linguistic in class review exam 2

phoneme

is the smallest sound that you can change to differentiate between distinct words in a language.

minimal pair

e.g., bath [bæθ] vs. bat [bæt])

• International Phonetic Alphabet

Articulation and articulatory features

(for consonants and vowels)

phonotactics

constraints on possible sequences of phonemes in a language.

• Phonological rules change underlying to surface representation.

• A → B / C __ D

morphemes

are the smallest units of a language that carry meaning.

structural ambiguity

differences in meaning correlate with different structures

basic word order of English

Subject Verb Object

constituency tests

proform substitution (“the part of an expression you

can replace with a proform/the antecedent for proform in a two-sentence

sequence is a constituent”)

parameters

s encode options made available by UG.

head of phrase

In some languages, heads of phrases occur finally within the phrase (SOV) –

like Japanese (head-final). In others they do not (SVO) – like English.

• This is reflected in the phrase structure rules (“VP → NP V” vs. “VP → V NP”)

compound head parameter

f morphology (e.g. English: right)

• There are universals about phoneme/vowel inventories of languages.

• These need not be included as principles in Universal Grammar (UG).

parents do not teach children language

No negative evidence; corrections are unsystematic (`noisy’); children ignore

correction

• Categorical perception in neonates (universal listener).

early stages

• Reflexive, cooing, vocal play, babbling

• Around 10 months: babbling focuses on sounds of caregivers’ language,

universal listening ability ends

later development stages

 Later development:

• One-word (holophrastic), two-word, vocabulary explosion, telegraphic speech

• Grammar Explosion (MLU 2.25) and overregularization

• Categorizations of learners by Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)

wug test

• By the age of 6-7 children have acquired the regular, productive rule of plural

inflection and apply it to novel words (Rule Learning).

• Experiment showed that at this age children do not acquire the plurals of noun

word by word (Lexical Learning).

• Factors explaining order of acquisition

• Semantic complexity, frequency, salience

• Acquisition of irregular past tense forms

children show U shaped learning curve

in errors with irregular past tense forms.

• First, they learn irregular past forms one by one, then they overregularize, then they

learn exceptions to the regular rule. Both lexical learning and rule learning are

involved.

 The rules of sentence structure include

transformations as well as phrase structure rules

movement transformation

displaces a constituent from one position in a tree to

 Yes/no questions are formed by the

 Subject-Aux Inversion transformation.

(Auxiliary: may, can, will, is, has…)

poverty of the stimulus (PoS) argument

• Concrete example: children have no basis to infer the correct rule for yes-no

questions (i.e., captures adults’ grammaticality judgments) from their Primary

Linguistic Data (PLD) only.

How do children acquire Subject-Aux Inversion (a structure dependent rule)

rather than a rule based only on linear order (Move First Aux)?

• Experiments show that children never even consider the latter rule.

• Universal Grammar guides children to structure dependent rules.