I think the blocking principle is an interesting psychological mechanism that explains how children are able to learn irregulars even without negative evidence from parents. Is this mechanism simply just a mechanism of memory and ease of recall? Do less common irregular verbs usually take longer for children to learn? How can the blocking principle allow children to follow the sequence from “took” to “taked”, without creating a superset of the English language?
On 6.4 Prosody You know when someone speaks sarcastically, or if they’re hinting something. We know the prosodic mechanisms behind this, and that prosodic choices are made to contribute to the meaning of a word, or set of words, at all stages of processing (semantic, syntactic, word-level). Prosody plays a major part in how we communicate with other people, sometimes helping cross a language barrier. We use it and understand it without even thinking about it. Prosodic cues can tell us more about what someone means than simple words. Given this, prosody isn’t only innate, but seems to go beyond simple language, beyond symbol grounding. We may choose the words consciously, but we aren’t always aware of the way we say them. This emphasizes how complementary these mechanisms are for understanding meaning in what people are saying, and prosody could very well tell us more about cognition than we think.
“Most obviously, the shape of the human vocal tract seems to have been modified in evolution of the demands of speech. Our larynxes are low in our throats, and our vocal tracts have a sharp right angle bend that creates two independently-modifiable resonant cavities…that defines a large two-dimensional range of vowel sounds.”
In much of the traditional literature on first language acquisition, babbling during infancy was conceptualized as a phenomenon exclusive to the verbal modality reflecting the maturation of the speech apparatus and its underlying motor mechanisms. However, these speech-exclusive approaches have been challenged by the patterns of language acquisition in deaf infants who reach analogous developmental milestones in a similar time course but in a different modality. Thus, UG, which underlies the human language faculty, can be conceptualized in a multi-modal way.
I was very interested in reading about “Learnability Theory”. The interaction of positive and negative evidence for language interaction are crucial for explaining language acquisition. Both of these evidences reply on feedback from parents/the environment. This may not have anything to do with a child’s pre-motivational readiness to acquire language, but I do believe that it is an adaptive trait and response that fits the environment in which the child is brought up in.
From what I understand, these are the parts of learnability theory. 1) There are a class of languages in which there is one target language, the one spoken in the target environment. 2) The child will naturally employ a learning strategy, this is where positive and negative evidence comes into play. There is either a positive feedback look or negative feedback look that reinforces the child’s language. With this understanding, my previous point about pre-motivation comes up again. Universal grammar must be innate, as children right out of the womb have no context or class distinction between languages. There is no rubric for them to even know to seek out/prioritize language acquisition without an innate, inborn, human trait. In my opinion. The acquisition of language is just as innate as the acquisition of higher level motor function.
"Learning to speak UG-compliantly is more like trying to figure out the rules of chess from viewing many chess games, all played by the rules (no errors), and then, on the basis of that sample of positive evidence alone, becoming able to play chess rulefully, with no need for error-correction, never having seen or made an error"
Based on this, could way say that children are only exposed to positive evidence which is self corrected by UG? Even when we use or learn language as adults we still don't have negative evidence because a grammatically wrong sentence too conveys meaning through a proposition. Does this mean that all of language acquisition is mere exposure sorted out internally by universal grammar. U could learn language and use it through instruction but this also needs UG for the rules to make sense right?
In this article again, pinker makes the 2 contradictory claims that 1/ language evolved "serially", with a series of protolanguages that eventually led to human language, and 2/ no trace of such protolanguages can be found in any living species other than humans. He does explain that humans do not descend from living non human primate species, but this still remains very unlikely as an explanation. This is because if 1 is true, then either those protolanguages held some evolutionary advantage or they didn't (similar to the debate on vision he referred to in the first article: is 5% of an eye better than 0%? it could be that the eye was used for something else, or was just a non-harmful characteristic until it became used for vision). It is very unlikely that those protolanguages did not hold any advantage if they existed, given the outcome of the mushroom experiment (located at a more primary level of evolution). And if did hold an advantage, then why would species other than humans (descending from the same ancestor as humans) not have kept this advantage? why would they not have survived but other primates with no such characteristic would (and here i mean primates who shared a common ancestor with humans but not with other living species, since pinker argues that the first protolanguage appeared after we split off from the lineage leading to chimps). It is precisely because UG is such a complex, yet universally shared characteristic, that in the evolutionary framework it can't have developed completely linearly --> meaning there must have been an intermediate after the split from chimps --> since those protolanguages were more beneficial than the communication skills of current chimps and presumably their ancestors --> they should have survived if chimps did.
