April 2, 2001

The readings for this class were:

• Whitney, Chapter 10

The outline for the class is:

1. Announcements
   • full text journals online
     (see "New" then "Science Direct")
2. Questions
3. Behaviorist approach
   • Allport - circular reflex theory
   • Skinner - operant conditioning approach
     Classes of Verbal Operants (mand, tact, echoic, textual, intraverbal operant)
4. Auditory and articulatory patterns
   • sound discrimination - raw perceptual ability
   • discriminability declines during 1st year - "perceptual magnet"
   • attention to phonemes and syllabic patterns, prosodic characteristics
   • articulatory changes:
     • birth cry, pain cry, hunger cry, pleasure cry
     • by 3 months, cooing
     • at 6 months, babbling
     • at 6 months, auditory and articulation still decoupled
     • at 9 months, babbling and shape of input language linked
     • by 9 months, auditory and articulation connection begins to emerge
5. First words
   • determine the meaning of these:
     • gyre
     • wabe
     • outgrabe
     • context
     • interpretations
   • search for word meanings guided by
     1. lexical principles
        • words refer to whole objects
        • focus on object names and nominal categories (in appropriate languages)
     2. social support
     3. child-based agendas
     4. overgeneralization and undergeneralization
   • vocabulary growth
     • control over articulatory representations
     • role of syntactic patterns in learning new words (syntactic frames)
     • underlying growth in cognitive capacities
     • Hull & Hull study
6. Syntax
   • at 12 months, holophrases
   • at 15 months, multiple words - multiple stress
   • about 15 - 24 months, multiple words - single stress
   • about 15 - 24 months, telegraphic speech
   • about 24 - 30 months, complex syntax (clauses)
7. Genie (video - "Secret of a Wild Child")

Digressions/Miscellaneous

• Jabberwocky translations
• Jabberwocky links

Overhead Notes

1. operant notations
2. dabigogatanagotidabigo

Parting Thoughts

• Read Whitney, Chapter 11
• Examination #2 is next week

Self-test Questions

• Describe the gavagai problem and its connection to the problem of explaining lexical development. In what sense is the problem compounded by the lack of negative evidence in language acquisition?
• Describe how a specific experiment could be designed to determine if ten-month-old infants have lost the ability to recognize speech contrasts that they could perceive at six months of age.
• Compare and contrast parameter-setting and processing-load explanations for the tendency to omit subjects in telegraphic speech.
• Compare and contrast prosodic bootstrapping, syntactic bootstrapping, and semantic bootstrapping. Could all of these be used by the same child during language acquisition? Explain.
• Contrast explanations for overregularization that have innate components (like Pinker) versus those without innate components (like connectionist approaches).
• Describe how the HAS procedure has been used to show that infants lose the ability to distinguish among some sounds that they were able to discriminate shortly after birth.
• As children move from holophrases to telegraphic speech, to what extent is their vocabulary size also increasing? How might changes in syntactic ability be related to both increases in the mean length of utterance and the size of a child's vocabulary?
• What regularities in language acquisition can you identify? Since language acquisition can be investigated at a number of different levels, be sure to consider regularities at all levels. Are regularities at any one level of use in learning about language at another level? How?