The Acquisition of
Word Structure, Collocations,
Word-class, and Meaning
Based mainly on:
Clark, E. (1995). The lexicon in acquisition
Ellis, Nick. chap. 2.2, in Vocabulary
description, acquisition and pedagogy
Sequencing
(Ellis, 2004)
• Language is sequential.
• Language is patterned.
• Some sequences/patterns are more
likely to appear, that is more
predictable, than others.
– “the” vs. “thx”
– “the dog” vs. “book dog”
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Language:Logic vs. Probability
(Ellis, 2004)
• Logic-based
– Rule-governed
– Open system
• Probability-based
– Habitual
– Idiomatic
– Collocated, patterned
– Closed system
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Word Groups / Phrases (E. Clark, 1995)
•
Words may be combined as idioms, where the meanings of the parts do not
add up to the meaning of the whole.
–
–
–
–
–
to belt up,
to be in a flap,
to hit the sack,
to keep tabs on,
to blow one's own trumpet.
Idioms like these are typically restricted in syntax, so some, for instance, may
not appear in the passive (compare He blew his own trumpet vs. *His own
trumpet was blown by himself).
•
Words may be combined in short phrases that act as if they were single words.
–
–
–
–
by and large,
in short,
happy go lucky,
once upon a time.
These forms are fixed: their word order is frozen, and many are used only in
restricted contexts. Once upon a time, for example, serves to introduce fairy
tales and rarely occurs outside that context.
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Word Groups / Phrases (E. Clark, 1995)
• Words can combine, following the syntactic rules of a language,
to form an indefinite number of noun phrases (e.g., the lone
skier, a red fox, three children) and verb phrases (e.g., raced
down the hill, crossed the road, climbed over the gate) in each
language.
• Words, fixed phrases, and idioms, then, all contribute to the
construction of clauses (e.g., Justin changed gear, Rod plotted
the data, Sophie is practicing her flute).
• Speakers build their utterances (both clauses and
combinations of clauses) from words, fixed phrases, and
idioms. And these are also the lexical units identified by
listeners as they parse and interpret utterances heard from
others.
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Word Structure & Meaning
(E. Clark, 1995)
•
Lexical items "clothe" syntactic structure. They are what exemplify a
relative clause (Duncan pointed at the man who was running), an
adverbial clause (Duncan went outside when he heard the car, or a
verb complement (They wanted to climb the hill).
•
Without words, there is no way for the syntax of a language to be
realized. Equally, without words, there is no way to exemplify the
phonological system or the morphology of language, in inflections
(e.g., in jump-s, race-d, wait-ing, know-n; cup-s, toy-s, cat-'s),
derivations (e.g., watch -er, violin-ist, construct-ion, silver-y, green-ish,
palm -ate), or compound words (e.g., snow-plough, key-hole, piledriver, writing desk).
•
In using language, children reveal what they know about it. And when
children start to talk, they start with words--word forms and word
meanings.
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Word Structure, Meaning, & Word Class
(E. Clark, 1995)
• Lexical and syntactic development go hand in hand.
• Children learn the syntactic forms that go with
specific lexical items, and gradually accumulate sets
of words that can act the same way syntactically.
• It is unclear when (or whether) young children learn
rules of syntax, but there is growing evidence that
they learn syntactic properties specific to individual
lexical items. As they learn more lexical items, they
become more likely to act consistently in the
syntactic patterns they produce. (Whether this
consistency is best described in terms of rules or
strategies remains an open question.)
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Lexical/Vocabulary Acquisition
(E. Clark, 1995)
• Children build up a vocabulary (isolating
forms from the stream of speech,
constructing hypotheses about possible
meanings, and mapping those meanings
onto forms).
• Children must also elaborate semantic fields,
linking words whose meanings are related;
analyze word structures, so they are able to
identify stems and affixes and their relative
contributions to meaning; and coin new
words to express meanings where they lack
the relevant conventional forms.
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Lexical/Vocabulary Acquisition
(E. Clark, 1995)
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Lexical/Vocabulary Acquisition
(E. Clark, 1995)
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Chunking
(Ellis, 2004)
Newell (1990, p.7):
• “A chuck is a unit of memory organisation,
formed by bringing together a set of already
formed chunks in memory and welding them
together into a larger unit. Chunking implied
the ability to build up such structures
recursively, thus leading to a hierarchical
organisation of memory. Chunking appears
to be a ubiquitous feature of human memory.
Conceivably, it could form the basis ofr an
equally ubiquitous law of practice.”
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Memory
• Short Term Memory (STM)
• Long Term Memory (LTM)
• STM  LTM
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Language Chunks
(Ellis, 2004)
• Smaller, lower level (sublexical) chunks
appear more frequently than larger,
higher-level (lexical) chunks.
