LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Speech Community, Oneword, Metalinguistic Awareness
Wednesday, October 18th, 2017
***REMINDER: Assignment 3 due this Friday
Child language:
• Child language is not a degenerate form of adult language.
• Child language is principled and rule-based.
• But obviously children are not working with the same rules as the adult speakers. • Where
do we get the data?• Diaries kept by parents• Audio and video recordings• Carefully
controlled experiments (also next class)
Comprehension before production
• Kids udestad e he I say, That’s the kitty’s food. It’s ot fo you. • I know she
understands because she waits for me to turn my head before
she puts it her mouth.
• Computational bottleneck• Tacit knowledge of subtle facts that they do not yet control. •
Cannot express all that they know.
Why do children make these errors?
Problem with speech perception?
NO: Children are able to discriminate a phonemic contrast before they are able to produce it.
U-shaped learning trajectory
% Correct
% IncorrectTime è
An example from English
• English has many irregular verbs Present Past
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
eat ate take took sleep slept throw threw bring brought
An example from English
• English has regular verbs too, of course Present Past
walk walked jump jumped hug hugged holler hollered help helped
An example from English
• Children begin showing the past tense on verbs correctly (may be a result of imitation)
% Correct
Eat, Ate
% IncorrectTime è
An example from English
• But then they go through a stage where they apply the general rule to all verbs.
Eat, Eated
An example from English
• Then they may use a hybrid form % Correct
eat, ated
An example from English
• Finally they return to adult-like production. % Correct
% IncorrectTime è
Eat, Ated
An example from English
• The acquisition of morphology provides clear evidence of rule learning. • At first the present
and past tense forms of verbs (eat/ate; play/played)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
are stored as separate unrelated entries.• Then children discover that –ed = past and
overgeneralize.
• bringed, goed, drawed, runned• Eventually they learn which verbs are exceptions.
Wug Test:
• Testing morphological knowledge in an experimental setting
• Tests children on nonsense items
• If they ko the ules, the they ill e ale to apply the to osese ods
• If they just memorize forms then they will not be able to generalize
• • The original wug test involved nouns (and tested plural formation)
• But these tests can be used with other parts of speech as well.
• The idea is to simply use a made up word and then apply the morphology to it.
Nouns è Verbs
• In English we can derive verbs from nouns • ioaeè to ioae• e-ailèto e-
ail
• Children learn this rule and apply it creatively • You have to scale it ...You have to weigh it.
• I
broomed it up ...I swept it up.
• He’s keyig the doo ...He’s ulockig the door.
Newborns
• Newborns are sensitive to contrasts that adult speakers are not sensitive to.
• English baby hears...• papapapa...• papapapapa...babababa
• Japanese baby hears... • lalalala...
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Comprehension before production: kids u(cid:374)de(cid:396)sta(cid:374)d (cid:373)e (cid:449)he(cid:374) i say, (cid:862)that"s the kitty"s food. It"s (cid:374)ot fo(cid:396) you. (cid:863) i know she understands because she waits for me to turn my head before she puts it her mouth: computational bottleneck tacit knowledge of subtle facts that they do not yet control. No: children are able to discriminate a phonemic contrast before they are able to produce it. An example from english: english has many irregular verbs present past eat ate take took sleep slept throw threw bring brought. An example from english: english has regular verbs too, of course present past walk walked jump jumped hug hugged holler hollered help helped. An example from english: children begin showing the past tense on verbs correctly (may be a result of imitation) An example from english: but then they go through a stage where they apply the general rule to all verbs.
