language

Question 1

+language as classical conditioning

Answer 1

• General learning mechanism: through imitation and positive reinforcement when child and parent establishes succesful communication
  
  • Emphasises the role of environmental input, highlights external reinforcement (eg explicit feedback) where adult like or meaningful speech is rewardsed.
    Proponents: Skinner.

Question 2

linguistics view: skinner

Answer 2

• Poverty of the stimulus: language input children receive is not enough to explain how they acquire the complex structures of their languages
• Speed and universality: children learn all kinds of language quickly and easily, suggests innate language acquisition mechanism.
• Creative use of language:L coming upw ith new and unique sentences is difficult to explain without resorting to language specific innate principles.

Question 3

statistical learning view

Answer 3

• Highlights experience rather than innate principles.
  
  • Assumes different mechanisms than behavioursm where conditioning principles (immitation confitioning) lead to languqage acquisition
  • Sensitivity to statistical regularities in our perceptual experiences.
  • Emphasizes implicit learning and ifentification of statistical regularities.

Question 4

social interactioinst view

Answer 4

• Role parents have in shaping the social communicative setting (for example shared book reading
  
  • Emphasizes social experiences as primary way in which children acquire language
    Social skills such as turn taking, mutual gaxe and joint attention

Question 5

language specific

Answer 5

• Parot- 80 words, rela language or rote learning? Bonobo- communicates symbolically however has no function words and limited morphography.
  Key insight: social aspect of language, many qualitative aspects of language in animals, but higher quantitative difference.

Question 6

brocas area and aphasia

Answer 6

• Brocas area: left inferior frontal gyrus inportant for speech production
  Adjacent to the part of the motor control area for the jaws, lips and tongue.
• Aphasia: - No problem understanding but slow, poorly articulated and ungrammatical speech
  
  • Prepositions, speech prepositions, articles, conjunctions often left out, speech can be laborious and halting, with scrambled sentences.

Question 7

wernickes area and aphasia

Answer 7

Wenicke’s area: adjacent to the primary auditory area that recieves linguistic input, left superior temporal gyrus, very involved with hearing, oricessing words and meaning.
- Wernickes aphasia:
Difficulty accessing verbs, nouns and adjectives, fluent speech that is completley lacking senee.

Question 8

behaviorist view on language (skinner)

Answer 8

• general learning mechanism: through imitation and pos reinforcement when a child and parent establish successful communication.
• emphasizes role of environment input, and external reinforcement when meaningful speech is rewarded

Question 9

linguistics view

Answer 9

(Chompsky)
poverty of the stimulus: language input children receive is not rich enough to explain how they acquire the complex rules and structures of their language
- speed and universality: children learn all kinds of language quickly and easily: suggests innate language acquisition mechanism
creative use of language: coming up with new and unique sentences is difficult to explain without resorting to language specific innate principles

Question 10

statistical learning view

Answer 10

language is learned the same way in which all human learning occurs
- highlights experiences rather than innate principles
- assumes different mechanisms than behaviorism where conditioning principles (imitation conditioning) lead to language acquisition
- emphasizes implicit learning and identification of statistical regularities

Question 11

social- Interactionist views

Answer 11

(Vygotsky)
language occurs in a social context:
- role parents have in shaping the social communicative setting
- emphasizes social experiences as primary way in which children acquire language’
- social skills such as turn taking, mutual gaze

Question 12

logical problem of language acquisition

Answer 12

• children generate and understand an infinite number of sentences that have never heard before, which suggests an innate capacity for language acquisition,
• the rules for forming sentences are non-obvious, and its hard to explain how we know when or what they are, yet everyone agrees with them.

Question 13

feedback or negative evidence

Answer 13

• one possibility is that we just try saying things and are told when we are wrong. lack of corrective input for grammatical errors: children dont get told when they say something is gramatically wrong.

Question 14

explanation: Universal grammar

Answer 14

• theory of the primitives and rules of inferences that enable the child to learn any natural grammar with limited input.
• learning a specific language= parameter setting
• sets boundaries on what acquired languages look like, languages cannot vary in every possible way= language universals

Question 15

evidence= linguistic universals

Answer 15

absolute: no languages from questions by reversing the word order
statistical: in about all languages, subjects proceed the object
implicational: if a language has X, it will have Y. if a language is SOV, it has question words at the end of a sentence
general: all languages make certain distinctions. noun-verb distinction; all spoken languages have vowels and consonants.

Question 16

example: Adjective ordering preferences

Answer 16

linguistic view: syntactic closeness to nouns encoded rightly through Universal grammar
cog view: ordering is not strict, but more out of preference

Question 17

evaluating linguistic universals

Answer 17

linguistic universals can often be explained by cognitive bias. a potential bias is adjective ordering: Novel information bias.,
- more unexpected or novel information to the front as this makes the message easier to phrase.
Other arguments: extensive hardwired set of rules seems biological impulsive
- language evolution: structure of language itself might have evolved to facilitate learning, which might explain some of the cog bias

Question 18

Large language models

Answer 18

• deep network capable of predicting long units of text trained on enormous amounts of data.
• context-aware representations
• outperform human bench marks
• similiar principles in visual models

Question 19

what can we learn from LLMs

Answer 19

• creative language generation

Question 20

Imprinting

Answer 20

Newley hatched geese rapidly learn the features of their ‘caretaker’ become strongly emotional attached, the songs they learn as a child act as a soundboard for developing song in puberty.

Question 21

are there critical or sensitive periods for learning language. evidence: feral children.

Answer 21

raised w little to no language, sometimes no language at all, if there is vocab better than grammar.

Question 21

driving forces of language acquisition

Answer 21

input, social interaction, variation

Question 22

1. starting off small

Answer 22

vocab size as a function of child-directed speech,
less-is-more principle: lim cog resources, including working memory may help children acquire language.

Question 23

2. driving forces for language variation- Child directed speech

Answer 23

the way caregivers speak to infants or young children
phonology- slower, more pauses, exaggerated, higher and wider pitch, convey pos affect, esp before 12 months’
vocabulary- here and now, concrete words, stuff interesting the children
morphology + Syntax- simpligy forms, incomplete sentences but mostly statistically correct (more grape juice)

Question 24

ev for limitied role of CDS (1st view)

Answer 24

- hunter gathere child- children are not spoken to until they can speak - theory that it doesnt matter how children are spoken to.

Question 25

ev for second view CDS

Answer 25

CDS helps children learn languages: linguistic feedback hypothesis= adults don't talk to children to teach them language, but to be understood, language lessons are a side product of CDS evidence: infants are sensitive to different types of speech. 6 month olds turn towards adults who speak in sing song voice.,

Question 26

3. Interaction: active participation

Answer 26

phonetic learning task followed by head-turn paradigm. american infants raised in english environment exposed to mandarin or english speak sounds. - highlights social dimension: presence of a person increases attention of acoustic properties.

Question 27

4. variation: individual differences

Answer 27

- biological variation: limitation is important for language learning and has a genetic bias: twin studies indicate 30% variance due to heritability., - good imitators turn out to be good talkers. quantitative differences in input: higher SES (social economic status) --> larger vocab qualitative differences: some children might learn more from overheard speech others from CDS

Question 28

INPUT

Answer 28

language exposure matters: it varies in amount and quality and affects rate of language development starting small: helps acquisition in some areas of language learning.

Question 29

INTERACTION

Answer 29

- adults use CDS, which simplifies and clarifies speech at every level - CDS might not be necessary to acquire language - interaction is essential for language acquisition, especially at young age.