• Sublexical > lexical > supralexical
• th > the
• the / ir > their
• their > their home
• their home > their home in Tainan
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Chunks
(Ellis, 2004)
• Various terms for chunks:
– lexical phrase, holophrase, prefabricated
routines and patterns, formulaic speech,
memorized sentences and lexicalised stem,
lexical chunk, formula
• Examples:
– Excuse me.
– How do you do?
– I have a headache.
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Speaking natively? (Ellis, 2004)
•
•
•
•
“I wished to be wedded to you.”
“Your marrying me is desired by me.”
“My becoming your spouse is what I want.”
“I want to marry you.”
• “Speaking natively is speaking idiomatically
using frequent and familiar collocations, and
the job of the language learner is to learn
these familiar word sequences.” (Nick Ellis,
p.129)
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Language acquisition
(Ellis, 2004)
• “An important index of native-like
competence is that the learner uses
idioms fluently. So language learning
involves learning sequences of words
(frequent collocations, phrases, and
idioms) was well as sequences within
words.” (Nick Ellis, p.130).
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Computational model of English
word-class acquisition (Ellis, p.131)
• A computer with an input of 15,000word corpus from mother-baby talks.
• A associative learning program which
establishes links between words and
their contexts (immediate successor).
• A classification learning program which
classifies words with similar leftcontext.
• The computer generated clusters of
words which seemed to be based wordclass.
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Computational model of English
word-class acquisition (Ellis, p.131)
Computer generated clusters of words:
• Noun-like words: hen, sheep, pig,
farmer, cow, house, horse
• Verb-like words: can, are, do, think, see
• Adjective-like words: little, big, nice
• pronoun-like words: this, he, that, it,
you, I
• Article-like words: a, the
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Human implicit learning of
artificial grammar (Ellis, 2004, p.131)
• Human subjects in the experiments
with the artificial language (and
grammar) are able to make judgments
at significantly better than chance
levels without being able to articulate
detailed information about what the
rules governing the letter strings are, or
which one they were using in guiding
their decisions.
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Acquisition of language form
(Ellis, 2004, p.132)
• Input  phonological memory  analysis of
language data acquisition of
–
–
–
–
–
phonotactic patterns,
word form,
formulas, phrases and idioms,
word collocation information,
grammatical word-class information
• Acquisition can be speeded by making the
underlying patterns more salient as a result
of explicit instruction or consciousness
raising.
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Memory and language
acquisition
(Ellis, 2004, p.133)
• STM is a reliable predictor of long-term
acquisition of L1 vocabulary and
syntax.
• Phonological STM is a reliable
predictor of later vocabulary
acquisition in both L1 and L2.
• Dyslexic children with verbal STM
deficiency have poor syntactic
development in both L1 and L2.
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L2 Vocabulary acquisition
(Ijaz, 1986, cited in Ellis, 2004, p.134)
• “…the second language learners essentially
relied on a semantic equivalence hypothesis.
This hypothesis facilitates the acquisition of
lexical meanings in the L2 in that it reduces it
to the relabelling of concepts already learned
in the L1. It confounds and complicates
vocabulary acquisition in the L2 by ignoring
crosslinguistic differences in conceptual
classification and differences in the semantic
boundaries of seemingly corresponding
words in the L1 and L2.” (p.443 in Ijaz, 1986)
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Reading & Vocabulary
acquisition
(Sternberg, 1987, cited in Ellis, 2004, p.134)
• People who read more know more
vocabulary.
• Moderate-to-low-frequency words
differentiate individuals of high vocabulary
size from those of low vocabulary size.
These words are more likely to appear in
print than in speech.
• In reading, the reader has opportunities to
study the context, to analyze the forms and
meanings of the fixed words on the page.
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Strategies in learning word meaning
(Sternberg, 1987, cited in Ellis, 2004, p.135)
• Selective encoding: Separating relevant
from irrelevant information for the
purposes of formulating a definition.
• Selective combination: Combining
relevant cues into a workable definition.
• Selective comparison: relating new
information to old information already
stored in LTM.
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Cues and variables in word learning
(Sternberg, 1987, cited in Ellis, 2004, p.135)
• The number of occurrences of the unknown
word.
• The variability of contexts in which multiple
occurrences of the unknown word appear.
• The importance of the unknown word to
understanding the text.
• the helpfulness of the surrounding context in
understanding the meaning of the unknown
word.
• The density of unknown words in the text.
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Mnemonic strategies in word
learning (Sternberg, 1987, cited in Ellis, 2004, p.136)
• Learning the meanings of words is a
conscious process.
• Imagery > Sentence generation >
Sentence reading > Repetition
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Mnemonic strategies in word
learning (Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986, cited in Ellis, 2004, p.138)
• Vocab. instruction is a useful adjunct to
natural learning from context.
• Learning both the definition and use (context)
were more effective.
• Several exposures were more beneficial for
drill-and-practice methods.
• Keyword methods were more effective than
others.
• Learning multiple aspects of a word was
more helpful for future understanding of
texts using those words in context.
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