LING3100B - Lecture 1&2: Vocab and L1 Acquisition

Linguistics and why we study it.

Linguistics: Scientific study of language, specifically the structures/rules that govern the use and learning and change over time. Linguistics is descriptive.

Why we should study it: It helps us understand humans, AI. Language is NOT random.

Linguistic Relativity

Language defines the “limits” as to which we can articulate and understand the world. (Benjamin Lee Whorf)

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)

Standardized system of symbols used to represent the sounds of human spoken language.

Language in relation to social life

Language is a mirror of social life, so by learning it we learn about social life. This is because language is based on where you live and your culture.

Neologism

Creation of new words or the creation of a new meaning from an existing word.

Effect of social media on neologism

The proliferation of social media has made it much easier for language to spread and take hold. “skibiddi” and “delulu” were added to the Cambridge dictionary recently. This previously would’ve taken years.

Critical Period Theory

That language gets harder to learn as an adult.

As a child: Language Acquisition, we pick up language extremely fast. This is because children have much higher neuroplasticity.

As an adult (post puberty): Language learning, much harder and slower.

Ferdinand de Saussure (Father of Linguistics)

His theory was that language was not a collection of names for real word objects rather an autonomous, structured system of signs.

Signifier and Signified: A linguistic sign combines two elements. The signified has no natural basis. Words connect concepts purely by social convention and tradition (the concept of a tree uses entirely different sound patterns in different languages)

Relational value: words derive their meaning from contrast with other words. “Dark” only has meaning because it differs from “light”

Phonetics

Study of human speech sounds made and perceived.

Phonology

Study of sound rules in a language

Example: Phoneme is a basic sound unit that changes word meaning. A minimal pair consists of two words with different meanings that differ by only one sound.

• Cat

• Bat

These two form a minimal pair because changing the first sound changes the meaning.

Vowels

Free air flow from lungs, a e I o u

Consonants

Restrict airflow from lungs, p t m f

What makes up the Articulatory system?

Lips, tongue, teeth, oral cavity and nasal cavity.

Aspiration

A strong puff of air that releases with a consonant sound, usually a stop or plosive. When you make sounds like p, t, k your vocal cords stay open for a brief moment as air escapes. This sounds like a tiny h sound added right before the vowel starts.

Morphology

Rules of word structure and formation

Syntax

Rules of sentence structure, a hierarchy.

Ambiguity

One sentence may have two meanings.

Pragmatics

Study how context influences the interpretation of meaning. What someone implies beyond the words they say.

Example: Bob asks Dylan “Do you want to go to the movies?”

Dylan responds: “I have an exam early tomorrow”

Meaning: Semantically Dylan is just stating a fact but pragmatically Dylan implies “no” because the context linked an early exam to needing sleep instead of going.

Sociolinguistics

Study of how social factors and cultural norms shape language use, variation, and change.

TLDR: How/why different people speak differently. Why does the west coast use soda while the south uses Coke for all sodas?

What makes humans unique in terms of language?

We have a unique anatomy built out for the human language that animals cannot replicate. We were basically made to speak the way we do.

Voiced sounds vs Voiceless sounds

Voiced sounds make your vocal cords vibrate, creating a buzzing or humming feel in the throat.

Unvoiced (voiceless) sounds only use breath and air moving through the mouth with no vocal cord vibration.

Lexicon

Mental dictionary in our brain that has all info about words (contextual use, definitions)

Most people think that child language is broken adult language, rather…

They speak by rules that conforms to their lexicon they have acquired so far. They aren’t quite “wrong” or speaking “degraded” English.

Child language progression:

0-2m:

2-4m:

4-9m:

9-18m:

18m - 2.5y:

2.5y - 4y:

Child language progression:

0-2m: cry

2-4m: coo

4-9m: babble

9-18m: one word utterances for objects

18m - 2.5y: two word utterance

2.5y - 4y: SVO telegraphic stage

SVO telegraphic stage (2.5y - 4y)

Phase in child language acquisition where toddlers combine 2 or 3 more words while following the Subject Verb Object (SVO) word oder for their language, but omit grammatical “little words” and inflections.

Called telegraphic because sentences look like old fashioned telegraphs. They retain the high value content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and drop helper verbs.

Example: “I want cookie” (subject-verb-object)

• “Mommy go bye bye”

  • “Doggy eat bone”

What do we have to acquire as children (for language)?

1, 2, 3, 4:

1. Sound systems

2. Words

3. Rules

4. Social Interaction

[What do we have to acquire as children (for language)?']

1. Sound systems

Learning the sounds of your language. Babies don’t begin by knowing which speech sounds matter in their language but early on they’re sensitive to differences among speech sounds including distinctions that aren’t used in the language spoken around them.

Over the first year their perception becomes increasingly tuned to their native language.

Ex: A baby learning English gradually learn that sounds such as p and b distinguish words:

• pat

• bat

They learn the phonological system (which sound differences are meaningful and what patterns of sounds their language permits)

Babbling is important because babies are practicing the coordination required for speech. Over time, their babbling also starts reflecting characteristics of the language(s) they hear. Eventually recognizable words emerge.

[What do we have to acquire as children (for language)?']

2. Words

Child’s problem:

How do I figure out that this particular sequence of sounds refers to that thing?

Suppose adults keep saying dog. The child has to figure out where the word begins and ends and what it means.

Early vocabulary often contains socially important and concrete words: names for caregivers, foods, animals, objects, routines, etc.

But children's early meanings don't necessarily match adult meanings perfectly.

