C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\admin\Desktop\Hauptseminar\Video-LA-1-TRANS.doc
Transcript: Human Language Series. Part II.
"Acquiring the Human Language "Playing the
Language Game"
Central Question:
How do children acquire language without seeming to
learn it?
Slobin:
Either it's there at birth or he has to learn it.
- Now do birds their young ones to fly?
- Do mothers teach their children to speak?
- NO! To both questions.
Birds do not teach their children to fly.
Mothers don't teach their children to talk.
This video is about a great mystery:
1. How do children acquire language without seeming
to learn it.
2. How do they do so many things with so little life
experience to go on.
Plato's Problem:
This problem is posed by Plato 2000 years ago.
Chomsky:
There are basically two approaches to Plato's Problem:
1st Approach: Learning language is just like solving any
other type of problem. Problem solving is a mechanism
within our intelligence and one of the problems is
acquiring language.
2nd Approach: The brain is like every other system in the
biological world. It is subdivided in highly differentiated
subsystems of special design and structure and one of
these subsystems has a special design in form for
language.
Lasnik: Talking - like walking - is encoded in the DNA.
Acquiring language is part of our genetic make up.
Chomsky: Nobody is taught language. In fact, you can't
prevent the child from learning it. It has very much to do
with physical growth.
Gleitman: Argues against polarization:
Important question: WHY CAN'T IT BE BOTH?
It is the most central question of modern linguistics:
How much of language does a child have to learn and
how much is built in?
2
SYNTAX IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Jill de Villiers (Smith College)
Experiment 1: Ambiguity Experiment
or: When-did-the-boy-say-he-hurt-himself Experiment
Design:
Jill told the following story to each child:
1. story of the boy climbing the tree in the forest.
2. then one day, the boy slipped and fell
3. In the bathtub at night, he had a big bruise.
4. Boy says to his father:
"I must have hurt myself when I fell this afternoon."
Question of the experimenter to the child:
"When did the boy say he hurt himself?"
Girl1:
Boy1:
Girl2:
Boy2:
Climbing the tree.
When he was taking a bath.
In the bathtub
when he fell
Conclusion: There are two possible answers!!!
Experiment 2: Unambiguous Sentence
or: When-did-the-boy-say-how-he-hurt-himself
Experiment
3
Similar Design as in Experiment 1, only now the
following question is asked:
Q: "When did the boy say how he hurt himself?"
The children answer with: "in the bathtub."
Conclusion: Only one possible answer
Crucial question:
Where did the second interpretation go?
Why is the sentence in experiment 1 ambiguous and the
sentence in experiment 2 unambiguous? What is the
difference between (1) and (2):
(1) When did the boy say
he hurt himself?
(2) When did the boy say how he hurt himself?
Answer: In sentence (2), the middle question introduced
by "how" blocks one of the interpretations that are
possible in sentence (1). "How he hurt himself forms an
island".
4
A Puzzling Difference
(1) When did the boy say
he hurt himself?
versus
(2) When did the boy say how he hurt himself?
Explanation:
Sentence (1) has two "D(eep)"-Structures:
(1) a. The boy said ………………
b. The boy said……………….
Sentence (2) has only one D-Structure:
(2)
The boy said……………….
Correlating to the D-Structures, we can deduce the
Movement operations taking place in each case:
5
SHORT WH-MOVEMENT:
Movement from D-Structure to S-Structure in sentence
(1a): The boy said WHEN/ he hurt himself?
S1
S2
When did the boy say ___ he
hurt
himself?
SHORT WH-MOVEMENT
6
LONG WH-MOVEMENT:
(1b): The boy said
he hurt himself WHEN/
S1
S2
When did the boy say he
hurt
himself ___?
LONG WH-MOVEMENT
7
SHORT WH-MOVEMENT:
Movement from D-Structure to S-Structure in sentence:
(2) a.
The boy said WHEN HOW he hurt himself /
S1
S2
When did the boy say ___ HOW he
hurt
himself?
SHORT WH-MOVEMENT
LONG WH-MOVEMENT OF WHEN across HOW is
IMPOSSIBLE!
8
The D-Structure for (2) which we are looking for would
be something like (2b). But WHEN cannot across HOW!
(2) b. The boy said HOW he hurt himself when/
S1
S2
When did the boy say HOW he hurt himself ___?
XXXXX
What is the relevance of this experiment?
1. These are not the kind of sentences anybody had ever
taught the child about.
2. Therefore, the experiment shows: a child must have
some kind of knowledge of syntactic structure.
9
Imitation vs. Innateness Theory:
Scene1: Ernie tries to get the baby to imitate his name.
Lasnik:
What's the big problem about a child learning language.
Doesn't a child just imitate what she or he hears?
