there are children who do learn language a little later because their parents do not address them directly because they feel like it is pointless. If talking in “motherese” to a child is not necessarily helpful other than for getting their attention, then why is it instinctive for mothers to do it? How many times do you see a child and talk to it in that slow and simplified manner unconsciously? Why is it weird to see an adult address a child like they would any other adult? It there might be a relation to evolution there since there doesn’t seem to be any effect on the child’s development whether we talk to it in “motherese” or not. It is possible we evolved to talk this way because it reassures the child or makes them feel positively about the speaker. Whatever the reason, it seems evolution might have something to do with this since “motherese” is so universal and seems so instinctive.
DeleteI think it can be argued that part of the reason behind Motherese is biological in that when we see something cute (as a baby is) we have this need to talk in a way that expresses that (i.e., high-pitched voice, slow speech) -- again, not sure why this happens but it could be argued that we talk like this when we see a cute dog on the street or another cute fluffy animal. This type of speech also innately expresses positive affect which, as Lucie mentioned, can be more attention-grabbing for infants (and dogs).
DeletePinker’s article discusses the role of context in language acquisition. In doing so, Pinker highlights Ervin-Tripp’s 1973 study which showed that children of deaf parents were unable to learn speech from unresponsive radio or television inputs, but rather require interaction with live human speakers. The article also contends however that “children certainly do not need negative evidence to learn grammatical rules properly”, (as seen in Stomswold’s 1994 demonstration).
ReplyDeleteThis leads me to ask... If children only require exposure to a grammatical sample of the language (i.e. positive evidence), then why would linguistic inputs from a television or radio (that provide positive grammatical exposure to the language) be insufficient for language learning? Is interaction a necessary component for language learning? And if so, is this a result of the symbol grounding problem? I.e., is sensorimotor interaction is a necessary component for comprehensive and complete language acquisition?
A previous post brings up the example of the feral child, Genie, who was not only held in social isolation, but was most often kept tied down, unable to move and interact with her environment. If Genie was still provided with language samples (i.e. the door was kept open and she was able to overhear her parents conversing), would this passive exposure to positive evidence have assisted Genie when later acquiring language through verbal interaction, and thus have enabled her to acquire language more wholly? Perhaps passive exposure to positive evidence would have aided in her linguistic development as once Genie was freed and permitted to learn language through verbal interaction, she never attained complete linguistic fluency... Moreover, if language learning is rooted in symbol grounding then if Genie did have interactive verbal communication with her parents but was still kept restrained and unable to interact with her environment, how would such a limited and impoverished sensorimotor experience in childhood affect her subsequent language learning?
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DeleteIn the case of Genie, I do believe, especially reading Pinker's article, that passive exposure would have assisted her in acquiring language through verbal interaction and would further allow her to acquire langauge more wholly. I see what you mean in terms of how she would not be able to ground the symbols as it would just be from a far but I feel like any exposure would have benefitted her. I think this would have helped because if she was exposed to passive conversation during her critical period, then maybe after she had been freed, she would find it easier to attain that linguistic fluency that she lacked otherwise.
DeleteI think there is a need as far as child development for contingent responding (i.e., active communication with another individual) when learning a language. Apart from UG and incidental exposure, this is how children learn the names of things. If a mother points to a dog and says "Look! A dog!" the child will associate that instance of a fluffy creature with a dog and as that's reinforced in multiple situations, the child learns what a dog is. Gaze-following is also a big component of understanding language, which is often seen in infants when they are pre-verbal. That's why television programs are not helpful in learning a language, although they could help in learning vocabulary when the child is a toddler. But again, not any TV show. A study was done that showed children who watched Sesame Street had greater receptive vocab two years after they were tested, but that this was not the case for other TV shows. Again, Sesame Street has an interactive nature to it, and that may explain why children were more receptive to it.
DeleteIn fact, parental speech to young children is so redundant with its context that a person with no knowledge of the order in which parents' words are spoken, only the words themselves, can infer from transcripts, with high accuracy, what was being said (Slobin, 1977).
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good explanation of how children acquire their language since it goes to show that linking various words to things in the environment is important. This also accounts for why children start by saying simple words at first and then progress to more complex sentences that adhere to more grammatical rules. Since this is the way that children acquire their first language and it is highly effective I wonder if there has been any research like this about learning a second language this way. Usually when people are learning their second language they are much older and already have formalized ideas and concepts which allows them to learn their second language through the knowledge of their first, but would it result in better learning if people tried to acquire the language as a baby does (at a theoretical level)?
