Child Language Acquisiton

8/11/2019 Child Language Acquisiton

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Nikhil Vij 07005035

Zibran Shaikh 07D05002

Ashish Paliwal 07D05013

Anurag Sharma 07D05016


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Language is the medium of communication and

mostly manifested in written, oral and manual forms.

Language Acquisitionis the process by whichhumans acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and

use words to understand and communicate.


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Why to learn language acquisition

Long range influences on adult behaviour

Children change rapidly compared to adults.

It encompasses various research fields like

Natural Language Processing Neural networks Psychology

"The direction in which education starts a man will determine hisfuture life."

--Plato (427 BC-347 BC)

"Decisions that are made about what will be accessible to childrenhelp shape the kinds of minds they will come to own."

--Elliott Eisner


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Language learning is doubtless the greatestintellectual feat any of us is ever required to perform

--Leonard Bloomfield


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How is Language Structured

(in the Human Brain)

The basic elements of Language are:

1. Syntax- Set of rules and principles for constructing

sentences2. Semantics-Study of meaning of sentences.

3. Pragmatics-Studies the ways in which contextcontributes to meaning


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Language Elements

Phones - speech sounds (produced)

Phonemes mental representation phones that arecategorized

Syllables - smallest unit of speech perception

Morphemes - smallest unit of meaning


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Stages of language acquisition

There are five basic stages of language acquisition:

CooingBabbling

One-word utterances

Telegraphic speech

Normal speech


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Stages of language acquisition


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Stages of language acquisition (contd.)

Cooing: Appears at about 6 months or so. All infantscoo using all the phonemes from every language. Itcomprises mostly of vowel sounds like aaa, ooo etc.

Babbling: Appears at around 9 months. Infants arestarting to selectively use the phonemes from their

native language. Consonants are also introduced alongwith vowels and he is able to correlate words withobjects or people. It starts using words with repetitivesounds like dada, mama etc.


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One-word utterances: At around 12 months, children startusing words. Starts using fairly complex words. Also canrecognize correct pronunciation of familiar words. The nextstage observed is two word utterance by age of 18 months.

Telegraphic speech: Children start making multi-wordutterances that lack function words i.e. conjunctions &articles. (about 2 years old) for eg. water now

Normal speech: By about 5-6 years of age, children havealmost normal speech with good command over syntax andsemantics. In later stage development of vocabulary and

pragmatics takes place.


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Two-word utterances:

I walking


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Telegraphic Speech:

I drink daddybeer


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Normal Speech:Grandads

happy cos werememberedhis birthday


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Critical QuestionsChildren learn to speak language in an extraordinarilyshort period of time after they are born.

How is it that language is acquired this quickly?

Is the ability to learn language innate, or is it theresult of children being exposed to lots of languageearly on?

One free lunch in the world is to learn anotherlanguage in early childhood.

--Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct


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HISTORY

Platofelt that the word-meaning mapping in someform was innate.

Under Behaviorism, B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior(1957), suggested that the successful use of a sign suchas a word or lexical unit, given a certain stimulus,reinforces its "momentary" or contextual probability.

This behaviorist idea was strongly attacked byNoamChomskyin a review article in 1959 where he arguedfor a more theoretical approach, based on a study of

syntax.


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NATURE

v/s

NURTURE


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NATUREPerception for speech sounds is better than

perception for other sounds.

Congenitally deaf children will learn sign language atabout the rate that normal children learn spokenlanguage, and will progress through roughly the samestages.

Children are not exposed to as rich a variety of speechas they are able to develop.

Parts of the brain seem to be specialized for language

processing.


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NURTURENurture is explained by the Theory of Cognitive

Development.It is a comprehensive theory about thenature and development of human intelligence firstdeveloped byJean Piaget. Also important was Zone ofproximal development, which is a concept developed byVygotsky.

Under Behaviorism, B.F. Skinner proposed that languagewas learnt mainly through the principles of reinforcementand conditioning just like that for any other stimuli.

