CLAC Review 12/1/2016 2:06:00 PM

Week 1
 How do children acquire language?
o Nativism / Nature
 Chomsky: language is innate
 UG
 Poverty of the Stimulus (PoS)
 Inexplicable that children know so much without
explicitly teaching them
 Input insufficient for output
o Behaviorism / nurture
 Skinner: language is learned
 Not everything universal is innate
 Ex: coca cola
 Like, something can happen without being born
with it
 PoS  kids just creative?
 Language develops
 Ex: pidgin  creole
o Critical period: lenneberg
 “competence only achieved within limited time period
 modern view
 Instead, multiple “ideal” learning periods for diff
aspects of language
 Ex: phonology
 Different fields of study
o Levels of language:
 Form:
 Phonology : study of sounds
 Morphology : study of word forms
 Syntax: study of sentence structure
 Content:
 Semantics: study of meaning
 Function:
 Pragmatics : study of meaning ++

Week 2:
The Prism:
 Input : continuous sound signal
 The prism: inner grammar breaks it down into
 Output : meaningful components

No such thing as “correct” language

 Weinreich: as soon as something is a state, it’s a language
 Language is a lvigin organism that changes
 Avoiding age
o A lot of variation leads to averages with uninformative ranges
o Important to consider other things like parents, environment,
etc
o Learning a lang is like playing a game
 People don’t know on average what age people know
how to skip rope
 So language should be the same
 Kids learn gradually and at different rates
 Maybe not all language learned through input
o Sheeps : two possibilities for why
 Child’s experimenting
 Language is innate
 Cuz no adult ever said sheeps
 There’s creativity in language and also in meaning
o Recursion – can make up infinite structures
o Also infinite meanings
Genie
 Ideal test case for language experiment?
o Cuz Chomsky was a thing and linguistics was hot
o Was ideal cuz ideal case would be child without any input
 Cuz if language develops, then supports language is
innate
 Forbidden experiemtn “
o Can we teach her language?
 If yes
 No critical period
 Lenneberg done
  If no
 Needs some lang input before certain age and if
not you can never learn lang
 What does this say about nature/nurture
o Maybe not much
o Didn’t speak before she was found  against nature
o Never fully learned to speak  against nurture
 Ideal test case = forbidden experiment
o Was actively taught not to speak –neg input
o Ideal test case would have no input
o Positive input would be people encouraging her to spreak
o She might’ve had possible cognitive deficit from birth
 Not ideal cuz you don’t want any other reason that
language might’ve been affected by other problems

Week 3 : 0-2 years

the only fact sheet you should remotely know
Milestones
 Comprehension (passive)
o 12m – 10 words
o 14 – 50 w
o 18m - >100 words
 production (active)
o 12-20m -1st word
o 24 – 50w
 Grammatical divide
o Noun primacy – mostly nouns so like, chair, table, etc
o Then verbs
o Modifiers – like adjectives, temporal things (yesterday)
whatever, but mostly adjs
o Social words is smallest amount – greetings, yes/no,
etc
 BASICALLY
o Comprehension (passive) Production (active &
divided).
o Acquiring words  using words
High amp sucking procedure:
 Establish baseline with no stimuli
 Habituation phase
o Stimulation of one kind to teach child that sucking harder
triggers the stimulus
 Then add new stimuli
 Experimental phase: playing a new sound and seeing if that makes
the baby suck harder
 If diff sucking rate, we think we know that baby can distinguish the
sounds

Stuff about noises:

 Prosodic information: prosody, intonation, and rhythm.
o Source of discrimination in languges
 Infants prefer voice, songs with words over other noise
o Also mother’s voice over other females’

Head turning paradigm / preferential looking

 Same basic thing as above
 Baby distinguishing old vs new sounds
 At 6 months babies can discriminate
 At 12, they can’t tell non-native differences

