Perception/production; See The Entries For And Speech .
Language AcquisitionCambridge Encyclopedia of Child DevelopmentBen AmbridgePsychological Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Health &Society, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford St. South,Liverpool, L69 7ZA. IntroductionLanguage acquisition is the process by whichspeakers come to have knowledge of alanguage. Although the term encompassesacquisition of both first (i.e., native) andsecond (i.e., foreign) languages, by mono-, biand multi-lingual children and adults, with andwithout various forms of language impairment,the present section focuses mainly onmonolingual first language acquisitionamongst typically-developing children(Bilingualism is subsequently discussed in itsown entry. Written language is not normallyconsidered within the remit of languageacquisition research; hence the inclusion ofseparate entries for Reading and writing andSchooling and literacy).The reason for the use of the neutralterm acquisition (as opposed, for example, tolearning or development) is that one of the twomajor theoretical approaches (the generativistor nativist approach) holds that manyimportant aspects of language are not learnedat all, but instead are present from birth (i.e.,innate). This knowledge takes the form of aninnate Universal Grammar; a set of categories,rules and principles that apply, potentially, toall of the world’s languages. The opposingview (the constructivist or usage-basedapproach) holds that children are not equippedwith this type of innate knowledge, but insteadconstruct their knowledge on the basis of thelanguage that they hear from their parents andother adults. Readers new to the field shouldbe aware that it is generally very polarizedwith regard to these two approaches, and thatmany textbooks, chapters and articles startfrom the assumption that one or other of thetwo theoretical frameworks is the correct one,and simply ignore (or dismiss in a sentence ortwo) theoretical proposals, and even researchfindings, associated with the rival approach.In contrast, the aim of the presentsection is to compare – in as even-handed amanner as possible – generativist andconstructivist accounts of some of the majorphenomena in child language acquisitionresearch, focusing on the core domains ofsyntax and morphology (though the dichotomyis also largely applicable in the domains ofword learning and speechperception/production; see the entries forCognitive development beyond infancy andSpeech development respectively).Languages use two main devices toconvey who did what to whom: Syntax, orword order (e.g., The dog chased the cat vsThe cat chased the dog) and morphology;changes that words undergo to markdistinctions such as tense (e.g., plays vsplayed; present vs past), person (I play vs Heplays; 1st person vs 3rd person) and number (Heplays vs They play; singular vs plural). Webegin by looking at three aspects of syntaxacquisition, before moving on to considermorphology.SyntaxAssigning words to syntactic categories.As we saw in the introduction, the maindistinction between generativist andconstructivist approaches to languageacquisition is that the former assume thatimportant some aspects of grammar are innate(i.e., present from birth), while the latterassume that all are learned on the basis of theinput. A particularly clear illustration of thesetwo positions is the debate regarding syntacticcategories. For most – and perhaps all –languages, the two most fundamentalcategories are NOUN and VERB. The NOUNcategory contains words that refer to concreteobjects (e.g., ball, chair), to people, names andplaces (e.g., man, John, London) and abstractentities or ideas (situation, democracy,happiness). The VERB category containswords that refer to actions (e.g., bite, kick), tochanges of state (e.g., melt, freeze) and toongoing activities or states of affairs (see,hear, live, love, justify). For children learninglanguage, acquiring these categories is afundamental task, as they constitute thebuilding blocks for the majority of theutterances that a child will hear or produce. Forexample, as we will see in the next section, assoon as the child has learned (a) the categoriesNOUN and VERB and (b) the way that herlanguage uses orders of these categories toconvey particular meanings, she will be able toproduce an infinite number of sentences. Forexample, English uses [NOUN] [VERB][NOUN] order, with the first NOUN denotingthe subject (e.g., the do-er of an action) and thesecond, the object (e.g., the entity that has theaction done to it). This information allows thechild to produce sentences such as John kicked[the] ball, [The] dog saw [the] cat, and even[The] situation justified [the] measures,provided she has not only learned the
