Language foundations

nature

any innate capacities and structures children are born with

nurture

what people gain from experience

argument against language as operant conditioning

• poverty of stimulus - input not enough to explain how kids learn complex rules

• speed and universality - all kids learn all kinds of language quickly and easily = innate languafe acquisition

• creative/productive use of language

kanzi

bonobo trained from yonug age to communicate using lexigram system

• symbolic communication

• some grammatical constructions

• consistent word order (syntax)

• understood novel sentences

limitations of Kanzi

• no function words (the, is)

• limited morphology

• short sentence length

• no complex syntax

what does kanzi tell us

animals have some qualitative aspects of language but humans have vast quantitative advantage in complexity and productivity = language development strongly influenced by social interaction and communication with others

brain regions for language

• brocas in left inferior frontal gyrus = speech production - adjacent to part of motor control area for jaws, lips and tongue

• wernickes in left superior temporal gyrus - comprehension - adjacent to primary auditory area that receives linguistic input

unique to humans

broac’s aphasia

slow poor and ungrammatical speech but can understand language

wernicke’s area

fluent speech that lacks sense

logical problem of language acquisition

children make and understand infinite sentences they never hear before = innate capacity for acquisition

• rules for forming sentences are non-obvious - how do we learn them?

feedback/negative evidence

1 answer for logical problem - we try saying things and told when we are wrong

• but children don’t usually have grammer corrected

universal gramemr

humans born with innate capacity for language with set of underlying gramamtical rules common to all language = children able to learn natural grammer with limited input

linguistic universals

Greenburg compared syntax of 30 languages on 5 continents and found 45 universals

• absolute - no language forms questions by reversing word order

• general - all languages make certain distinctions (noun-verb) and all have vowels and consonants

• stats - subjects precede objects

• implicational - if language has X will have Y

large language models

deep network capable of predicting long units of text trained on enormous amounts of data

• context-aware representations

• creative language generation

driving forces of language acquisition

input, social interaction and variation

less-is-more principle

limited cognitive resources incl working memory might actually help children acquire language

child-directed speech

way caregivers speak to infants

• phonology - slower, exaggerated intonation, higher and wider pitch

• vocab - concrete words, stuff that interests kids

• morphology/syntax - simplify forms, incomplete sentences but mostly syntactically correct