Can’t assign meaning / mental states

 Can’t say they have a preference
 They just recognize things

Phonemic contrasts
2 hypotheses:
 Blank slate: kids must learn to discriminate the things valid in the
native language
o Kid needs to perform phonemic discriminations from birth
 Perceptual narrowing
o Kids learn ALL possible contrasts and must forget the
irrelevant ones (pruning)
 o Evidence supports his one
 Babies do this by taking stats / notes /noticing
 Functional reorganization of sound space
o This thing that people might not pronounce sounds exactly
the same but my /b/ is still the same as your /b/
Word discrimination
 Issues for babies
o Words not said in isolation
 Need to place word boundaries
 Phonological bootstrapping:
o Split speech/continuous sound signal in units
 Phonemes and syllables
o Leads to word segmentation
 Kids rely on acoustic cues that signal prosodic
boundaries, like pauses
Word meanings
 Quine: gavagai problem
o The thing with the bunny, like if it jumps out what does it
mean?
o Word can refer to many things
 “Tools” for word meaning
o Disposition to establish “joint attention”
 Very important
 The first problem is just getting the kid’s attention
o Whole-object constraint
 X-refers to whole object, not part of object
o Mutual exclusivity bias
 If one object is X, other object are Y
New word could be a new thing but not the label for a
thing that you already know the label to
 But then like, how do synonyms work ?
 Or same words for different things?
o Money bank vs river bank
o Taxonomic constraint:
 Labels refer to objects of the same kind
 Not objects that are thematically related
  Something is like something else
Acquiring human lang vid
 Two major options to convey meaning
o Word order
o Inflections – changing word endings
o Almost every language uses these two things
 When did the boy say [how] he hurt himself?
o Interesting cuz no one ever explained to the child the
difference between the two sentences , they just know it
 Could be indicative of innate language
 Plato’s problem
o “Gap between knowledge and experience”
o How do children know stuff without being exposed to it
o PoS problem – how to children learn so much with being
taught (explicitly) so little
 Cuz no one sits down with them and teaches them
every little thing
 Learning how to walk
 Difference between ‘how’ and ‘when’ with the boy
o Chomsky linked it to language specifically
 Language is innate – that’s why there’s a gap between
knowledge and experience

Week 4 – first words/phrases

 “wauwau” referring to something furry
 Kids seem to create very subtle perceptual sets
o Perception over function
o Appearance dominates word making effort, not function
 Uh oh vs oops
o Oops is for agents / people
o Uh oh is for incidents
o Both indicate that children have expectations
 Indicates children know things don’t just “happen”
 Have knowledge about how things are supposed to go
 Makes children more active agents of language and not
just passive observers of whatever is going on
  Shows children can distinguish between 2 different
states
 “Daddy” & sneakers
o Words can refer to relationships between things
o Level of abstraction!
 Direct reference to relational reference
 Daddy doesn’t have to be there for the relational
reference
 Cuz direct reference would be like
 Point to pen – that’s a pen
o This is big shit because animals do not refer to objects so
creatively
 Humans unique in relational abstractions
o Opens realm for all the thematic relations (thing with kim and
the eggs)
 Ownership
 Agents
 Goals
 Instruments
Main takeaway – very ambiguous
 Hard to differentiate what a child means if they’re
assigning an attribute or not
o Two-word phases with relational nouns
 Agent-object, etc
 Remember what’s not possible
 Ex: Mommy daddy
 Conjunction not possible with two word phrases
cuz its democratic
 In language, things have to dominate other
things
o Ex: boathouse vs houseboat
o Conjunction is democaratic – nothing dominates anything
 The thing with the house boat
 Cuz in language, one thing dominates the other
o Maybe cuz we have this thing where language is structured in
a way where one thing is the head
  Merging:
o Creates modifier relation where one element is the main
element
 New york student film committee = type of committee
 Recursion: do the same operation again, and do it upon the same
structure
o the things
 Syntactical bootstrapping
o Syntax can help you figure out meaning (semantics)
 John daxed (intransitive) – john did something
 John kip the gorp (transitive) – something to another
thing
 John flims the gorp to the lirk (ditransitive) – doing
thing to a thing
Know that this is a process
Direct reference (one word phase)  relational reference(one word)  two
word phase (merging) – opens up world for recursion and stuff
 Just that idea that hey, they figured out something about language
o When they learn one thing dominates another, recursion and
merging and other things can happen.