In terms of learning a second language, I know that adults have a harder time in doing so because they have passed that critical period where language acquisition is at its optimal level. However, it would be interesting to see if learning it the way a baby does, iek, in simple strings, is more effective than learning it through knowledge of their first language
DeleteI found this section of the paper really interesting - in particular, in thinking about statistical language acquisition. If speech is redundant in interactions with children, it seems that they would learn to rely on predictable aspects of the environment.
DeleteI think that the redundancy of these interactions may provide a framework in which children can gain expectations about speech and grammar - or in other words, a pattern recognition tool based on the positive evidence they are surrounded by.
"Children whose mothers use Motherese more consistently don't pass through the milestones of language development any faster".
ReplyDeleteWith regards to prosody, I wonder if this tone of speech increases the Childs ability to acquire speech faster. Although it is mentioned that children prefer this form of speech rather than adult to adult speech, does it also further their language acquisition skills? Or is it similar to motheresse in the sense that it has no affect on the rate of language development?
Pinker makes some important points in this paper. He notes, to my surprise, that children almost perfectly follow grammar rules by the age of three, though we may not describe their speech as “correct”. Further he notes an interesting point about the need for other individuals for language to be learned. I.e. a child in the woods without other individuals will be a mute. But a child with other children about will develop language abilities or even create new language, e.g. Creole or sign language. His point that genetics do not in any way predispose the learning of select languages also intrigued me, although I suppose this makes sense in hindsight. However, I felt as though there were some differences between how we have identified UG and how Pinker describes and applies it. Pinker draws the important connection between UG and “the mental mechanisms children use in acquiring language”. He further describes these mental mechanisms prevent the individuals from making what would appear to be rational generalizations about the way language works, that are in-fact false. But, the example he gives, Darwinism vs Darwinsism, does not really seem to be similar to the examples of violations of UG we discussed in class. Perhaps I am wrong here but it seems that Pinker is conflating violations of UG with violations of OG.
ReplyDeleteI am inclined to believe that the adaptive advantages of language were impossible without UG. As such, I find that Chomsky's Merge-mutation theory, very intriguing. Firstly, why is the theory currently that it was a single mutation? Secondly, I find that the first half of the C&C hypothesis that language was selectively determined by the shape of the brain falls in line with Chomsky's 'physical laws' argument (I disagree with the idea that only the languages that were learnable by our brains successfully survived and reproduced, principally because I don’t view language as an organism), if I understand both papers correctly. There is definitely an aspect to language that is constrained by the size of the brain, but more importantly by which specific regions in the brain expanded in size in order to have the allometric relation we currently see in humans today. With expansion, the concept of exaptation is prominent, perhaps no single region expansion was the cause, it could be the conjunction of multiple regions, or the 'spandrels' created by those expansions, this would still not mean that language is evolved by natural selection but it would still fall in line with the idea that the evolution of the brain produced a species that was predisposed to acquiring and sharing categories through instructional learning that was intentional. In the article the co-evolutionary hypothesis is challenged because "it does not begin to explain what it is about our brains that makes them able to play chess without trial and error" however why have there not been brain model simulations, that play on the variations of possible brain evolution paths (essentially with different physical constraints) to see at what brain model would one be unable to produce language (essentially what brain variations disallow UG compliance) and thus we can produce a rough casual mechanism by which the field can narrow its focus on? If there have been such experiments, what were the results and challenges? I would not dismiss the entirety (although aspects of it are far reaching) of the co-evolutionary hypothesis until such experiments are attempted.
ReplyDeleteAlso as a side thought: if UG is necessary to think, and thinking is done in a language, what language does a deaf-blind person think in? I ask this, because a deaf-blind person has little need for grammatically well-formed language, but they are an example of an entity that truly can not learn UG or language for that matter, but by the current UG theory they should be able to go through life never making an ill-formed UG sentence.
DeleteAfter reading this article, it is evident just how complex of a process it is for children to learn language, and how little we really know about it. To add to the complexity, I wonder what it entails for a child who is growing up bilingual from the beginning to learn both languages simultaneously. In Psychology of Bilingualism, we learned a lot about how children who are growing up bilingual (or even trilingual) do not experience any real deficits when compared to monolingual children who are learning their first language. Of course -- they may have a slightly smaller vocabulary in each language, or experience minor switch-costs when going from one language to the next -- but nothing that actually affects their life in notable ways. If language learning is a complex interaction between the environment, the input, the experiences, and countless other aspects, it makes me wonder if a bilingual baby's brain is working harder than a monolingual baby's? Or is it instead that the brain is experiencing so much change and plasticity at the time of language learning that it doesn't matter what language the inputs are coming, the child is still able to make sense of it all.