Gets reinforced and learns the language?
Pinker: It's the common sense idea: children listen to
their parents and they imitate their language.
Lasnik: But how can we explain that every child and
adult can produce brand-new sentences.
Gleitman: "I hate you, mama." Now, come on, you
haven't learned this from your mother.
Pinker: Listen to a 3 year old. They are not simply
imitating what they hear from their parents:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Stop giggling me.
My teacher holded the baby rabbit.
My nose is crying.
I am barefoot all over.
This is a very funny sort of imitation. Why?
Q: What are possible corrections?
10
Scene2: Ernie wants to teach the little baby to say Ernie.
In the end he gives up. Bird comes in. Ernie says: Hi,
Bird. The baby imitates [bd].
Problem: If we don't learn by imitation - how do we
learn?
Linguist's strongest argument: Acquiring language is
different from learning other things, because we don't
seem to learn languages the same way how we learn
other difficult things - like playing the trumpet, riding a
bicycle, etc.
Wittgenstein said: Children acquire speech by
playing the language game. A game where mothers
seem to imitate their children.
Experiment 1 with Sam:
Sam: (31/2 years old)
Linguist 1 to Sammy:
- "We know that cookie monster likes cookies and cakes.
Ask the rat what he thinks."
Sam to rat:
"What do you think cookie monster eats?"
Linguist2 answers for rat:
11
"I think he eats maybe pizza?"
"Maybe cookies?"
Sam: "Cookies and what else?"
"Ice-cream?"
Sam: "I'll give you a guess. I'll give you a hint. It's
spelled with a [k]."
Sam: "What do you think m m cookie monster eats?"
Lasnik: It is rather remarkable that such a young child
can produce such a difficult sentence!
It is a complex sentence that has one sentence inside
another.
Step 1: Find the D-Structure:
[S1 You think [S2 Cookie Monster eats (something)]]
Step 2: change the sentence into a question.
The way it's changed into a question:
a. "something" is changed into "what"
[S1 You think [S2 Cookie Monster eats what]]
12
b. and then "what" is displaced from the very end of the
sentence to the very beginning. (Inversion)
[S1 What You think [S2 Cookie Monster eats ____]]
Q: What is missing?
[S1 What do You think [S2 Cookie Monster eats ____]]
'do'-insertion
The child was able to do it unerringly.
How long does it take children to figure out their syntax?
It has been though that it takes children 10-12 years to
figure out their syntax. But experiments have shown that
a child was able to produce a very complicated sentence
when they are about 3 years of age.
Fodor: Nobody can teach language.
Most of it is innate, but not all of it is.
Gleitman: Certainly "French" is not innate. Or Spanish!
There is a sense in which language is obviously learned
from specific facts in the surrounding environment.
13
Chomsky: The environment certainly has an effect. I am
talking English, I am not talking Chinese - that's because
I grew up in Philadelphia.
Girl: Tells story. The child is able to say sentences he or
she has never heard before.
Chomsky: There is a traditional semi-answer to this. And
this is - we do it by analogy.
ANALOGY Theory:
1. Give an example of where analogy seems to hold:
1. Substituting one color word for another
(1) I painted the red barn.
(2) I painted the blue barn.
2. Switching the last two words in a sentence:
(3) I painted the barn blue.
(Interpretation: I painted the barn and as a result of it
became blue.)
14
Gleitman: It looks as if you can take those last two words
and switch them around in their order.
(4) a. - a red barn
b. - a barn red.
2. Give an example of where analogy breaks down:
Case 1:
Now, let's assume you want to extend this to the case of
seeing. Now you have to look at barns instead of
painting.
(5) a. I saw a red barn.
b. *I saw a barn red.
Something's gone wrong. This is an analogy that didn't
work.
Chomsky: A concept of analogy breaks down under
investigation at once.
Case 2:
The example in (1) means "Taro ate a sandwich, lunch,
dinner."
15
(1) Taro ate.
It does not mean: his shoe, his hat, his words.
Lasnik: How does any speaker of English know that
"Taro ate" means that Taro ate something, but not "Taro
ate his shoes."
But now look at (2):
(2) a. John grows tomatoes
b. John grows _______.
(2b) doesn't mean John grows something or other. It
means: John undergoes some sort of development.
The analogy breaks down. The analogy is wildly
broken.
Task: Give two examples of where the analogy theory
breaks down.
We all do that instantaneously, without training, without
experience. And in a way that is quite common to the
human species.
16
Gleitman: When does the child understand/appreciate
the grammar of his native tongue?
When does he know about ideas as the subject and the
object of the sentence?
When does he know the difference between:
(1) a. The horse kicked the cow. vs.
b. The cow kicked the horse.