Week 5 – Reference
 How do thigns and language connect?
 There’s pretend “absolute reference”
o No such thing as “absolute reference”
o There’s pretend absolute reference
 Absolute reference: look at THAT car
 One specific thing
 Variable reference: have you read THAT book
 Not the particular thing, but something like it
 More abstract
 From “a” to “the”
o General to specific
o Language providing tools
o Major mental shift
o Problem: “I went to a restaurant. The menu was terrible”
  You didn’t introduce the things
o Part-whole connection
 THE can refer to sub-parts of objects, based on world
knowledge
 Even proper names do not seem to directly refer to the
object/person (form of absolute reference)
o But names refer to an idea in people’s mind
o Label is a collection of ideas in people’s minds and they tend
to vary
 Person can be teacher, student, son/daughter, etc
 All the THERES
o Expression of satisfaction
o Comforting
o Deictic
o Existential
o Locative
 Means no direct relationship between language and thought
o Freedom to refer
o Sapir – Whorf hypothesis tho : language affects thought
 40 inuit words for snow because snow was snow
prevalent in their environment that they had to label it
 Environment was controlling their language
 BUT English can still communicate types of snow,
just with more words/in a different way
 Color perception – if a language doesn’t have words to
describe different shades/colors, they perceive it in the
same way
 Sky blue, navy blue vs just blue
 Hopi don’t experience time cuz they don’t have time
words
 Aboriginal spatial orientation with the cardinal directions
But still trying to change minds today
 Chairman  chairperson, in the name of equality
 Spatial orientation
 Aboriginal example – north, south, east west
 You have fly on your north leg or whatever
  Language is set up that way so affects their
thinking to always know where they are
 English uses self to orient themselves
 Relationship between language and cognition is still unclear
basically
o It matters
o Cuz if child has grammatical deficit, not equal to cognitive
deficit
 Then that means SLI is a thing cuz, if you give them
nonverbal task, they’ll be fine then it’s like what

Week 6 : Morphology / Recursion

Morphology
 Agglutinative language
o Gluing stuff together
o Heavily inflectional language
 Analytic (English)
o Using a lot of function words that inflections/compounding
does in other languages
o But English still has some inflection and derivation tho
 Inflection modifies meaning, not changing it
o Change  changes (still noun, just plural)
o Does not change word class
 Ex: change /change(s)
o English has inflections for
 Past-tense
 Aspect (not completed actions)
 So like, he is eating
 Derivation: forming new word
o Happy vs (un)happy
o Sometimes changes word class
Recursion
 Repetition is not recursion
 Evolves from Merge
o Merge brings words together
o Recursion creates new structure
 Central idea to generative grammar
o Generates more of itself from within itself
 Unique aspect of human language ?
 Know how to give recursion examples at every level – know the
example and the thing in parentheses
o Word level
 Anti-anti-missile missile (prefixation)
 Big, black, strange bear (adjective)
 Changing meaning (kind of bear) but same
structure (all adjectives)
 Student film group festival (compound)
o Phrase level
 Possessive
 john’s friend’s car’s thing
 Prep phrases
 In the corner in the cabinet under the thing
 Conjunction:
 I came and I saw and I shat myself
o Clause level
 Infinitive Verbs
 John wants to start to go to sing
 Finite verbs
 Mary thinks that john thinks…
 Almost no recursive possessives in adult/child language
 Principle: all languages have recursion
 Parameter: some languages build left, right, both
 BUT
o Everett: if Piraha doesn’t have recursion, recursion is not
universal
o Chomsky said they might have potential to use it, they just
don’t use it
 They can walk, but they prefer to crawl
 So why bother trying to find commonalities
o Cuz if language is not nature and born with it, then what the
heck
o Could prove innateness of language principle is wrong
Week 8
Ellipsis: allows “efficient” communication
 Omission of a word/words/ from a sentence
 Makes it syntactically, but not semantically incomplete
o Structure is incomplete, but still makes sense
 Rule: Words over visual stuff
o The thing with the cookies and the fruit
o Bowl of cookies next to fruit.
 “Here is some fruit” (takes cookies)
 “Did I take some?”
 Distributive ellipsis
o John saw his mother and so did Bill
 But who’s mother ?
o Every noun gets their own attribute
 John saw his mother and bill saw his too
 Ragged endpoint
o Reconstruct and replace sometimes a little less, sometimes a
little more
o Varies between speakers in interpretations
 Shorter not equal to easier
o Varied reconstruction
o Can lead to ambiguity
o Children offered shorter sentences may still not understand if
the relevant part is left out