necessary words, but assigned each to therelevant syntactic category (e.g., dog NOUN,justify VERB).So, just how do children do this(given that words in the speech stream do not,of course, come with syntactic categorylabels)? According to generativist accounts,the categories themselves are innate. That is,the knowledge of Universal Grammar withwhich children are born includes theknowledge that languages contain thecategories NOUN and VERB. This simplifiesthe problem, as children are not faced with thetask of building these categories from scratch,but does not solve it entirely: Children muststill somehow assign each of the words thatthey hear to one of these pre-existingcategories (not just NOUN and VERB, butalso ADJECTIVE [e.g., happy, sad],DETERMINER [e.g., the, a], PREPOSITION[e.g., in, on], WH-WORD [e.g., what, who],etc.).Perhaps the two leading generativistproposals for how children do this are those ofPinker (1987) and Christophe, Milotte, Bernal& Lidz (2008). Under Pinker’s semanticbootstrapping hypothesis, children’s innateknowledge of language contains not onlysyntactic categories (e.g., NOUN, VERB), butalso semantic categories (e.g.,PERSON/THING, ACTION/CHANGE OFSTATE) and linking rules that pair-up the two(e.g., PERSON/THING NOUN;ACTION/CHANGE OF STATE VERB).This helps the child because, unlike syntacticcategories, semantic categories are observablein the world. Suppose, for example, that thechild hears a sentence such as The dog bit thecat, while seeing this event takes place. Wealso need to assume that the child knows whatdog, cat and bite mean (i.e., she is aware of theparticular aspect of the unfolding event towhich each word refers). This real-worldknowledge (e.g., that dog and cat are THINGSand bite is an ACTION) allows the child toassign each word to the relevant syntacticcategory: dog THING NOUN,cat THING NOUN, bite ACTION VERB.Once the child has used these linking rules tobreak into the system, they are largelyabandoned in favour of distributional analysis:Items that occur in the same sentence positionsare grouped into the same category. Thisallows the child to correctly classify NOUNsthat do not refer to THINGS and VERBs thatdo not refer to ACTIONs. For example,situation could be assigned to the NOUNcategory on the basis that, like dog and cat, ittends to occur immediately after the.One potential problem for Pinker’stheory is that it would seem to predict thatVERBs that do not denote ACTIONs shouldbe learned later in development. In fact,nonactional verbs such as have, get, see and –of course – want tend to number amongstchildren’s earliest verbs (though one couldargue that they are using them with a moreactional meaning than do adults). A secondpotential problem is that children will hearNOUNs that refer to ACTIONs (e.g.,spanking), which could therefore beincorrectly assigned to the VERB category (wewill encounter a third in the following section).Pinker’s (1987) solution to these problems is tohave the linking rules operate onlyprobabilistically, competing with other factorssuch as distributional analysis. However, thissolution is in danger of raising more problemsthan it solves. For example, if the child isunable to definitively assign any words tosyntactic categories on the basis of theirmeaning alone (e.g., dog THING NOUN),then distributional analysis will reveal thatsituation is in the same category as dog, butnot what category this is.Christophe et al (2008) propose thatchildren use function words to identifysyntactic categories. For example, their innateknowledge could include the information that,if a phrase contains a DETERMINER (e.g., theor a) plus one other word, then that word mustbe a NOUN. This raises the question of howchildren know that the and a areDETERMINERs. Christophe et al’s (2008)solution is again innate knowledge. Onerelevant piece of knowledge is that aDETERMINER can combine with a NOUN toform a NOUN PHRASE (e.g., the dog; thecat). Another is that a sentence (or, morestrictly speaking, a clause) can contain twoNOUN PHRASES, but only one VERBPHRASE. Armed with this knowledge, if thechild hears a sentences such as The dog bit thecat, she will be able to infer that the dog andthe cat are NOUN PHRASES, and hence thatthe is a DETERMINER and dog and catnouns. A problem for this account is that it isfar from clear that there exist suitable ‘flags’for every syntactic category (e.g.,DETERMINERS are flags for the NOUNcategory), even in English, let alone for everylanguage of the world. For example Russiandoes not use DETERMINERS, so a differentflag would be needed. (Incidentally, theDETERMINER category has provokedparticularly intense debate between the twosides; see the further readings section for onerelevant paper).
