10 (143) Syntactic Wrap-Up, Pragmatic Development, and Bilingual Language Acquisition
Phrase Structure Grammar and Innateness Theories
Foundations of Grammar: Previous lessons established phrase structure grammar focusing on rules such as: 1. 2. 3.
Lexicon and Properties: The lexicon represents parts of speech (e.g., Determiners like "a, the"; Nouns like "boy, dog"; Verbs like "chase, eat"). This framework explains productivity, recursion, and ambiguity.
Chomsky’s Principles and Parameters Theory: * Syntactic categories and rules are considered universal or innate. * Variation occurs according to specific parameters, such as the "Head-first" vs. "Head-last" parameter. * Examples: English is a head-first language, whereas Japanese is a head-last language.
Nativist vs. Constructivist Theories of Syntactic Development
Theoretical Comparison: * Constructivists: Argue that children initially only possess concrete, item-specific knowledge, referred to as "verb islands." For example, a child might learn specific frames like or . * Nativists: Posit that children’s knowledge is abstract from the start. They use general roles such as (e.g., "She hugged him," "She kicked him").
"Smart" Distributional Learning: * A domain-general mechanism tracks the morphological properties of individual words. * When a set of words shares mutually predictive properties, a category (like Noun or Verb) is formed. * Innate semantic-syntactic linking rules help pair meanings with categories (e.g., Animate/Object = Noun, Action = Verb).
Generalization Performance: * Children sometimes show productivity by generalizing beyond what they hear (e.g., overregularization). * Errors like "She falled me down" or "Don’t giggle me" typically do not appear before age , raising questions about whether abstract knowledge exists before that age.
Conservativity and Abstract Knowledge in Sentence Comprehension
Child Conservativity: Young children are often conservative in producing new verbs. In a test using a novel verb "tamming" (e.g., "The sock is tamming"), most children under will not use the verb in a new syntactic structure (like the transitive "The dog is tamming the car").
Explanations for Conservativity: * It may not indicate an absence of abstract knowledge. * Not all verbs fit all constructions (e.g., "The ball rolled"/"He rolled the ball" works, but "The ball fell"/"He fell the ball" does not). Verbs are difficult to learn; children might be unsure of the verb’s specific kind or meaning.
Gertner, Fisher, and Eisengart (2006) Study: * Abstract: The study probed whether and have abstract word-order knowledge. * Methodology: Using a novel-verb test phase, children heard transitive sentences like "The duck is gorping the bunny!" * Results: Children looked longer at the screen where the subject corresponded to the causal agent. Even with small verb vocabularies showed these effects, suggesting they represent experience in terms of an abstract mental vocabulary from the start.
Pragmatic Development and Communicative Competence
Communicative Competence: Meaning in conversation often extends beyond literal word meanings, depending on context and communication dynamics. For instance, "The dog chased the cat" means different things following "What happened?" versus "Do you like me?"
Shwe & Markman (1997) Study: * Goal: Determine if children speak to communicate or only to achieve goals. * Method: An experimenter would either understand/misunderstand the child's request for a toy (giving the correct or incorrect object). * Results: (and ) repeated labels more often when misunderstood, even if they received the correct object (the goal was achieved but the communication failed).
Egocentrism vs. Perspective Taking: * Piaget’s View: Children under are egocentric and cannot take another’s perspective because they lack certain mental operations. * Evidence for Egocentrism: Children at age may introduce entities without context (e.g., "Starman is going to come to our house") or use pronouns/definite determiners without clear referents. * Referential Communication Task (Krauss & Glucksberg, 1967): Children (kindergarten age) used egocentric descriptions (e.g., "Pick up the one like Daddy’s shirt"), whereas adults used descriptive, reduced labels (e.g., "The hourglass").
Adaptive Communication and Common Ground
Preschooler Adaptations: Preschoolers do show some adaptation, such as giving more detail to someone who was absent or using "baby talk" with younger children ().
Nadig & Sedivy (2002) - Perspective Taking: * Conditions: Common Ground (both see two glasses), Privileged Ground (one glass hidden from speaker), and Baseline (only one glass present). * Findings: Children () used common ground information within the first to rule out referents the speaker could not see.
Gricean Maxims and Scalar Implicatures
Paul Grice’s Theory: Not everything communicated is linguistically encoded. He proposed maxims for conversation: * Relevance: Be relevant (e.g., A: "I'm out of gas," B: "There's a station around the corner"). * Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false (includes Irony and Metaphor). * Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as possible.
Scalar Implicatures (SI): * "Some" literally includes "all," but pragmatically implies "not all." * Study (Papafragou and Musolino, 2003): often fail to make scalar implicatures. They accept "Some horses jumped" when all horses jumped, whereas adults reject it as under-informative. * Stiller, Goodman, and Frank (2015): Created an "Ad-hoc Scale" task (e.g., "My friend has glasses"). Children succeed at these pragmatic inferences by age when alternatives are concrete and visible.
Bilingual Language Development
Definitions: * Simultaneous Bilingualism: Exposure to multiple languages from birth. * Sequential Bilingualism: Exposure to one language first, then another later.
Language Differentiation: * Children generally do not mix grammatical rules; they follow language-specific morphology (e.g., placing negative markers correctly in English vs. French). * Lexical Differentiation: Bilingual children readily learn "translation-equivalents" (objects having labels in both languages). Between of their vocabulary overlaps by age , suggesting they do not strictly follow the "Mutual Exclusivity" (ME) bias across languages.
Mutual Exclusivity in Bilinguals (Byers-Heinlein & Werker): * Study at : Monolinguals show strong ME use; Bilinguals show marginal use; Trilinguals show no ME use. Language experience, not vocabulary size, predicts this.
The Bilingual Advantage Debate
Historical View: Early studies (e.g., ) claimed bilingualism caused "mental retardation" or was a "hardship."
Contemporary View (Bialystok et al.): Recent studies suggest a "Bilingual Advantage" in executive function (EF) and attentional control due to the constant need to inhibit one language and switch to another. * Card Sorting Task: Bilingual children succeed in switching rules earlier than monolinguals. * Dementia: Bilinguals may fend off dementia symptoms for an average of years longer than monolinguals (Age of onset: vs ).
Kovács & Mehler (2009): Found that bilingual infants show improved cognitive control, successfully redirecting anticipatory looks in eye-tracking tasks when reward cues changed sides.
The "Bitter Fight": Large-scale replications have failed to find the bilingual advantage in young adults, leading to concerns about publication bias and the "file drawer" effect (only positive results being published).
Bilingual Education in the United States
Legal Context: Lau vs. Nichol (Supreme Court) ruled that schools must instruct students with limited English to protect their civil rights.
Educational Models: * English Immersion: Focus on rapid English proficiency. * Bilingual Immersion: Instructs in both languages. Meta-analyses (August et al., 2006) suggest children in bilingual programs achieve English skills as good as or better than those in immersion.
Miami Case Study (Oller & Eilers, 2002): * English-only students were initially more proficient in oral English. * By , this difference disappeared. * Bilingual education students were significantly better at Spanish and retained that advantage. * Conclusion: Education systems can support a native language without cost to the majority language.