Transcript Conclusion

Language and the mind
Prof. R. Hickey
WS 2007/08
First Language Acquisition
Katharina Auerswald (LN, Grundstudium)
Daniela Neeven (TN, Hauptstudium)
Sabrina Hoffmann (TN, Grundstudium)
Language and the mind
Prof. R. Hickey
WS 2007/08
Language Acquisition and
Maturation
Ann-Katrin Grendreizig und Lena Jägen
LN und TN
Hauptstudium or Grundstudium
Language acquisition
Def.:
First language acquisition refers to the acquisition of
one’s mother tongue during the first 6 to 7 years of
one's life (from birth to the time when children start
school).
Language acquisition for children consists of
achieving control in four main areas:
1) A set of syntactic rules determining how phrases are
formed out of words and sentences out of phrases.
2) A set of morphological rules determining how words
are built up out of morphemes.
3) A set of phonological rules determining how words
are pronounced.
4) A set of semantic rules determining the meaning of
words, phrases and sentences.
Maturation
• no evidence for any conscious and systematic
teaching of language
• environment changes, because the child's behaviour
changes
• most important differences between pre- and
postlanguage phases originate in the individual
> maturational processes
• differ in each individual so that it is very difficult to
explore
Hallmarks for maturationally controlled emergence
of behaviour
•
regularity in the sequence of appearance of given
milestones
•
opportunity for environmental stimulation remains
relatively constant, each infant makes different use of
these opportunities
•
emergence of behaviour before it is of immediate
use to the individual
•
clumsy beginnings are not signs of goal-directed
practice
Emergence of Speech and Language
•
onset of speech > gradual unfolding of capacities
• speech milestones and motor-developmental
milestones occur together but it is no logical necessity
•
•
independent from articulatory skills
can babble but cannot form simple utterances
>psychological retarding factor in language
acquisition, not a physical one
Emergence of Speech and Language
• at the age of three speech skills are fully developed,
other mechanical skills not
•
language comprehension comes before the
language production
Emergence of Speech and Language
• 12 weeks > cooing: squealing-gurgling sounds,
vowel- like in character
• 6 months > cooing changes into babbling,
on-syllable utterances like ma, mu or da
• 12 months > signs of understanding, identical sound
sequences are replicated, mamma or dadda
• 18 months > definite repertoire of words, more than
3, less than 50, no attempt to communicate, no
frustration for not being understood, no spontaneous
two-item phrases
Emergence of Speech and Language
• 24 months > more than 50 words, spontaneous twoitem phrases, own creations, interest in language
• 30 months > new vocabulary every day,
communicative intent, frustrated if not understood,
rarely verbatim repetitions, understand everything,
intelligibility not good yet
• 3 years > 1000 words, intelligible even to strangers,
grammatical complexity similar to colloquial adult
language
•
4 years > language well-established
Acquisition of morphemes:
Research of uncontrolled spontaneous speech has
shown that:
The developmental order of the morphemes (in, on,
third person regular/irregular articles a.s.o.) is quite
constant > the same is true of grammatical devices in
general
BUT
The rate of development varies greatly between
different children
Communication Pressure
• Is there a pressure in communication that forces
children to replace ill-formed utterances by well-formed
utterances?
• investigation with questions, negatives and tags
showed that there is no communication pressure
• ill-formed utterances were understood perfectly well,
meaning became clear
Contingent approval
•
the approval or disapproval has no influence on the
syntax, it depends on the truth value of utterances
Conclusion
•
no conscious or systematic teaching of language
•
independent from mechanical skills of the child
•
no communication pressure or contingent approval
Division between First and Second
Language Acquisition:
The ability to acquire a language with the competence
of a native speaker diminishes around puberty due to
1. general inflexibility of the brain caused by fixing of
various functions of parts of the brain
2. hormonal changes during puberty having the same
effect
Language and the mind
Prof. R. Hickey
WS 2007/08
Steffi Dickmans und Hannah Neugebauer
TN
Grundstudium
B.F. Skinner
• American psychologist (1904-1990)
• amongst others he wrote a book on verbal behaviour
in 1957
• his thesis is that external factors such as present
stimulation and reinforcement are crucial for the First
Language Acquisition of a child
B.F. Skinner
• therefore children learn the rules of language by
imitating what they are been presented and taught in
daily life
• Skinner thinks that children learn to produce
grammatically correct sentences because they are
positively reinforced and corrected by parents or other
adults
• the learning of a child’s first language is similar to any
other learned behaviour
Language and the mind
Prof. R. Hickey
WS 2007/08
Language and Experience
Denise Lemke und Monika Ophey
TN
Grundstudium
Introduction
• Importance of Experience  General Information
• Role of experience in language learning
• General Problems from Learning from Observations
• Two Experiments
• Conclusion
Importance of Experience
• To know a language = to know the relations between
sounds and their meanings
•
Relations vary in different languages
- English /si/ means: “gaze with the eyes“
- Spanish /si/ means “Yes“
 Special experience is needed
Role of experience in language
learning
•
Experiment: language learning by blind children
•
the blind seem to confront a world quite different
from our own
•
Blind children have another context for learning
words and sentences than sighted children
•
Question: How much differs the language learning?
