LOT 1: jan06 1 Language Acquisition 1. Elena Lieven, MPI-EVA, Leipzig School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester

LOT 1: jan06 2 Sharing food

LOT 1: jan06 3 M. Who would like a biscuit? C. Jessie D. I would like a biscuit M. Jessie and Dimitra M. Who gave us these? C. Grandma Granddad M.Yes, Grandma and Granddad C. Open it M. Isn’t it a great box? C. Mum have one M. Mummy have one? C. Yeh, Mummy have one M. Can we offer Dimitra one? C. Ya M. You hold the box M. Hold the packet C. Yeh M. And offer Dimitra one M. Say “Would you like a biscuit, Dimitra?” C. And Mummy D. Mmm, very nice C. One for Jessie M. They’re callred fingers, aren’t they, Jess M. Chocolate fingers C. Chocolate fingers

LOT 1: jan06 4

5 Outline of Course 1.What infants bring to language learning 2.Early structure 3.Developing complexity 4.Crosslinguistic issues 5.Comparing theories Theoretical preliminaries Errors and different approaches to explaining them Input and complex syntax Crosscultural issues Unanswered questions MAIN TOPICPOST BREAK

LOT 1: jan06 6 Outline for Session 1 MAIN TOPIC Precursors – Infant perception – Word meaning – Understanding communicative intentions POST BREAK Some theoretical preliminaries - Constructions - Abstraction - What does ‘usage-based’ mean?

LOT 1: jan06 7 What newborn and very young infants can already do  discriminate human speech from other sounds and prefer to listen to it  discriminate their mother’s voice from that of other adult women  discriminate their language from another language  they listen longer to a story that they have heard read in the womb Eimas et al Mehler et al De Casper et al. Infants are using the broad pitch and rhythmic characteristics of the speech to do this

LOT 1: jan06 8 Perceiving phonemic distinctions - differences between the sounds of different languages Both Hindi and English:/ba/vs./da/ 6-8 month-old babies and adults could discriminate. Hindi, not English, easy/Ta/vs./ta/ 6-8 month-old babies could discriminate. Adults could not initially but could after 25 trials of training. Hindi, not English, hard/t h / vs. /d h / 6-8 month-old babies could discriminate. Adults could not, and never learned. Werker et al. Babies can discriminate the sounds of all the world’s languages and adults cannot.

LOT 1: jan06 9 Recognising and remembering words Between 6 and 7.5 months, babies learn to identify familiar words in context At 7.5 months, English-learners can identify words with strong-weak stress patterns but not words with weak-strong patterns. They can identify words with weak-strong patterns by 10.5 months. 8-month old babies listen 10 times over 2 weeks to 3 stories, read by different speakers, in different orders. Two weeks later, they listened longer to lists of words that had occurred frequently in the stories than to lists of words that had not occurred in the stories Jusczyk et al.

LOT 1: jan06 10 Learning that elements are ordered 1. Present babies with strings of elements from an artificial grammar: VOT PEL JIC RUD TAM Gomez & Gerken 2. The artificial grammar has rules as to the order of elements PEL can occur: 1st position 2nd position both 2nd and 3rd not at all JIC can occur:after VOT, PEL or TAM but its position depended on whether VOT or TAM was first 3. The babies listen to the strings following these rules for 2 minutes 4. Test with strings of the same sounds but different rules of combination month-old babies listened longer to new strings from the grammar they had heard before than to strings from the other grammars

LOT 1: jan06 11 Does this mean that babies ‘know’ grammar ‘innately’? Babies are sensitive to the statistical properties of what they hear and these sensitivities are developing before and during infancy. NO ! Younger babies could not do this, though Marcus et al. found that they could do a related but much simpler task at 7 months Older babies (17-months) could do a ‘distance dependency’ task in an artificial grammar: e.g. The boy, who I like, is here today The boys, who I like, are here today

LOT 1: jan06 12 Connecting sound and meaning: processing speech 1. Present babies with two pictures: dolldog 2. Present sentences: Where’s the dolly/doggie? See the dolly/doggie 3. From about 9 months, they look at the right picture BUT it takes them much longer to do this at 12 months than at 24 months Fernald et al.

