language 3

Question 1

children + learning words

Answer 1

• the fast rate of word learning in later life is probably due to a child’s capacity for fast mapping: learning the correct referent of a word alter only one or two labeling.

Question 2

shape bias (what bias children rely on when learning words)

Answer 2

• children prefer to categorise most nouns by shape
• emerges over the course of the second year
• may be learned based on associations betwene words and features of categories to pick out

Question 3

evidence for shape bias

Answer 3

• teaching chuldren new nouns cleanly organised by shape speeds up later word learning

Question 4

mutual exclusivity

Answer 4

children generally assume items don’t have more than one label.

Question 5

social reasoning

Answer 5

infants only labels if the speaker is looking at the objects.
- infants learn that the object is a dawnoo if the speaker is looking at it when they label it. if speaker not looking at it they mislabel

Question 6

parts of speech

Answer 6

are associated with different roles in the sentence, these are often called arguments

Question 7

object, verb, subject

Answer 7

object= usually denotes the non-actor things involved in a sentence
subject= usually denotes the actor or the agent who is doing the action

Question 8

word order in english

Answer 8

primary= I see dead people= SVO
passive= secondary (passive) word order is OVS- my homework was eaten by my dog

Question 9

word order matters

Answer 9

language is compositional: the meaning of a phrase or sentence just a mixture of its words

Question 10

children learn word order early

Answer 10

• recognition: children are aware of word order very early (8 months)
• production: even the first sentences, through they drop words, usually have the right order for the words that are produced

Question 11

the rest of grammar comes quickly

Answer 11

lost of individual variability- but this is the kind of rapid expansion expected.

Question 12

verbs are in charge

Answer 12

most linguistics agree that, regardless of the word order, verbs in every language are the heads of the sentence.
- they determine what the arguments are
‘Ziggy likes music’ - one object and one subject
‘She put the rubbish in the bin’- subject, 2 objects.
- because of their importance a lot of grammar learning is actually about verb learning.

Question 13

learning verb arguments

Answer 13

• how do we learn that different verbs take different arguments? we probs dont learn just by brute mimicry. people are willing to say verbs in ordered argument structures, they have never heard before: overgeneralizing errors suggest that children aren’t mimicking.

Question 14

possible solutions to the logical problem of language acquisition,

Answer 14

• negative evidence: children are told when they get something wrong, - this doesn’t happen
  more subtle kinds: like rephrasing does occur- doesn’t fix the whole problem
  implicit negative evidence: it predicts the overgeneralization errors should be more common for infrequent verbs.

Question 15

it’s not just verb arguments

Answer 15

• we also have to learn the morphological rules governing how morphemes can be used and combined in language
• morphemes are the smallest units that convey meaning. (er), (s), (un). Includes tense, which overlaps with mood (might, will) and aspect (have walked, is walking.)

Question 16

how do people learn the past tense?

Answer 16

• regular add (ed), almost all new verbs are regular, which indicates that the past tense rule is productive and has some psychological reality.
  irregular: mostly occur in clusters based on the similarity of stem. these are also psychologically real. people are more confused about new verbs that sound like irregulars.

Question 17

why are some verbs irregular

Answer 17

• irregular verbs are most frequent, which suggests an language- evolutionary story. if a verb is infrequent, its unlikely to be well-memorized. that means people are more likely to use regular +ed rule when they use it. only the frequent verbs will be so well memorized that they are impervious to regularization over time.

Question 18

how is verb morphology learned?

Answer 18

• follows a U shaped curve.
• few vers are used, but most of them have correct tense morphology.
  middle: past-tense rules often overgeneralized (eg. goed instead of went)
  late: eventually these mistakes are corrected.