April 16, 2001

The readings for this class were:

• Whitney, Chapter 11

The outline for the class is:

1. Announcements
2. Questions
3. prosodic & phonological information
4. function words
5. morphological decomposition
6. sign language intro
7. maturational issues: "Less is More"

Digressions/Miscellaneous

• HandSpeak, online visual language dictionary
• Animated ASL dictionary
• SignWriting
• point-light display from The "Virtual Pigeon" project of Troje and Frost
• Maturational Constraints on Language Learning by Elissa L. Newport, 1990, Cognitive Science, 14:11-28.

Overhead Notes

1. 7 months - prefer interruptions at clause boundaries
   9 months (not 6 months) - at major syntactic boundaries
   	pitch and durational changes are apparent
   11 months (not 9 months) - between words
   
   more generally: at 4.5 months, prefer breaks at musical boundaries
   	rythmic patterns/prosody
   
   manual babbling of deaf children; rythmic repetition 
   

2. open versus closed class words
               function words (markers of syntax)
               # syllables           }
               syllabic complexity   } 91% categorize
               vowel duration        }
   
               function words are late in production
               useful in comprehension
   

3. deaf children acquiring language (ASL)
      impoverished input
      home sign
   
   Give [to her] [imperative]
      handshape
      location
      path
      diagonal motion } morpheme
      tense           } morpheme
   

4. why study ASL?
   1. different modality
      developed independent of English
      it is a natural language (grammar, expressiveness, etc.)
   2. acquired under different circumstances
      a test of critical period hypothesis of Lenneberg?
5. two studies by Newport
   1. L1 - 3 groups, Native v. Early signers v. Late signers
      tests of comprehension and production, looking for correct usage/understanding of morphemes.
      results are that there is a linear decrease in correct grammatical use, correlated to age of immersion in ASL
   2. L2 - age of immersion in English from Chinese/Korean L1 kids later tested at college age.
      test is grammatical/non-grammatical decision of 276 sentences where non-grammaticals violated 1 of 12 rules (tense, agreement, word order, etc.)
      results are linear decrease correlated with age of immersion in L2, with a plateau after puberty
6. explanations: special language facility that degrades/declines/ends over youth at puberty vs. "Less is More" hypothesis suggesting increased cognitive capabilities (with age) make segmentation/categorization more difficult with larger units making uncovering morphemic structures more difficult.

Parting Thoughts

• Read Whitney, Chapter 12
• Read Speech-like cerebral activity in profoundly deaf people processing signed languages: Implications for the neural basis of human language by L. A. Petitto, R. J. Zatorre, K. Gauna, E. J. Nikelski, D. Dostie, and A. C. Evans, 2000, PNAS, 97(25):13961-13966.

Self-test Questions

• Outline the most important evidence for the existence of one or more critical periods in language acquisition. Next, contrast two different interpretations of this evidence. Is it possible to explain the data without appealing to a nativist view of language acquisition?
• Compare the situations faced by a child reared in an environment in which a pidgin is the dominant langauge with the situation faced by a deaf child born to parents who know no sign language. Does either of these situations provide convincing evidence in support of a nativist view of language acquisition? Explain.
• Explain the concept of a double dissociation. What evidence have you learned about that that represents the strongest case for a double dissociation between language and more general cognitive abilities? Justify your answer.
• Studies of children with specific language impairment, Williams syndrome, and Down syndrome have been interpreted as showing a dissociation between language and cognition. WHat are the problems with such a strong interpretation of these data? Give an example of how a more fine grained analysis of the abilities have weakened the support for a strongly nativist view.