LOT 1: jan06 13 Infants have a number of perceptual skills which we share with other species They are surrounded from before birth with an environment of human speech They are powerful statistical learners Learning to process speech proceeds by stages in which the child gradually identifies different levels of organisation : prosody  syllables  words Connecting sound to meaning starts in the first year, but takes a ‘quantum leap’ at about 9 months Achieving the perception and production of accurate speech sounds using our specially evolved human speech apparatus is a long task Summary Jusczyk, Kuhl, Werker, Gomez, Gerken, Marcus, Fernald

LOT 1: jan06 14 Learning word meaning Very few words can be learned by simple association Some researchers posit innate constraints that help the child to learn words Others maintain that the child’s developing cognitive skills and understanding of intention is enough

LOT 1: jan06 15 Developing intersubjectivity Pointing to direct the other’s attention Tracking another’s attentional state Respond to the perceived intentions of others

LOT 1: jan06 16 Misunderstanding [Litowski, MPI-EVA]

LOT 1: jan06 17 Uninterested

LOT 1: jan06 18 Intention reading [Warneken MPI-EVA]

LOT 1: jan06 19 Communicating intention Language is first about communication, then about meaning Children have intentions that they want to communicate They understand that others have intentions that they are trying to communicate Children use this to work out mappings between form and meaning

LOT 1: jan06 20 Some theoretical preliminaries Constructions Abstraction What does ‘usage-based’ mean?

LOT 1: jan06 21 Intention reading and preverbal communication Distributional analysis: prosody  phonemes  words Learning to talk Form-meaning mappings Infant cognition

LOT 1: jan06 22 Intention reading and preverbal communication Distributional analysis: prosody  phonemes  words Learning to talk Form-meaning mappings Linguistic universals ? How does this relate to patterns of interaction with infants? How much input is enough? Learning patterns Identifying slots Creating paradigms Abstraction ? How does this relate to the amount and type of language that children hear? Infant cognition

LOT 1: jan06 23 What’s that? [Wassat?] [get adult attention] /[ask for a name] Where’s X? [Where’s] X [ask for location] [Person/Object] Where did X go? [Where] [did] X [go] [ask for location] [marking [entity] [movement/ for time ] not marked for time/person Mapping sounds to meaning

LOT 1: jan06 24 Constructivist views of language acquisition Language acquisition involves the learning of form meaning pairs Simple or Complex (word-sized) (phrase-sized) Concrete or Abstract (phonologically specific) (partially underspecified phonologically) Abstract constructions have the same structure as more specific units and are acquired by generalising over them

LOT 1: jan06 25 Where does X go? [Q-word: [Grounding [Entity] [Process] Location] predication: TAP] LOCATIVE QUESTION CONSTRUCTION Tense Aspect Person: TAP Where does THING play? Where does THING sleep? Where does THING live? Where does THING PROCESS? Where has X gone Where is X going Where do they sleep? [Entity] [Process] [Location] + [Grounding Predication: TAP] INTRANSITIVE LOCATIVE X goes there

LOT 1: jan06 26 Implications for language development Children start by learning concrete expressions Then abstract low-level schemas from them (mappings of form and function) These become: – more complex (more parts) – more abstract (less phonologically-based) Children are making abstractions from before they start talking. What changes with development is the scope of the abstraction.

LOT 1: jan06 27 Abstraction Children abstract from the beginning A concept is an abstraction, so is a word The issue is not whether children abstract but –What do they abstract over? –How specifically linguistic is the nature of the abstraction process?

LOT 1: jan06 28 Usage-based theories Language structure emerges from language use Human communication is biologically underpinned But grammar is the product of historical language change Children learn a structured inventory of constructions from the utterances they hear