General Problems from Learning
from Observations
•
Too many encodings of experience are available
•
False Experiences
•
The problem of abstract meanings
Too many encodings of experience
are available
•
Normally learners are exposed to objects, scenes,
and
events as they listen to the stream of speech
•
Problem: no direct connection between the
“meanings“
and the objects, scenes, and events
• Example: cat on the mat, the mat under the cat, and
the mat and the cat on the floor  same meanings 
difficult for children to understand
False Experiences
• A child is inspecting a scene while the adult is
speaking of something else
 false pairing
• Example: Mother says: “Time for your nap“ while the
child inspects a cat on the mat
The problem of abstract meanings
• Many words have no direct connection with sensoryperceptual experience
•
Example:
- Simple verbs as “get“ or “put“
- Simple nouns as “fun“ or “pet“
- Simple adjectives as “fair“ or “good“
Experiment 1: Does look mean “touch“
to the blind child?
• Setting:
- Kelli and sighted control children were tested in
a familiar room
- Experimenter gives commands and waits for
response
• Subjects:
- Kelli: blind child, 36 months old
- 4 sighted blindfolded control children: 33 to 42
months
• Commands: Look up, Look down, Look behind you,
Look in front of you, Look over here by me, Look over
there by Mommy
Experiment 1: Does look mean “touch“
to the blind child?
• Results:
- Kelli moved her hands to the commanded
directions every time, but never moved her
head
- In contrast each blindfolded child moved the
head in the commanded direction
 For Kelli look means „touch“
Experiment 2: Look is more like
“apprehend“ to the blind child
• Results of Experiment 1 lead to a problem: Is there a
difference between look and touch for Kelli?
•
Further question: Does certain adjectival and
adverbial
modifications of look produce still more distinctive
behaviours?
Experiment 2: Look is more like
“apprehend“ to the blind child
•
Subjects:
- Kelli: 36 months old
- 4 blindfolded sighted children: 33-42 months
•
Commands: “look” or “touch” (using toys)
1. With spatial modifiers: up, behind you, in that,
under, here
2. With intensity modifiers: real hard, gently, real
good
3. With instruments of contact: with your finger,
foot, nose, mouth, ear
Experiment 2: Results of Kelli
• In most cases she distinguished between touch and
look
•
1. With spatial modifiers
- “look behind you”  she searched around in the
are
behind her
- “touch behind you”  she touched her back
•
2. With intensity modifiers
- “look real hard”  she rubbed the object all over
- “touch real hard”  she banged against the object
Experiment 2: Results of Kelli
•
3. With instruments of contact
- “look with your mouth”  she held the object up to
her mouth
- “touch with your mouth”  she pressed her mouth
against the object
touch = “contact”
 look = “explore” or “apprehend”
Experiment 2: Results of the sighted
children
• These children also usually distinguished between
look and touch commands
Touch = “contact”
 Look = “visual”
Conclusion
• Children do not acquire a language just by
experience
and observation
• But Kelli shows that experiences in different contexts
in early infancies lead to different meanings of words
Language and the mind
Prof. R. Hickey
WS 2007/08
The Child’s Learning of English
Morphology
Mouna Ksiksi (TN, Hauptstudium),
Nazgül Songün (TN, Grundstudium)
Aysel Sahan und Günes Yildirim
(LN, Grundstudium)
The Child’s Learning of English
Morphology
• To discover what is learned by children exposed to
English morphology experimenters used nonsense
materials.
• If children do have knowledge of morphological rules
how does this knowledge evolve?
• To test the children’s knowledge they began with an
examination of the actual vocabulary.
The Child’s Learning of English
Morphology
• Tested areas: the plural/ the two possessives of the
noun/ the third person singular of the verb/ the
progressive/ the past tense/ the comparative and
superlative of the adjective
• Children’s vocabulary at the first-grade level contains
a number of words that are made of a free morpheme
and a derivational suffix or of two free morphemes.
• It also contains a number of compound words.
Materials and Procedure
•
The subjects included pre-school children, firstgrade
children and adults.
•
Pictures to represent the nonsense words were
drawn
on cards.
• Subjects were asked to supply the missing word and
the item was noted phonemically.
• After all of the pictures had been shown, the subjects
were asked why they thought the things denoted by the
Examples:
1. Plural
´ This is a wug. Now there is another one.
There are two ……..´
2. Past tense
´ This is a man who knows how to spow. He is
spowing. He did the same thing yesterday.
What did he do yesterday? Yesterday he ……. ´
3. Compound words (e.g. football, airplane)
Results
•
The first question to be answered was whether there
is
a sex difference in the ability to handle English
morphology at this age level.