A child may learn dog and then use it for several four-legged animals:

dog → dog
dog → wolf
dog → maybe even a cow

That's overextension: applying a word too broadly.

Underextension: The reverse can also happen. A child might initially think bottle refers only to their particular bottle, rather than bottles generally.

With more exposure, children refine these categories.

The vocabulary starts accelerating

Once children have accumulated some words, vocabulary growth can become quite rapid. Importantly, they're doing more than memorizing a giant list:

sound form ↔ meaning/concept

They're building a lexicon, or mental vocabulary.

And once children start combining words, we get especially interesting evidence about whether they're learning linguistic rules.

[What do we have to acquire as children (for language)?']

3. Rules

Children don't seem to acquire language by simply memorizing every sentence they've heard.

We can see this because they produce forms that adults probably never taught them.

A classic example is:

goed

instead of:

went

At first glance, goed looks like a mistake.

Linguistically, however, it's an extremely interesting mistake.

The child has apparently figured out something like:

verb + -ed = past tense

walk → walked
jump → jumped
play → played

So they apply the pattern to go:

go → goed

The child hasn't failed to learn a rule.

They've learned the rule and applied it too broadly.

This phenomenon is called overregularization.

Eventually, children learn that English has both regular patterns and irregular exceptions:

walk → walked
jump → jumped
go → went
eat → ate

🐦 The Wug Test

Psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason (father of modern linguistics) developed the Wug Test to investigate whether children actually learn morphological rules rather than merely memorizing individual words.

Imagine showing a child a picture of an imaginary creature and saying:

"This is a wug."

Then you show two imaginary creatures:

"Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ____."

Children say:

wugs

Here's why that's such powerful evidence.

The word wug is invented.

The child couldn't previously have heard adults saying wugs. There are no wugs to learn about.

So when the child produces wugs, they are doing something productive:

wug + plural rule → wugs

They're applying knowledge of English morphology to a novel word.

The test can similarly examine other patterns. Give children an invented verb and see whether they can produce an inflected form.

Why the Wug Test matters

It helps distinguish:

memorization

"I've heard the word dogs before."

from productive linguistic knowledge

"I understand something about how English forms plurals, so I can pluralize a word I've never encountered."

That's a fundamental characteristic of human language: productivity.

We can understand and create linguistic forms we've never encountered before.

Children are therefore extracting patterns from their linguistic environment, not merely copying adults.

[What do we have to acquire as children (for language)?']

4. Social Interaction

Knowing sounds, words, and grammatical rules still isn't enough to be a competent speaker.

Imagine someone who knows perfect English grammar but walks up to a stranger and says:

"Give me your phone."

Grammatically? Fine.

Socially? Potentially very weird.

Children therefore also acquire pragmatics: knowledge about how language is used in social situations.

They learn things like:

• how conversations take turns

• how to get someone's attention

• how to make requests

• how much information another person needs

• how tone affects meaning

• how language changes depending on the listener and situation

• how to interpret intentions that aren't explicitly stated

Social interaction also contributes to earlier language learning. When an adult and baby both attend to the same toy, for example, joint attention can help the child work out what an adult's words refer to.

Children also gradually become better at considering another person's perspective.

If I point toward a table and say:

"Can you give me that?"

Understanding me requires more than grammar. You have to infer what that refers to from our shared situation.

That's pragmatic competence.

(How do children acquire language?): A view: B F. Skinner’s Imitation and Reinforcement

Psychologist B. F. Skinner took a behaviorist approach. The basic idea is that children learn language through their environment, much like other behaviors.

Think:

hear language → imitate it → receive reinforcement → repeat successful behavior

For example:

A child says:

“Milk.”

Parent responds:

“Yes! Milk!” and gives them milk.

The successful response reinforces the child's use of the word. Over time, according to this view, imitation, practice, and reinforcement shape increasingly complex language.

So Skinner emphasizes nurture/environment.

The major limitation

Children say things they have never heard adults say.

Remember:

“I goed to the park.”

Parents probably aren't repeatedly saying goed for the child to imitate.

Instead, the child appears to have discovered the regular past-tense pattern:

walk → walked
play → played
jump → jumped

and generalized:

go → goed

The Wug Test creates a similar problem for a pure imitation account. Children can apply grammatical patterns to completely novel words like wug.

So imitation and reinforcement clearly play some role in learning and interaction, but they have difficulty explaining the creative/productive nature of children's language.

(How do children acquire language?): A view: Noam Chomsky’s Universal Innate Language

Rather than children learning language entirely through reinforcement, humans have an innate biological capacity for acquiring language.

In the classic Chomskyan view, children are born with some kind of underlying knowledge or constraints that make human language learnable.

You may encounter the terms Universal Grammar (UG) and, especially in older presentations of the theory, Language Acquisition Device (LAD).

The reasoning goes something like this:

Children receive imperfect and limited linguistic input.
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Yet they acquire an extraordinarily complicated grammatical system.
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They produce and understand sentences they've never heard before.
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Therefore, something beyond simple imitation must be helping them acquire grammar.

This connects to what's called the poverty of the stimulus argument: the linguistic input available to children may not seem sufficient, by itself, to explain all of the grammatical knowledge they eventually develop.

But the innate view has limitations too

The big question becomes:

Exactly what is innate?

Humans clearly have biological capacities that enable language, but that's different from demonstrating that babies possess a detailed, language-specific Universal Grammar.

Modern language-acquisition research therefore includes many approaches beyond a simple Skinner-vs.-Chomsky choice, including theories emphasizing statistical learning, cognition, social interaction, usage, and pattern detection.