ReplyDelete"No child has learned language from the radio; indeed, children rarely if ever learn language from television."
ReplyDeletePinker goes on to explain that, the reason that children would not be able to learn language through T.V or radio would be that it would be very difficult for them (without a mastery of language) to determine the subjects which the characters are referring to. However I'm not sure if I agree with this completely. If the child has a satisfactory level grounding through sensorimotor processes, and the program is low-level and clear I believe that it can create a context through which the child can learn language. A prime example would be Sesame street teaching children about foods and how we use the topic of fruits in conversation "Elmo loves to eat apples", letting the child infer that apples are something that people eat and be used in conversation as such. Basically my point is that if projected conversation interactions (as in children's TV), are basic and detailed enough, they could help form a contextual basis for children for which they can determine the meaning of language and then incorporate into their own ability to communicate using language.
Sacha, I agree with what you are saying (mostly). I do not believe that a language could be learned solely from a radio or TV program, as it lacks an important part which is the social interaction that relates to language. When a child points at a dog to his mom and the mom responds "YES! That's a dog.", she is engaging in what is called contingent responding. That is, the mother is socially interacting and going along with the cues provided by her child. This social interaction is rewarding, as humans are social animals, and surely helps in learning a language. The case of Sesame street is an example of a program that is specifically designed to make children learn new words. It is true that this program has scientific support for its efficacy in doing so. However, other TV programs that do not have this aim do not show the same effect. In sum, I agree with you that TV programs can create enough context to help learn "some" language. Still, some social experience is required for the child to make the links between the TV cues and his own experience with the cue.
DeleteI see your point, it would be interesting to see as technology progresses, the way that entertainment and education through technology become more advanced. Maybe instead of Dora the Explorer just saying "say map!" there'll be a program that does contigent responding to the child's action in response to Dora.
DeleteRe: “To understand how children learn language, we have to know what aspects of language (from their parents or peers) they have access to.”
ReplyDeleteWhenever the controversy surrounding language acquisition arises, the same silly question keeps popping in my head. Couldn’t it be possible that some neurological structure necessary for language develops while the fetus is still in the womb. I am not an expert on the subject and so I do not want to pronounce myself personally on the issue, but I would be interested to know if someone knows to what extend can fetuses “hear” while in the womb. I remember reading a study in a course about child development that found that the heart rate of fetuses increases when they heard their mother’s voice. This would mean that the learning process starts even before we are born, and so we don’t come into the world having absolutely no bias towards a particular language.
I think that Pinker gives compelling evidence that children do not learn language by being given sets of grammar and language lessons. Although this conclusion seems intuitive, I found it enriching to support this easily assumed conclusion with evidence.
ReplyDeleteThe first piece of evidence I find interesting is that children are often not receptive to grammar correction (in though they rarely receive grammatical correction in the first place). Children will usually repeat the same mistake when told their grammar is incorrect and then given a correct example. I think that children are not receptive to grammatical correction because to incorporate a correct grammar requires an awareness of grammar in the first place. Although they are in the process of learning language, children are certainly not aware of grammatical structures that they are learning and manipulating. If they were aware of their learning, then perhaps grammatical correction would be successful.
I also find the idea that Motherese is not a set of “language lessons” compelling. I believe it is complementary to my previous observation that children are not aware of their learning of language because if they did consciously learn language and grammar, then Motherese’s “simplified” language might function to benefit (or hinder) children from learning. However, there is no difference in the language development of children whose parents spoke to them in “simple" sentences and the children whose parents spoke to them in more “complex” sentences.
“There have been occasional cases in history where abandoned children have somehow survived in forests, such as Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron …The outcome is always the same: the children, when found, are mute. Whatever innate grammatical abilities there are, they are too schematic to generate concrete speech, words, and grammatical constructions on their own.”
ReplyDeleteIn cases where children were not exposed to language until after their critically period, do they not have UG? I’m confused by this because I would have imagined that UG is something that children innately have but are set to different parameters depending on what their first language was. So I would have guessed that all children would have the ability to UG, but would have to access a language to adjust to these settings and that the children in these cases would be able to learn to speak a language with more exposure.