Plurals invite abstractions
 Thinking about categories
o Do you like bananas?
 Need to understand asking about “concept” of bananas
 Plural distributivity : similar to ellipsis
o Everybody went [to their own] home
o But everybody went to HIS home
 Single, plural, and exhaustive
o The thing with the girls and the sweaters
  Pointing to one girl in a sweater vs all of them
(exhaustive)

Don’t make the leap from grammatical to mental deficit

Modularity of Mind proposal
 Module for language
 Module for cognition
 Heavily intertwined , but essentially separate
o One can trigger another
 This is just Roeper’s proposal
o Not a known fact so
 Piaget thought problem with language = problem with cognition
o Leap from grammatical deficit to mental deficit
o But roeper says don’t extend justdgement of one module to
another

Week 9 : Theory of Mind

 Mental States: independent of the real world and independent of
the mental states of others
o So like, you can think it’s raining when it’s not
 False Belief: belief that is in fact not true, based on the real world
 ToM is the ability to attribute mental states to people other than
yourself
 Two methods to assess ToM using false beliefs
o Unexpected contents / smarties
o Change of Location / Sally Ann Task
 In general, children ~ 4 years old pass and younger ones fail
 Why does it develop late – just developmentally generally? Well
maybe because of:
o Executive function
 Managing two perspectives too hard
 Reality pulls to hard and can’t suppress the other
one
o Memory : maybe not enough memory / too complex
o Inference: two independent facts
 Trouble bridging ideas in two different things.
 o Language development:
 Embedding (subordination)
 Mental state verbs (think, feel)
 ToM – type of cognition
o Heavily influenced by language
 3 options for relationship between language and ToM:
o Factor X facilitates ToM and language
 Internally: developments in memory and executive
functioning
Externally: more socially sophisticated activites (ex:
school)
o ToM facilitates language
 Joint attention facilitates world-to-world mapping
 Non-verbal false-belief task
 Cuz the two tasks are very heavily reliant on
language
 Longer looks for illogical searches compared to
logical searches
 When the person looks in the box with
nothing in it
 Interpretation: infancts have expectations
regarding actions
o Violating those expectations (illogical
searches) triggers longer looking time
 So although they can’t express it in
language, they’re expressing ToM
o Language facilitates ToM, but what aspect of language?
 Semantics: mental state verbs
 Learning what “think” means and all that
 Syntax: embedded structure
 Can hold more than one truth value
 Allows more than one perspective
 Most salient connection hearing the word “that”
 So child makes connection that “that” is a
key word for expressing mental things to
what’s happening in the world
  Memory for complements task
 Report on thought content
 Communicative and mental state verbs share the
structure of subordination
 Thought he found his ring, but it was really a
bottlecap
 ToM and ASD
o Question is if ASD people have theory of mind
o Happe’s assessment of “able” austistics
 If they pass  TOM
 If they fail  TOM is “hack out” strategy
 Failure of TOM in individuals could be because
they memorized a task