I think it’s pretty obvious that UG is inborn, and that there is specificity in the brain for language and language acquisition, but I don’t think that that the content of UG (e.g. the complex set of rules that make up UG), which guide language acquisition, are necessarily specific to language or that the learning process of language acquisition itself is specific to language/ completely distinct from other aspects of human cognition.
My point is that UG may have developed to facilitate language, but its rules are inevitable; they are a property of human cognition. So, the way UG works might not have anything to do with language per se, but rather the way our brains work!
If we accept that our success depends on doing the right thing with the right kind of thing, and that most of our cognition and behaviours rely on doing the right thing with the right kind of thing, then almost all aspects of cognition should be built to serve this purpose (of categorization), so the way we think, act..etc. is defined by kinds' relationships to other kinds. Language is not an exception; most of the words in natural language are content words that represent categories, and when we speak we are mostly just translating what thing is happening to some category. So, a person’s grammar should be set up in a way that best conveys what things are happening to some category, which could explain the universality and principles of UG, and nature of language acquisition. For example, in all languages every proposition has a subject, i.e. the category in question. Children don’t learn language word or word, but by phrases, which makes sense if the goal is to convey relationships, or what is happening, to a category. This perspective also explains the importance of context and semantics, and how rule learning relies on children mapping rules to grammatical categories; Why kids cross culturally have very similar two word combinations; the ease that we can apply affixes to words to slightly modify their category to a new, related, category; why children can learn any word order, as long as the concept of SOV is there, and why they don’t over generalize a language since there are only so many possibilities of things that can rightly occur to a category and that similar things (of the same grammatical class) happens to similar types of categories.
Point is, although there is some “innate” capacity for language, the “innate capacity” might not have anything to do with properties of a langue per se, but just another product of the way cognition works.
I think the blocking principle is an interesting psychological mechanism that explains how children are able to learn irregulars even without negative evidence from parents. Is this mechanism simply just a mechanism of memory and ease of recall? Do less common irregular verbs usually take longer for children to learn? How can the blocking principle allow children to follow the sequence from “took” to “taked”, without creating a superset of the English language?
ReplyDeleteOn 6.4 Prosody
ReplyDeleteYou know when someone speaks sarcastically, or if they’re hinting something. We know the prosodic mechanisms behind this, and that prosodic choices are made to contribute to the meaning of a word, or set of words, at all stages of processing (semantic, syntactic, word-level). Prosody plays a major part in how we communicate with other people, sometimes helping cross a language barrier. We use it and understand it without even thinking about it. Prosodic cues can tell us more about what someone means than simple words. Given this, prosody isn’t only innate, but seems to go beyond simple language, beyond symbol grounding. We may choose the words consciously, but we aren’t always aware of the way we say them. This emphasizes how complementary these mechanisms are for understanding meaning in what people are saying, and prosody could very well tell us more about cognition than we think.
“Most obviously, the shape of the human vocal tract seems to have been modified in evolution of the demands of speech. Our larynxes are low in our throats, and our vocal tracts have a sharp right angle bend that creates two independently-modifiable resonant cavities…that defines a large two-dimensional range of vowel sounds.”
ReplyDeleteIn much of the traditional literature on first language acquisition, babbling during infancy was conceptualized as a phenomenon exclusive to the verbal modality reflecting the maturation of the speech apparatus and its underlying motor mechanisms. However, these speech-exclusive approaches have been challenged by the patterns of language acquisition in deaf infants who reach analogous developmental milestones in a similar time course but in a different modality. Thus, UG, which underlies the human language faculty, can be conceptualized in a multi-modal way.
