Chap 12. Process of
Language Acquisition
2008. 11. 27
김민경
Main Points

How Language is acquired?

Linguistic Environment


Cognitive Processes


Gross environmental neglect (feral & isolated children)
Retard language acquisition
Cognitive process are correlated with language development
Innate Mechanisms

Children given poor linguistic input  Create communication
systems similar to early child language
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The Linguistic Environment



Feral and Isolated Children
The Critical Period Hypothesis
Motherese
Feral and Isolated Children (1/3)

Feral children

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
Grown up in the wild
Ex) Victor case
Isolated children


Grown up with extremely limited human contact
Ex) Genie case
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Feral Children - Victor (2/3)

Found in the woods of France in 1797, was captured as a
naked 12 (or 13)-year-old boy

No speech (normal hearing, utterance of some sounds)

Itard (physician) tried to train him to be socialized and to
use language for 5 years

In general, Victor’s language progress was poor



Able to comprehend language, but practically unable to produce it
The only 2 pronounced words: “milk”, “oh my god”
The majority of his communication consisted of grunts and howls
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Isolated Children - Genie (3/3)

Rescued in 1970, at the age of 13 in California, she could not stand erect and
was unable to speak except 2 words: “Stopit”, “Nomore”

Very little exposure to language during her imprisonment



From the age of 20 months, lived in nearly total isolation and was attached to a potty
by a special harness for most of the day
Her father did not speak to her but communicated through barking
By a program of language remediation


1970: one-word utterances, ex) “No. No. Cat” [13 y.]
1971: her language resembled that of a normal 18-20 months old child





Distinction between plural and singular nouns
Tow-word utterances, ex) “Want milk”, “Big teeth” [14 y.]
No vocabulary explosion after 18-20 months
Incapable to produce questions (Ex. “I where is graham cracker on the top shelf?”)
Semantic development: rapid & extensive, Syntactic development: slow


Ex) I like hear music ice cream truck (Curtiss, 1981) : Little grammatical structure
Ex) Think about Mama love Genie (Curtiss, 1981)
 Cognitive development in advance of language development
-6-
The Linguistic Environment



Feral and Isolated Children
The Critical Period Hypothesis
Motherese
The Critical Period Hypothesis
(1/5)

There is a period early in life in which we are
especially prepared to acquire a language

There are neurological changes in the brain
that leave a learner less able to acquire a
language

Most commonly, these changes are assumed to
occur near puberty
-8-
The Critical Period Hypothesis
(2/5)

Johnson and Newport (1989)



Examined Korean and Chinese who had immigrated to
the US at various ages between 3 and 39 years of age
Grammatical Test (Figure 12.1)
Correlated age of arrival and scores on the test above


Strong negative correlation ( r=-.87): arrived (0 ~ 16)
No correlation: arrived (16 ~ 40)
 Concluded that fundamentally different processes are
involved in younger versus older learners
-9-
The Critical Period Hypothesis
(3/5)
[Figure 12.1]
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The Critical Period Hypothesis
(4/5)

Criticism

Bialystok and Hakuta (1994)


Simply moved the boundary between the younger and older groups from
16 to 20 years and found significant negative correlations for each group
Hakuta, Bialystok and Wiley (2003)

1990 US Census from 2.3 million immigrants with Spanish and Chinese
language backgrounds

Self-reported language proficiency


“not at all”, “not well”, “well”, “very well”, “speak only English”
No sharp breaks before and after 15 years of age (gradual decline)
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The Critical Period Hypothesis
(5/5)

Criticism

Snow and Hoefnagel-Hohle (1978)






Tested all English-speaking family embers who moved to Holland for one
year and were learning Dutch
Adolescents did best > adults > children
Old learner seemed to do better initially but they reach a plateau;
younger learners eventually catch up and pass them
The evidence from second-language acquisition research has not
provided unequivocal evidence for the critical period hypothesis
Young children generally learn L2 better than older children and
adults, at least in the long run
Younger and older learners differ in cognitive development and may
bring somewhat different cognitive strategies on the task of L2
acquisition
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The Linguistic Environment



Feral and Isolated Children
The Critical Period Hypothesis
Motherese
Motherese (1/4)

The ways adults speak to young children
(Adult-to-Child Language) : see Table 12.1

In general, speech to children learning language is
shorter, more concrete, more directive, and more
intonationally exaggerated than adult-directed speech

Such properties would assist children in their language
development but data on this question are relatively
scarce, and widely different opinions exist on the matter
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Motherese (2/4)

