Psycholinguistics
First language acquisition
1
A true story
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Like the story of Phineas Gage last week
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We learn something when things go wrong
In groups:
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Most people start to learn language when very
young
Imagine of a situation where this does not
happen
Describe the situation in a short English
paragraph
2
Language acquisition: the critical
period
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Language cannot be effectively learned after brain
lateralization is complete
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Fromkin (Natalie’s book) says that Genie’s story proves
the critical period hypothesis.
Yule makes the opposite claim
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This may be around puberty
Genie had zero exposure to language until she was 13, but she did
acquire some language
She learnt words, but very limited syntax
Dichotic experiments (??) showed that she had no lefthemisphere language facility
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It is possible to use the right hemisphere for restricted language
purposes.
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1L acquisition  learning
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Language is like walking
Reading and writing are like riding a bike,
or swimming
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Many languages have no writing system
Some people never learn to read
Second language is usually taught
4
Nature vs nurture
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B F Skinner wrote Verbal Behavior in 1957
He said that babies are born with a brain which is more or
less empty
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They learn language (and everything else) from the environment
Many of Skinner’s ideas came from experiments with rats
Chomsky wrote a strong criticism to the book in a 1959
article
His argument is often called the Poverty of the Stimulus:
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Language is extremely complex
Children could not learn language without an innate ability
They do not hear enough evidence from adult speakers
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Poverty of the Stimulus (Chomsky’s
argument)
1. There is an infinity of expressions in language
2. It has been proved (by formal logic) that if 1. is
true, children would need negative evidence to
acquire language. Positive evidence is not
enough.
3. Children do not generally get negative evidence
4. Children do acquire language
Therefore: Language is not learned from “evidence”
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The language acquisition device
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New-born kids have a complex, innate LAD (a
system which prepares them for language
acquisition)
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This contains the Principles of language
Children of any race or nationality can learn any
language, through cultural transmission
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They learn the details specific to their own language
from their environment
That is, the Parameters relevant to their language
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Correction and teaching
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Do parents talk to children in a special way?
Does it make any difference?
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Correction and teaching
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Do parents talk to children in a special way?
Does it make any difference?
Neither seems to apply to language acquisition
Various examples in Yule
Caretaker speech (motherese)
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Reduplication (and other baby talk)
Lots of questions
Pretending to be in a conversation (but only really one participant)
Reduced speed
Exaggerated intonation
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Stages of LA: Cooing
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Cooing
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Usually velar consonants and high vowels
[ku], [gi]
Roman Jakobson (1968) claimed sounds were
acquired in order of frequency in all the world’s
languages
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And that the least frequent sounds are the first to be
lost in aphasia
But his views are not widely accepted now
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The next stage: babbling
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This includes various vowels, as well as fricatives,
nasals and even non-pulmonic sounds
Experiments show that babies
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Can distinguish sounds (allophones) which adults
cannot (like [r] and [l] for Japanese speakers
Do not respond to non-linguistic distinctions (eg sex of
speaker)
Later babbling is language-specific
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Sign language babbling in deaf babies (or with deaf
parents)
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Holophrastic stage
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One word utterances appear to represent more
complex structures
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Child sees empty bed, says 姊姊
Overextension
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球球 used to represent an apple, the moon, anything
round
狗狗 means dogs, cats, horses, lions
Daddy to mean any man. Potentially embarrassing for
mothers!
Kids always use the middle member in a hyponymy
relation (dog, not animal or Cocker)
Never use colors in an overextension relation!
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Melissa Bowerman’s findings
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Others had assumed that overextension meant: one shared
feature
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An apple is a “ball” because it’s round
A speck of dirt is a “fly” because it’s tiny
A cat is a “dog”
because it has four legs, or is soft
But Bowerman discovered that “kick” could mean
a)
b)
c)
d)
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Kicking a floor fan (first time; really kicking)
Moving a ball by bumping it with a toy
A moth fluttering over a table
Pushing her tummy against a mirror
Can you explain what Bowerman concluded?
13
Two-word stage
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The famous phrase Mummy sock, uttered by the
daughter of researcher Lois Bloom
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Picking up her mummy’s sock, and
When Mummy was putting baby’s sock on baby
Quite a lot of research has been done on the
syntax of baby language!
Why is it difficult to do this kind of
research?
14
Comprehension exceeds
production
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Babies may not distinguish “mouth” and “mouse”
in their own pronunciation
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Famous example
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But, they can point the two things out in pictures when
they listen
“Silly Daddy, not a guk, a guk!”
But, in experiments, one child pronounced
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Puddle as [pʌgəl]
Puzzle as [pʌdəl]!
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Telegraphic speech
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Andrew want ball
Cat drink milk
This shoe all wet
No inflectional morphology
No determiners
The Chinese equivalents of many of these
utterances are OK
In Bulgarian, the articles (determiners the and a)
are added to the noun as a suffix; they are
acquired earlier than English articles)
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Acquisition of morphology
一.
二.
三.
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I broke it
I breaked it
I broke it
Why is 二 important?
Kids acquiring richly inflected languages (like
Spanish, Italian) typically do so before 2.5
years
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