Furthermore, from my understanding children who do not have access to languages often end up mute, but in addition, also suffer other cognitive deficits. Is there any evidence that the acquisition of language is critical to normal cognitive functioning or is it just the situations that the children were place in that shaped this?
Positive evidence refers to “some kind of linguistic input to acquire a language”, while negative evidence tells us about “which strings or words are not grammatical sentences in language”. Both positive and negative evidence seem to be parts of OG, as they require some type of stimulus. Conversely, UG functions without need of these inputs, i.e. POS states that children are not exposed to enough data in their linguistic environments to acquire all the features of that language. Additionally, children can make errors with OG, but not with UG.
ReplyDeleteI was wondering what happens when someone learns a language? They receive both positive and negative evidence, as they are corrected frequently when they make errors. However, it seems like they would also be making UG-ish errors, as the new language would have different parameter settings compared to their first language. Therefore, when someone learns a new language are they primarily learning OG, but having to change the way that UG works for them?
Benjamin's Whorf's hypothesis does makes sense on its face. I recall a class we had earlier in the semester where we discussed the "language of thought" and whether or not it was possible to separate spoken/written language from the language we use inside our heads. My initiate thinking is that though we do "speak" natural language in our heads, I do not believe that knowledge of a language is a sufficient condition for the complexity of human thought. I always think about the indescribably feelings that accompany an emotional stretch of music, or the complex feelings of travelling or experiencing nature (not to get overly poetic). Thought we do have an internal monologue, I think human thought extends beyond what is describable in language.
ReplyDelete"Artificial chimp systems have some analogies to human language, it seems unlikely that they are homologous." (compares young chimpanzee to children)
An important point here, I think. There is a misconception that because humans and chimps share DNA, that all their systems must be homologous from a common ancestor. I think, with language, we must begin our evolutionary study by identifying the systems and comparing them to our closest animal "evolutionary neighbours". I think it speaks volumes about the nature of language and its utility for humans that chimps do not share the same systems. It means that anatomical systems essential for speech must have developed after our division from the closest chimp ancestor.
"At which point the child has 50% more synapses than the adult."
I wonder if this peak point of synaptic volume may be a contributing factor to the rapid language acquisition that occurs. I know from Child Psychology that there are so many neurons so that eventually trimming can occur and the most important information learned can remain online until adulthood. Could these extra synapses be contributing to children's ability for rapid language acquisition? After all, we know that children and adults beyond this age have a much harder time learning a new language, although their brains are far more developed in other aspects.
"It is because of the subtlety of these examples, and the abstractness of the principles of universal grammar that must be posited o explain them, that Chomsky has claimed that the overall structure of language must be innate, based on his paper-and-pencil examination of the facts of language alone."
This quote sort of hits the problem with language acquisition on the nose. There is this tug of war going on between the subtle concrete differences between natural languages that demands an extremely abstract language acquisition structure to be able to accommodate the possibility of learning any of them. Perhaps attempting to develop an algorithm that functions to learn any given natural languages, and which learns through supervised and unsupervised learning, as a child does, would bring us closer to understanding what abstract capacity a system would have to have in place to accommodate for these subtleties across language.
In his paper, Pinker often hints at UG, but ends up confusing it with OG. For example, he discusses the lack of negative evidence, or “information about which strings of words are not grammatical sentences in the language, such as corrections or other forms of feedback from a parent that tell the child that one of his or her utterances is ungrammatical”, an important point supporting the idea that UG is not learned. However, Pinker goes on to discuss negative evidence about OG only, ignoring UG. Indeed, he discusses ungrammatical utterances, or utterances that are badly formed, which occur for OG but never for UG. Thus, studying how parents react to their children’s ungrammatical utterances can help better our understanding of how OG develops, but does not inform us on how UG develops, a question to which Pinker offers no hypotheses.
ReplyDeleteIt really is a wonder how can passively acquire so much language ability and understanding just by looking at what’s going on in the world around them and making association, while simply listening without yet being able to speak themselves during the first stage of language.
ReplyDeleteCategories, on the other hand, preceding language, are learned mostly while supervised - although there may be some exceptions of categories that are innate and therefore could be learned unsupervised.
However, when thinking about the seeming lack of negative feedback that children receive in unsupervised language acquisition, I wonder if negative feedback may not always necessarily be explicit. For instance, a lack of positive feedback or even not having examples of others using ill-formed sentences may contribute to learning processes. I imagine that if a kid kept producing non-UG sentences, they might internalize that this is wrong as they realise that others don’t understand what it is they’re trying to say.