Motherese Hypothesis


There is a relationship between the speech adjustments
adult make and children’s language development
Strong form of the motherese hypothesis


Weak form of the motherese hypothesis


Motherese features are necessary for language to develop
properly; absence of features  child’s language difficulty
Motherese features assist a child’s development
(1) Correlational Approach & (2) Experimental Approach
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Motherese (3/4)

(1) Correlational studies

Newport & Gleitman, 1977

Limited relationships between parental speech and
child language. Mothers who used more yes/no
questions had children who used more auxiliaries
but most aspects of child language were unrelated
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Motherese (4/4)

(2) Experimental studies



Nelson, Carskaddon, Bonvillian,1973
Language development can be facilitated if children are presented
with new syntactic information related to the child’s previous
sentence.
(1) Recast-sentence group

Received new sentences related to the child’s sentence



(2) New-sentence group



Child: Allgone truck
Experimenter: Yes, the truck is all gone
Received relatively short, grammatical sentences that excluded the
content words of the child’s previous utterance
(3) Control group (received no special treatment)
Recast-sentence group (>> Control, > New-sentence)
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Cognitive Processes




Operating Principles
Sensorimotor Schemata
Cognitive Constraints
Impairments of Language & Cognition
Operating Principles

Children’s preferred ways of taking in information
Table 12.2, p335)

Useful in explaining certain patterns in early child
grammar



(See
Children use fixed word order to create meanings. (C)
Children often overregularize grammatical morpheme. (F)
Useful in understanding children’s acquisition of complex
sentences

First attempting to form negatives and questions, children often
simply place the negative or question marker at the front of a
simple declarative sentence (D)
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Cognitive Processes




Operating Principles
Sensorimotor Schemata
Cognitive Constraints
Impairments of Language & Cognition
Sensorimotor Schemata (1/2)

Cognitive development – Piaget


Believed that intelligence was not random, but was a
set of organized cognitive structures that the infant
actively constructed through the adaptation to the
environment
Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor period of development (0~2 y.)


Child use body and senses: banging, sucking, throwing
Acquisition of object permanence (near end of S.P.)

Notion that objects continue to exist even when they cannot
be perceived
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Sensorimotor Schemata (2/2)

Cognitive development & Child’s language development
(two predictions)

Very young infant (not acquired object permanence)

Should use words referring to concrete objects


Infants (mastered object permanence)

Should begin to use words referring to objects or events that are
not immediately present



Large number of “here and now” words
Ex) allgone truck, more milk
Specific language and cognitive achievements occur with very
short time lags or nearly simultaneously
Little support for the notion that cognition predates language by
a significant period of time
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Cognitive Processes




Operating Principles
Sensorimotor Schemata
Cognitive Constraints
Impairments of Language & Cognition
Cognitive Constraints (1/2)

Adult-to-Child language (a simplified and orderly
pattern of data) is sufficient for normal language
acquisition?



It seems unlikely that children explore every possible
meaning of a given word from adults
Child may have certain expectations about word
learning (Cognitive Constraint)
Three Possible Constraints



Whole object bias
A taxonomic bias
Mutual exclusivity bias
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Cognitive Constraints (2/2)

Whole object bias

When children encounter a new label, they prefer to attach the label to
the entire object rather than to part of the object


A taxonomic bias

Children will assume that the object label is a taxonomic category
rather than a name for a individual dog


Ex) dog (a label for the entire object rather than dog’s tail)
Ex) dog is a label for a group of animals not just Fido
Mutual exclusivity bias

It refers to the fact that a child who knows the name of a particular
object will then generally reject applying a second name to that object

Ex) Show me the X (X was a nonsense syllable)  much more likely to
select the novel object
 Children have some clear biases or preferences in learning new
words
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Cognitive Processes




Operating Principles
Sensorimotor Schemata
Cognitive Constraints
Impairments of Language & Cognition
Impairments of Language and
Cognition (1/3)



The notion that a close relationship exists between
language and cognition has generally been supported by
studies of individuals with Down syndrome
These individuals tend to have language delays that are
proportionate to the severity of their cognitive disability
However, in certain individuals, there can be significant
discrepancies between the level of cognitive functioning
and the level of linguistic functioning



Genie
Williams Syndrome
Chatterbox syndrome
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Impairments of Language and
Cognition (2/3)

Genie

Advanced cognitive skills relative to linguistic skills

Grammatically rudimentary but semantically more advanced




Adult: Why aren’t you singing?
Genie: Very sad
Adult: Why are you feeling sad?
Gene: Lisa sick
 This would provide evidence against the thesis that
cognition is sufficient for language
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Impairments of Language and
Cognition (3/3)