Skinner suggested that a child imitates the languageof itsparents or carers. Successful attempts are rewardedbecause an adult who recognises a word spoken by a child

will praise the child and/or give it what it is askingfor. Successful utterances are therefore reinforced while

unsuccessful ones are forgotten.


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NURTURESince 1980, linguists studying children, such as

Melissa Bowerman, and psychologists followingPiaget, like Elizabeth BatesandJean Mandler,came to suspect that there may indeed be manylearning processes involved in the acquisition process,

and that ignoring the role of learning may have been amistake.

Language is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift.

-- Frank Smith


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NATURE and NURTURE

Consequently, attempts were made to integrateNature and Nurture.

As kids are exposed to language, they formhypotheses, which are kind of like tentative rules forthe language. As these hypotheses are confirmed ordisconfirmed, they are modified appropriately.


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Thus, it can be

concluded that ChildLanguage Acquisition

is a very fine

interweaving of Natureand Nurture.


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Chomskys Theory

Chomsky was the pioneer as far asformalizingtheprocess of Language Acquisitionis concerned.

Chomsky's generative grammar ignores semantics andlanguage use, focusing on the set of rules that wouldgenerate syntactically correct strings.

What is innate was claimed to be a universalgrammar, initially connected to an organ called thelanguage acquisition device(LAD).


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Chomskys Theory

Chomsky has gradually abandoned the LAD in favourof a parameter-setting model of language acquisition .

Although trained linguists working for decades havenot been able to identify a grammar for any humanlanguage, Chomsky suggested that what was universalacross all languages were a set ofprinciples, that were

modified for each particular language by a set ofparameters.


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Language is a process of free creation; its

laws and principles are fixed, but the mannerin which the principles of generation are usedis free and infinitely varied. Even theinterpretation and use of words involves a

process of free creation-- Avram Noam Chomsky


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Chomskys Theory

Chomsky developed the idea that each sentence in alanguage has two levels of representation a deepstructure and a surface structure.

The deep structure represented the core semanticrelations of a sentence, and was mapped on to thesurface structure via transformations.

Chomsky believed that deep structure was innate andwas Universal to all languages while transformationswere learnt by interaction with Society(Nurture).


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Theory of Cognitive DevelopmentJean Piaget placed acquisition of language within the

context of a childs mental or cognitive development.He argued that a child has to understand a conceptbefore he can acquire particular language form whichexpresses the concept.


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Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor: 0-2yrs experiencing the world through sensesand actions.

Object permanence and Stranger Anxiety

Preoperational: 2-6/7 representing things with words and

images, intuitive thinkingPretend play, Egocentrism

Concrete Operational: 7-11 thinking logically about concreteevents, arithmetic

Conservation, Mathematical TransformationsFormal Operational: 12 adulthood abstract reasoning

abstract logic, mature moral reasoning


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Emergentist Theories

Because of Limitations of Chomskys theory, such as:

1. The theory relies on children being exposed to languagebuttakes no account of the interaction between children and their

carers.2. The concept of a Language Acquisition Device is unsupported

by evolutionary anthropology.

3. The underlying rules as mentioned in Chomskys universalgrammar have not been found despite significant research by

linguistic in that area.This has led proposing of new emergentist theories of Language

Acquisition.


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Emergentist Theories

Proponents of Emergentists language acquisition includingElissa Newport, Richard Aslin, andJenny Saffran, believethat language acquisition is based primarily on general

learning mechanisms, rather than based on innate, language-specific mechanisms completely dependent upon one'sexperience with language or the influence of the environment.


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Competition Model of LanguageAcquisition:

Language learning involves psycholinguistic processes such as cues(including

context, such as word order, morphology, and semantic characteristics), storage,chunking etc.

These cognitive mechanisms control the interpretations in the target languagethat compete in the mind of the learner during acquisition and usage of thelanguage.

The weights of the competing representations are computed and adjusted on thefly based on the learner's experience with the target language. Thus understandingof language improves with experience.

Connectionist models supporting this and other emergentist theories have been

developed proving the validity of the theory.