Week 10: Cognition

 Thinking in symbols
 Literally the moment we step away from reference, things become
symbols
 Representational insight
o Knowledge that an entity can stand for something other than
itself
o Like the child saying “daddy” and looking at the sneakers –
symbolic relationship between the dad and the sneakers
 DeLoache Studies
o Using scale model to find toy in large room
 Using scale model in representational way
o Retrieval 1: find toy in real rooom
o Retrieval 2: back to symbol/model: where was the toy?
 Important to eliminate confound of just forgetting / bad
memory
o Saying the room “shrank” increased success because it
eliminated “symbolic” aspect of it
 Removes problem of dual representation
 Thinking about entity 2 different ways at the
same time
 Appearance / reality distinction
o Things not always what they seem
o Kids have this thing where if you change the appearance, you
change the reality
 That thing where the grandma can’t drive grandpa’s
car, so the kid tell her to dress up like grandpa
o DeVries study
 Putting dog mask on a cat changes identity of the
animal
o Dual encoding problem?
 Creating sets is based on perception
 Perception is a very stable thing
 Children rely on appearance, so how it looks,
that’s how it is
 Fantasy / reality distinction
o Is pretending real to children?
 Differentiate between imagined and experienced events
o Harris studies: imagining bunny / monster in a box
 Kids know at one level distinction between imagination
and reality
 BUT still don’t exclude possiblilty of actual danger
o Do adults always make this distinction ?
 Symbolic play: substituting one thing for another
 Sociodramatic play: elaborate social form of symbolic play
o Playing school, doctor, etc
 Piaget:
o Single cognitive system as opposed to roeper’s modularity of
mind
o Child is active, self-motivated agent
 Not just a mini-adult
o Equilibration model: the thing with the boat and the duck
 Cognitive schemes need to be kept in balance
 Disequilibrium is intrinsically in balance
 Assimilation: incorporate new info into already existing
schemes
  Accommodation: change scheme to incorporate new
info
4 different stages (know them in the right order)
 Sensorimotor : reflexes to goal-directed behavior
o So purposefully doing things
 Characteristics of the other three
o Operations drive actions
 Operations are internalized actions (covert/mental), no
trial and error
So going from “ I need to actually try this thing to see if
it will work” to “I’ll just think about it to see if it’ll work
instead of actually doing it”
o Use of symbols
o Rules and reversibility: operations can be reversed or
compensated with another operation
 Preoperational: 2-7: almost entire language period
o Perceptual centration
 Influenced by how a thing seems (Appearance) not
what it must be (logic)
 The thing with the milk in the red glass
o Conservation: knowing entity is the same despite changing
forms
o Egocentric: others see the world as they do
 ToM and false belief tasks (4y/os)
 Concrete Operations: 7-11
o Perception becomes less egocentric
o Can consider 2 dimensions at once
o Still need the environment cuz can’t think about thinking
o Able to pass conservation tasks and other tests
o Feel disequilibrium and contradiction when conservation is
reversed
 Formal operations:
o Reflection
o Hypothetico-deductive reasoning : true symbolic thinking
 Don’t necessarily need the environment to think
 Reflection : thinking about thinking
  Going from general to specific in hypothesis
 Inductive
 So like, if you’re in a new city and you need to
take the train, you can apply general knowledge
about train systems to assume something about
the new system
 Conservation tasks
o Know the format of the conservation tasks in logic language
(B  B’, etc)
 A=B
 B  B’
 A ? B’
 Kids have greater cognition than piaget though
 Perhaps it overestimates formal operations in adults

Week 12 – Bilingualism / AAE

Within English grammar, there are inconsistencies
 Our grammar consists of multiple subgrammars
o Fundamentally bilingual?
 Language vs dialect? Very ill-defined
o Idea of bilingualism may be more complicated than just
“english vs chinese”
o Language / dialect not equal to intelligence/education
 Can’t make heinous assumptions about anyone’s
language use
 “Everyone that speaks MAE likes tomatoes”
 Although there is language variation and differ in degree of
expression/precision, that does not mean same concept cannot be
expressed in another language
o Unheimlich – doesn’t mean you can’t understand the feeling,
just need more words in English to express it
o Relates to modularity of mind
 If language and cognition were the same, then it would
suggest that if you have to say things in a different
way, you think of that thing in a different way too
 But no
 Language changes
o In English: no semantic present tense in syntactic present
tense
 AAE has a system
 Perspectives :
o AAE is same system, but has a different meaning from MAE
o Progressive dimension – deletion of 3rd person
o Contradiction dimension: could be root of racial biases
 Says it’s 100% different
 Code-switching
 12/1/2016 2:06:00 PM

Essay questions
 More critical reasoning and thinking
 Describing and linking things
 Argumentative

Multiple choice will be like 60%

 Facts
 Specific theories
12/1/2016 2:06:00 PM