William Syndrome



Elfinlike facial appearance, mental retardation, cardiac defects
Despite their cognitive impairment, syntactic skills were found to
be largely intact
Chatterbox Syndrome

Significant cognitive impairments & unexpected language
abilities
 If normal cognitive development is necessary for normal
language development, it should not happen at all
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Innate Mechanisms



The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis
Parameter Setting
The Issue of Negative Evidence
The Language Bioprogram
Hypothesis (1/3)

Language Bioprogram - Bickerton (1983, 1984)


Children have an innate grammar that, in the
absence of proper environmental input, serves as the
child’s language system  a linguistic backup
system
Related studies



Case 1: Pidgins and Creoles (Bickerton)
Case 2: Studies of language development in
congenitally deaf children (Golden-Meadow)
Case 3: Sign language in Nicaragua
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The Language Bioprogram
Hypothesis (2/3)

Case 1: Pidgins & Creoles (refer to Table 12.3)

Pidgin: an auxiliary language that arises when speakers of several mutually
unintelligible languages are in close contact (Bickrton, 1984)



Creole: when the children of these immigrants acquire a pidgin as their native
language



Ex) Immigrant workers come to speak a simpler form of the dominant language of the
area-just enough to get by
No recognizable syntax, often one word order, no complex sentence
Relatively sophisticated, complex sentences
Unlike pidgins, the creoles resembled the structural rules of other languages
Case 2: Congenitally deaf children





Children (13 months ~ 4 years), every 2-4 months, for 1.5 years
None of these children were exposed to conventional sign language
Nevertheless, the children invented a form of gestural language (Homesign)
similar to the language of children with normal hearing
One-sign utterances appeared (18 months), followed by 2-3 sign utterances
When linguistic input is minimal, deaf children may create a gestural language
similar to normal children’s language
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The Language Bioprogram
Hypothesis (3/3)


Bioprogram might operate in the absence of ordinary
linguistic stimulation
What happen given appropriate linguistic input?



Bioprogram is suppressed and children learn the native
language
Children use “Preemption Principle”; If you hear people using a
form different from the one you are using, and do not hear
anyone using your form, abandon yours and use theirs”
Cognitive processes associated with language use are
not general purpose problem-solving processes but are
instead restricted to language
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Innate Mechanisms



The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis
Parameter Setting
The Issue of Negative Evidence
Parameter Setting (1/4)

Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1981)

Grammar  a set of parameters corresponding to each of the
subsystems of the language
(Each parameter has a finite number of possible settings)

Various combinations of parameter settings  all of the
languages of the world

Children are born with the knowledge of the parameters and
their possible settings

Language Acquisition  identifying which parameter settings
apply to one’s native language
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Parameter Setting (2/4)

Head Parameter (Cook, 1988)



Each phrase in the language has one essential element called
head
Noun in noun phrases, verb in verb phrases
The head parameter specifies the position of the head within the
phrase

English – a head first language





The man with the bow tie
Liked him
Nice to see
To the bank
Japanese – a head last language

Watashi wa nihongin desu (I Japanese am)
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Parameter Setting (3/4)

Null-Subject Parameter (Hyams, 1986)

Italian, Spanish – grammatically acceptable

English – not permitted

Children are born with this parameter set to the null-subject
value (default value)

Ex) Play it

Ex) Eating cereal

Ex) Shake hands

Ex) See window
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Parameter Setting (4/4)

Subset Principle (Berwick and Weinberg, 1984)

Children begin to search through possible languages by
beginning with the smallest subset available (that is, the
most restrictive language). If there is no evidence from their
linguistic input that this is their native language, they proceed
to the next largest subset until they find a match
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Innate Mechanisms



The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis
Parameter Setting
The Issue of Negative Evidence
The Issue of Negative Evidence

Positive Evidence


Negative Evidence


Evidence that a particular utterance is grammatical in the language that
the child is learning
Evidence that a particular utterance is ungrammatical
Pinker (1990)



It would be very difficult to acquire a language from positive evidence
alone
Negative evidence, which could constrain the problem space, is not
generally available
Therefore, some constraints must be innate
 Although negative evidence is present and may assist language
development, research has not shown that it is necessary
 Justification for innate mechanisms
- 40 -
Summary

Three classes of variables are needed for a
complete account of language acquisition

Linguistic Environment


Cognitive Processes


Gross environmental neglect (feral & isolated children)
Retard language acquisition
Cognitive process are correlated with language development
Innate Mechanisms

Children given poor linguistic input  Create communication
systems similar to early child language
- 41 -