• There was not a significant difference between the
boys´ and girls´ performance, boys did as well as girls,
or somewhat better, on over half the items, so that
there was no evidence of the usual superiority of girls
in language matters.
Results
• Age differnce
The first graders did significantly better than
preschoolers on slightly less than half of these
•
Formation of the plural
The results of the first-grade children in the plural
tasks were better than the results of the preschool children. The significance level of
difference was 5 percent.
Verb inflexions
• The children were shown a picture of a man how to
*zib and were required to say he was *zibbing. Fully
97% of the first graders answered this question
correctly
= there is just one allomorph of the progressive
morpheme, and the child either knows the –ing form or
not
• The results of the past tense form shows that the
children can handle the /-t/ and /-d/ allomorphs of the
past.
Correct percentage answering: *binged: 78; *glinged:
77. The older group did better than the younger group
on *binged.
Verb inflexions
• All English verbs with the ending –ing are irregular:
50% of the adults said *bang or *bung for the past
tense of *bing. 75% said *glang or *glung for the past
tense of *gling. Only one of the children said *bang and
one said *glang.
• The percentages on *bing and *gling represent a
substantial grasp of the problem of adding
phonologically /-t/ o /-d/.
Verb inflexions
• *spow: several children retained the inflexional /-z/
and said spowzd, others repeated the progressive.
The children had to choose one or the other of the
allomorphs, and the drop to 52% correct represents
this additional complexity.
On *bodded they were 31% right, on rang only 17%
right. The older group was better than the younger
group.
Adjectival inflexion
The child was shown dogs that were incrasingly *quirky
and expected to say that the second is *quirkier than
the first, and that the third was the quirkiest.
Only one child was able to give the right answer.
If the children failed to answer, the experimenter
supplied the form *quirkier, and said “this dog is quirky
This dog is quirkier. And this dog is the …?”
Under this condtions 35% of the children could supply
the –est form.
Derivation and compounding
• They were asked what they would call a man who
*zibbed.
The adults said that a man who *zibs is
a *zibber, using the common agentive pattern –er.
Only 11% of the children said *zibber,
35% gave no answer,
11% said *zibbingman and
5% said *zibman.
The rest of the answers were real words like acrobat or
clown.
Analysis of compound words
• They were asked about some of the compound
words in their own vocabulary. The object of this
questioning was to see if children at this age are aware
of the separate morphemes in compound words.
Analysis of compound words
4 categories:
1. identity: “a blackboard is called a blackboard
because it is a blackboard.”
2. statement of the object’s salient function or feature: “a
blackboard is called a blackboard because you write on
it”
Analysis of compound words
3. the salient feature happens to coincide with part of
the name: “ blackboard is called a blackboard because
it s black.”
4. there is the etymological explanation given by adults,
it takes into account both parts of the word, and is not
necessarily with some functional feature:”Thanksgiving
is called Thanksgiving because the pilgrims gave
thanks.”
Analysis of compound words
• the greatest number of etymological responses (23%)
was given for Thanksgiving, wich is an item wich
children are taught.
• despite this teaching, for 67% of the children
answered: Thanksgiving is called Thanksgiving
because you eat a lots of turkey.
• shows the general nature of the private meanings
children may have about the words in their vocabulary.
Conclusion
The experiment
• In this experiment preschool- and first-grade children
from the age of four to seven years were asked to
supply English plurals, verb tenses, possesives,
derivations and compounds of nonsense words
•
General question: Do children possess
morphological
rules?
Conclusion
> The children knew something more than the
individual words in his vocabulary. They were able to
supply the right morphological items to the new
words.
• They understood the problem of the experiment and
did not want to make any mistakes by giving the
answers
> Children at early age have a good command on
morphological rules.
Conclusion
Sex differences:
• No sex differences in the acquisition of English
morphology
• Boys and girls did equally well
> Every child at young age is in contact with spoken
English and has to grapple with basic morphological
processes.
> This capability does not depend on complex
sentences, it also appears in simple ones.
> Practice with limited vocabulary has the same effect
as practice with extensive vocabulary.
Conclusion
Differences between preschool- and first-grade children
• No child in preschool was able to supply the irregular
past “rang” and a few in the first grade could do
>This difference was significant
•
The answers were not qualitatively different
•
Both groups applied the same morhological rules
Conclusion
Further analysis- Example
• children were able to form the plurals requiring /-s/ or
/-z/ and they did best on the items
• In their vocabularies were also real words that form
their plural in /-әz/
> They did not generalize to form new words in /-әz/.
Conclusion
•
Their rule is to add /-s/ or /-z/.
• To unknown word ends which sound like /s z ž š ĵ/
they did not try to make the plural
> Generally it can be said that the childrens choice of
voiced and voiceless consonants or sibilants lead back
to phonological rules about final sound sequences.
The End
Thanks for your attention!
References
• First Language Acquisition - The Essential Readings
Edited by Barbara C. Lust and Claire Foley
• http://academics.tjhsst.edu/psych/oldPsych/language/
skinner.html