Constructivist accounts sidestep thisproblem by arguing that children do not needflags or ways to bootstrap into innate syntacticcategories, because there are no innatesyntactic categories. Instead, children buildthese categories gradually from the input usingdistributional analysis. Although this proposalshares with that of Pinker (1987) the use ofdistributional analysis, the difference is thatchildren simply use these distributionallydefined clusters directly, rather than hookingthem up to innate categories. For example, achild might learn that, if two nouns have bothappeared after the (e.g., the book, the ball) andthe first has appeared with a (e.g., a book),then the second can probably also be used witha (e.g., a ball). This process is driven by theinput, and makes no reference to an innatecategory of NOUN or DETERMINER.Another difference from proposals such as thatof Pinker (1987) is that the distributionalanalysis is functionally based. Children grouptogether not only words that share similardistributions, but also those that are used insimilar ways. For example, the verbs want,buy, eat and like, while not particularly similaron the surface, usually involve a human and asmaller inanimate object. A car is not like amovie, but both can be bought, rented or stolenby humans, and can be good or bad, long orshort, cheap or expensive etc.An advantage of this account is thatusing fine-grained distributionally-definedclusters avoids some of the problemsassociated with relatively coarse syntacticcategories. For example, a learner whoassigned count (e.g, book) and mass nouns(e.g,. mud) to a single innate NOUN categorywould make non-childlike errors such as *amud. A learner who formed more fine-graineddistributional clusters (e.g., count noun, massnoun), and used these clusters in productionwould not make such errors (Freudenthal, Pine& Gobet, 2005). A disadvantage of theconstructivist account is that it does not offer asatisfactory explanation of how childrenacquire the abstract rules that allow them toproduce novel sentences; a question to whichwe now turn.Combining words into sentences.An important assumption of the generativistapproach is that children’s innate UniversalGrammar contains not only syntacticcategories (e.g., NOUN, VERB), phrases (e.g.,NOUN PHRASE, VERB PHRASE) andsyntactic roles (e.g., SUBJECT, OBJECT), butalso rules for combining them into sentences.For example, children are born with rules thatform a sentence by combining a SUBJECTNOUN PHRASE, and a VERB PHRASE(which may contain, in addition to the VERB,an OBJECT NOUN PHRASE):[NPSUBJECT] [VP[V] [NPOBJECT]The dogbit the catThese rules are often represented using asyntactic tree. Figure 1 illustrates these rules,as well as one that we met in the previoussection: that a NOUN PHRASE may contain adeterminer (e.g., the, a) as well as the NOUN.S5NPVP4 4DN VNP11 13Thedog bitDN11thecatFigure 1. Innate rules for combining syntacticcategories and phrases into sentences.As we saw above, because these rules areinnate rather than learned, as soon as childrenhave assigned words to the relevant syntacticcategories, they are almost ready to beginusing them to produce sentences. The reasonthey are not quite ready is that the innate rules(e.g., VP V NP) do not specify the order ofthe constituents. Indeed, they cannot do,because this varies between languages. Forexample, in English, a VERB PHRASEconsists of a VERB, followed by a NOUNPHRASE (e.g, [kicked] [the ball]). In Turkish,a VERB PHRASE consists of a VERBpreceded by a NOUN PHRASE (e.g., [theball] [kicked]. Because the VERB is the“head” of the VERB PHRASE (just as allphrases are named after their head category),we say that English is head-first, while Turkishis head-final. Thus, a key assumption of thegenerativist approach is that, before childrencan use their innate rules to produce sentences,they must first set the head-directionparameter: a kind of inbuilt mental switch withtwo settings (head first/head final).An advantage of parameter-settingapproaches (e.g., Sakas & Fodor, 2001), isthat, because children can set the headdirection parameter on the basis of, inprinciple, a single utterance, they explain thefact that children seem to learn languagerelatively quickly, and rarely, if ever, makeword order errors with these type of basicsentences (e.g., *The dog the cat bit). A
problem for parameter setting approaches isthat it is unclear how children are able torecognize the heads in the language that theyhear. For example, an English speaking childcould use an input sentence such as The mankicked the ball to set the head-directionparameter, only if she were somehow able torecognize kicked as the head of the VP kickedthe ball; but, of course, speech does not comewith these labels. A second problem is that,because children must set multiple parameterssimultaneously, many sentences will notprovide unambiguous evidence of the correctsettings. One possible solution to theseproblems is that children use phonologicalinformation to set the parameter (e.g.,Christophe et al, 2008). For example, headfirst language tend to place stress on the end ofthe phrase (e.g., kicked the ball), and headfinal language at the start (the ball kicked).However, it is far from clear that thiscorrelation is sufficiently robust for thestrategy to be reliable crosslinguistically.An alternative generativist approachis Pinker’s (1987) syntactic bootstrappinghypothesis. In addition to the innate linkingrules discussed above (one linking ACTION toVERB), Pinker proposes rules linking AGENT(the do-er of an action) to SUBJECT andPATIENT (the entity that has the action doneto it) to OBJECT. This would allow the childto use a sentence such as The dog bit the cat(AGENT ACTION PATIENT) to discover thatEnglish uses SUBJECT VERB OBJECT wordorder. Together