I was very interested in reading about “Learnability Theory”. The interaction of positive and negative evidence for language interaction are crucial for explaining language acquisition. Both of these evidences reply on feedback from parents/the environment. This may not have anything to do with a child’s pre-motivational readiness to acquire language, but I do believe that it is an adaptive trait and response that fits the environment in which the child is brought up in.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I understand, these are the parts of learnability theory. 1) There are a class of languages in which there is one target language, the one spoken in the target environment. 2) The child will naturally employ a learning strategy, this is where positive and negative evidence comes into play. There is either a positive feedback look or negative feedback look that reinforces the child’s language. With this understanding, my previous point about pre-motivation comes up again. Universal grammar must be innate, as children right out of the womb have no context or class distinction between languages. There is no rubric for them to even know to seek out/prioritize language acquisition without an innate, inborn, human trait. In my opinion. The acquisition of language is just as innate as the acquisition of higher level motor function.
"Learning to speak UG-compliantly is more like trying to figure out the rules of chess from viewing many chess games, all played by the rules (no errors), and then, on the basis of that sample of positive evidence alone, becoming able to play chess rulefully, with no need for error-correction, never having seen or made an error"
ReplyDeleteBased on this, could way say that children are only exposed to positive evidence which is self corrected by UG? Even when we use or learn language as adults we still don't have negative evidence because a grammatically wrong sentence too conveys meaning through a proposition. Does this mean that all of language acquisition is mere exposure sorted out internally by universal grammar. U could learn language and use it through instruction but this also needs UG for the rules to make sense right?
In this article again, pinker makes the 2 contradictory claims that 1/ language evolved "serially", with a series of protolanguages that eventually led to human language, and 2/ no trace of such protolanguages can be found in any living species other than humans. He does explain that humans do not descend from living non human primate species, but this still remains very unlikely as an explanation. This is because if 1 is true, then either those protolanguages held some evolutionary advantage or they didn't (similar to the debate on vision he referred to in the first article: is 5% of an eye better than 0%? it could be that the eye was used for something else, or was just a non-harmful characteristic until it became used for vision). It is very unlikely that those protolanguages did not hold any advantage if they existed, given the outcome of the mushroom experiment (located at a more primary level of evolution). And if did hold an advantage, then why would species other than humans (descending from the same ancestor as humans) not have kept this advantage? why would they not have survived but other primates with no such characteristic would (and here i mean primates who shared a common ancestor with humans but not with other living species, since pinker argues that the first protolanguage appeared after we split off from the lineage leading to chimps). It is precisely because UG is such a complex, yet universally shared characteristic, that in the evolutionary framework it can't have developed completely linearly --> meaning there must have been an intermediate after the split from chimps --> since those protolanguages were more beneficial than the communication skills of current chimps and presumably their ancestors --> they should have survived if chimps did.
ReplyDeleteI think it’s pretty obvious that UG is inborn, and that there is specificity in the brain for language and language acquisition, but I don’t think that that the content of UG (e.g. the complex set of rules that make up UG), which guide language acquisition, are necessarily specific to language or that the learning process of language acquisition itself is specific to language/ completely distinct from other aspects of human cognition.
ReplyDeleteMy point is that UG may have developed to facilitate language, but its rules are inevitable; they are a property of human cognition. So, the way UG works might not have anything to do with language per se, but rather the way our brains work!
If we accept that our success depends on doing the right thing with the right kind of thing, and that most of our cognition and behaviours rely on doing the right thing with the right kind of thing, then almost all aspects of cognition should be built to serve this purpose (of categorization), so the way we think, act..etc. is defined by kinds' relationships to other kinds. Language is not an exception; most of the words in natural language are content words that represent categories, and when we speak we are mostly just translating what thing is happening to some category. So, a person’s grammar should be set up in a way that best conveys what things are happening to some category, which could explain the universality and principles of UG, and nature of language acquisition. For example, in all languages every proposition has a subject, i.e. the category in question. Children don’t learn language word or word, but by phrases, which makes sense if the goal is to convey relationships, or what is happening, to a category. This perspective also explains the importance of context and semantics, and how rule learning relies on children mapping rules to grammatical categories; Why kids cross culturally have very similar two word combinations; the ease that we can apply affixes to words to slightly modify their category to a new, related, category; why children can learn any word order, as long as the concept of SOV is there, and why they don’t over generalize a language since there are only so many possibilities of things that can rightly occur to a category and that similar things (of the same grammatical class) happens to similar types of categories.
DeletePoint is, although there is some “innate” capacity for language, the “innate capacity” might not have anything to do with properties of a langue per se, but just another product of the way cognition works.