My work on perspective-taking, competition, and brain mechanisms suggests thatthe most likely account of the origin of language is one grounded on social

mechanisms


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Coalition Government Model ofLanguage Comprehension (contd.)

Three Phases:PHASE 1: Acoustic packaging (integrating different sources ofcoalition of inputs) for later use.

PHASE2: Children begin to use the correlates of prosody,semantics, and even syntactic cues.Marked by rapid growth of lexicon

Associative learning gives way to referral system.

. Language comprehension governed by semantics or pragmatics.Example.

PHASE 3: At the age of around 24 months the reliance on coalitionof inputs fades away.

As children become aware of more complex relations among objectsand people theyll need to discover more ways of communicating.


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AI and Language acquisition

As Leonard Bloom saidLanguage learning is doubtless the greatest intellectual feat

any of us is ever required to perform

The capability to learn First Language is therefore a

challenging requirement and a litmus test for a trulyintelligent system.

Significant amount of research has gone into this area and

several models for learning language have been developedbased on neural networks, computational models, andother connectionist approaches.


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Some of the interesting and most promising work in thisfield has been done by researchers from Institute ofCognitive Science and Technology and Sony.

They developed robots that can evolve their own language,bypassing the limits of imposing human rule-basedcommunication.

Two AIBOs develop their own language by agreeing upon aname when they see and unrecognized object.


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To ensure continuous learning process, the researchersinstilled their robots with a sense of curiosity.

The curiosity system, or metabrain, continually forced theAIBOs to look for new and more challenging tasks, and togive up on activities that did not appear to lead anywhere.


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Another inspiring initiative in this field was taken by BrianMacWhinney and Catherine Snow in the form ofCHILDES(Child Language Data Exchange System), a repositoryfor first language database.

Now merged with TalkBank and also includes the data fromaphasics, second language acquisition, conversation analysis, andclassroom language learning

Since long played a vital role in encouraging study and researchin this field.


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References

MacWhinney, B. (2005) Language evolution and human development. In Bjorklund, D.

& Pellegrini, A. Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and ChildDevelopment (pp. 383-410). New York: Guilford.

MacWhinney, B. (2002) Language emergence. In Burmeister, P., Piske, T., and Rohde,A.(Eds.)An integrated view of language development - Papers in honor of Henning Wode.pp. 17-42. Trier: Wissenshaftliche Verlag

MacWhinney, B. (2007). The TalkBank Project. In Beal, J., Corrigan, K. & Moisl, L.Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Synchronic Databases, Vol.1. Houndmills,Basingstoke, Hampshire, Palgrave-Macmillan.

Luc Steels , Frederic Kaplan (2001)AIBO's first words. The social learning of

language and meaning

Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2006). The emergentist coalition model of wordlearning in children has implications for language in aging.
http://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/emergentism/evoldev.pdfhttp://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/emergentism/emerge.pdfhttp://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/talkbank/tb-palgrave.dochttp://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/talkbank/tb-palgrave.dochttp://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/talkbank/tb-palgrave.dochttp://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/talkbank/tb-palgrave.dochttp://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/talkbank/tb-palgrave.dochttp://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/emergentism/emerge.pdfhttp://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/emergentism/evoldev.pdf


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References

A report on EMERGENTISM by William OGrady published in Cambridge Encyclopedia

of Language Sciences

Theories of Child Language Acquisitionhttp://cobcenglang.homestead.com/CLA/CLA_theories.doc.

Wiki link on Language Acquisition(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition)

Lectures from Timothy Masons Site

(http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/LangTeach/Licence/CM/OldLectures/ )

Lecture notes on Basic Course on Psychology HS 303

Some other resources on internet.
http://cobcenglang.homestead.com/CLA/CLA_theories.dochttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisitionhttp://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/LangTeach/Licence/CM/OldLectures/http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/LangTeach/Licence/CM/OldLectures/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisitionhttp://cobcenglang.homestead.com/CLA/CLA_theories.doc


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Child Language Acquisiton

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