with other innate linking rules,this knowledge would allow children to inferthe syntactic structure of the target language(e.g., Figure 1, for English). However, inaddition to the problems discussed above(including the existence of nonactional verbs,and actional nouns), Pinker’s account (1987)suffers from the problem that some languages(e.g., Dyirbal) link semantic and syntacticcategories in a different way to English.Furthermore, languages differ as to whichentity they conceptualize as the PATIENT ofa given event. For example, the ChechenIngush equivalent of Johnny hit Tommy with astick has a stick rather than Tommy as thePATIENT (a rough paraphrase would be Jonnyhit a stick onto Tommy).According to the constructivistapproach, children do not have innatecategories or rules, but instead learn basicword order from the input. Children start outwith rote-learned holophrases (e.g., I hold it;I eat it; I get it), across which they abstractto acquire low level lexically-specificconstruction schemas or slot-and-framepatterns (e.g., I [ACTION] it). Later, childrenanalogize across these partially-abstractschemas (e.g., I [ACTION] it; He’s[ACTION]ing it; She’s eating [THING]) toarrive at a wholly abstract [SUBJECT][VERB] [OBJECT] construction.An advantage of the constructivistapproach is that it offers an explanation of thefact that children’s linguistic developmentappears to be not only uneven (which wewould not expect if children have generativiststyle abstract knowledge), but uneven in a waythat reflects the input; i.e., forms that arefrequent in the input are acquired earlier, andshow lower error rates, than more frequentforms (e.g., Tomasello, 2003; Ambridge &Lieven, 2015; Ambridge, Kidd, Rowland &Theakston, 2015). For example (1) innaturalistic data studies, a high proportion ofchildren’s utterance appear to reflect the use ofa small number of slot-and-frame patternswhose source forms are frequent in the input;(2) in elicitation studies, young children rarelyproduce full SUBJECT VERB OBJECTsentences with novel verbs; but when they do,they almost always use pronoun forms thatsuggest the use of a slot-and-frame pattern(e.g., He’s [ACTION]ing it); (3) in weirdword-order studies, young children imitateunconventional word orders for low-frequencyand novel verbs, but not high-frequency,familiar verbs.A potential problem for theconstructivist approach is that, when testedwith comprehension paradigms, children showevidence of generativist-style abstractknowledge of word order from a muchyounger age. For example, even young twoyear-olds are able to point to a matching videoin response to a sentence such as The duck isglorping the bunny or The bunny is glorpingthe duck. However, one could argue that thepredictions of the constructivist account relatenot to age, but unevenness (Ambridge &Lieven, 2005). A more serious problem for thisapproach is that it offers only a very generalsketch of how children move from lexicallyspecific to abstract constructions (e.g,Tomasello, 2003: 163-169) and that this aspectof the account has not, to our knowledge, beentested empirically. In contrast, the generativistapproach – by essentially placing adult levelsof abstract knowledge in the head of the child– sidesteps this problem; though at the expenseof failing to satisfactorily explain the apparentunevenness of children’s early syntacticknowledge.
Movement constructionsThe debate plays out in a very similar way for“movement constructions”: passives (e.g., Thecat was bitten by the dog), relative-clausesentences (e.g., The cat who the dig bit chasedthe mouse) and – our example construction forthe present section – questions. Generativistapproaches assume that children’s innateknowledge of Universal Grammar containstwo movement rules. One (subject-auxiliaryinversion) moves the auxiliary (e.g., can) fromafter to before the subject (e.g., he). The other(wh-movement), which applies to wh- but notyes/no questions, moves the wh-word from itsunderlying position at the end of the sentenceto the beginning of the sentence (see Figure 2):Whatj cank he tk eat tj ?Figure 2: Wh-movement and subject-auxiliaryinversion in questionsThis movement is illustrated by the subscriptnotation, with tj and tk indicating the positionsfrom which Whatj and cank have moved. Thatis, the sentence starts out as He can eat what?,then is successively transformed into What hecan eat? and What can he eat? by subjectauxiliary inversion and wh-movementrespectively.Just as for basic word order, theadvantage of generativist accounts of questionacquisition (e.g., Santelmann, Berk, Austin,Somashekar & Lust, 2002) is that they explainwhy children appear to acquire
Language Acquisition Cambridge Encyclopedia of Child Development Ben Ambridge Psychological Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Health & Society, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford St. South, Liverpool, L69 7ZA. UK. Ben.Ambridge@Liverpool.ac.uk www.Benambridge.com Introduction Language acquisition is the process by which speakers come to have knowledge of a language. Although the term .
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Chính Văn.- Còn đức Thế tôn thì tuệ giác cực kỳ trong sạch 8: hiện hành bất nhị 9, đạt đến vô tướng 10, đứng vào chỗ đứng của các đức Thế tôn 11, thể hiện tính bình đẳng của các Ngài, đến chỗ không còn chướng ngại 12, giáo pháp không thể khuynh đảo, tâm thức không bị cản trở, cái được
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Le genou de Lucy. Odile Jacob. 1999. Coppens Y. Pré-textes. L’homme préhistorique en morceaux. Eds Odile Jacob. 2011. Costentin J., Delaveau P. Café, thé, chocolat, les bons effets sur le cerveau et pour le corps. Editions Odile Jacob. 2010. Crawford M., Marsh D. The driving force : food in human evolution and the future.