Define the subject and the object in (1):
The subject is the one who does the kicking and the
object is the one who got kicked.
What is the subject and the object in (2):
(2) The cow was kicked by the horse.
Subject _________
17
Object _________
Experiment at the Temple University:
Design: Showing two films simultaneously.
Scene 1:
a. Where is Cookie Monster washing Big Bird?
b. Find Cookie Monster washing Big Bird.
Commentator: The question behind all our studies is,
will the child look more at the screen that matches the
language that they are hearing.
Scene 2:
a. Look, Big Bird is feeding Cookie Monster.
b. Find Big Bird feeding Cookie Monster.
Boy: points and says ma/ma/ma/ - looks for confirmation
Commentator: The remarkable thing is that some of
these children that are 16 months and have only 2 words
in their productive vocabulary nonetheless understand the
order of information as it comes in our senses.
Q: What do you think about this test procedure?
Result: Word order is a very important part of grammar.
18
Chomsky: Language is an organ of the mind. The child is
creating the language.
MEANING OF WORDS: SEMANTICS
Commentator: Does this also apply to words?
Surely, words don't exist in the child's mind.
Why do they acquire words so easily?
Does the brain give them some special help there too?
Gleitman: The problem is how the child learns the
meanings of words.
1. Mother points to the car.
Child knows: "aha this is a car"
Jill de Villier: The trouble is: that can't be the whole
story.
Dog: nunu
Overgeneralization of "nunu"
- nunu: referred to dogs in general, to animals, slippers,
salad, etc.
The question was-when he said "nunu", what did he
mean?
Gleitman: The trick in learning word meaning is not so
much applying it to the thing meant, but apply it to some
other referents, but not to all of them.
19
Commentator:
- How does a dog know that there is another dog?
- A word is something that stands for a concept.
Aronoff:
- But then we have another problem.
- What is a concept?
Gleitman: Clothes-Pin
- Clothes-Pin Statue
G: How does a child pick out a category that is relevantly
alike?
Experiment: What does "alive" mean?
- Is a dog alive?
Answer: yes: it has teeth, feet, it barks
- Is a worm alive?
Answer: yes.
But it doesn't have teeth and feet?
Kids: but it moves.
- What about a car? It moves…
Kids: agree - yes, it is alive.
Harvard University: Gavagai
20
Philosopher: Philip Quine
Gavagai refers to Rabithood
Gleitman: How could it be that all that comes to a child's
mind is RABIT?
Q: What might an inborn assumption be?
Pinker's Flimik-Experiment.
- open vs. closed flimiks
 The whole object assumption
Child expects object labels to refer to the whole object.
 The mutual exclusiveness principle
Children expect objects to have one and only one
label, that is one and only one name.
Words might be learned one by one.
Sentences, however, cannot be learned one by one.
Very young children can tell stories and thereby use
sentences that they have never heard before.
UG:
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Focus on Papua New Guinea [gini:]
21
If languages are inborn, then the question occurs of
whether the languages in New Guinea are similar to ours.
Crosslinguistic Universals: we find a small set of
principles.
One possibility that the child has to figure out is where to
put the verb - at the beginning - in the middle - or at the
end.
There are about 5 thousand languages spoken in the
world.
- these 5 thousand languages are very very similar.
Pinker: These 5 thousand languages are all dialects of
one human language.
De Saussure: There is no such thing as a primitive
language.
Every language has rules.
Siberian Eskimo: even this language is less different than
it seemed.
UG:
22
There are fixed invariable structural principles which are
simply part of the biological endowment and that
determine what counts as a human language.
The child might have a plan what might be a possible
rule:
A possible rule is: Subj Verb Obj and variations
thereof.
Children's Errors:
Children look for rules and overgeneralize rules.
(1) He drived to school.
(2) Geezes
two foots
it breaked instead of it broke.
There are certain kinds of mistakes that children never
seem to make.
1. Questions
(1) a. What did you eat your eggs with.
b. *What did you eat your eggs and?
2. Object Shift
(2) a. I baked a cake for Mary.
b. I baked Mary a cake.
(3) a. I painted the house for 6 hours.
23
b. *I painted 6 hours the house.
Mistakes like (1b) and (3b) are never made, because they
violate UG.
Experiment 2: Sam
Sam: What do you think what's in here?
Adult: What do you think is in here?
This is not a random error.
Rather it is a rule of a number of other languages.
German allows in one of its dialects that is disallowed in
English, namely (1b):
(1) a. Was glaubst Du, ist hier drin?
what think you is here in-it?
b. Was glaubst Du, was hier drin ist?
what think you what here in-it is
Chomsky: Striking general conclusion
1. Capacity to learn language is deeply engraved in the
mind.
2. Children are not taught language, they just do it.
24