COGS - Week 4 - 10-2-23 - Language Aquisition.docx

Learning Language (Language Acquisition) Week 4 Notes: October 7 (Saturday at Midnight (Paper is Due) Thursday (Presentation is due) Oct 5: 5 minute presentation An argument for a position Proposal for experiment that would advance understanding of a topic Apply something we have discussed in cla...

Learning Language (Language Acquisition) Week 4 Notes: October 7 (Saturday at Midnight (Paper is Due) Thursday (Presentation is due) Oct 5: 5 minute presentation An argument for a position Proposal for experiment that would advance understanding of a topic Apply something we have discussed in class to an aspect of our mind that we have not applied it to 1000 words Consult sampled papers No sources are really required Group Meeting should be on Zoom and presentations should not be more than 5 min Presentations will meet on Thursday and will be arranged by the group members and will be recorded for the TA to grade Nature vs Nurture is a debate that has to do with language learning How much of behavior/reasoning/cognition is due to how we are raised and/or hardwired Debate headed up with Noam Chomsky (Nature or Nativists) and Skinner (Empiricist or Nurture) Skinner: Everything we do is a response to a stimulus If you can condition creatures to respond to stimuli in predictable ways then all behavior is due to stimuli Pidgeon Operant Chamber Pidgeon given reward when a green light is on Stimulus Discrimination Learned Response: Discriminated operatn Response is under control of the stimulus Skinner believed that this was a way that we learned new language Language acquisition, therefore, is a really complex reinforcement of verbal responses to stimuli Ex: two plus two equals (four) Trained responses to verbal stimuli Operant: Some behavior (I say four/Pidgeon presses lever) Reinforcer: Some reward or punishment (Get praised by teacher/Get food when lever is pressed) Chomsky: However, the same stimulus could elicit different behavior Ex: If you make the sound of the airplane, a small child might recreate that sound as well. How would that be reinforcement training? Reinforcement may not be the correct term for this or it is meaningless If a child recreates the sound of an airplane, maybe the child just like that sound Or a writer wants other to read his work, which is why he will write or say different things Poverty of the Stimulus There are many things that children can produce and comprehend There is too much stimuli in the world to predict how a child may respond Skinners Behaviorallist approach does not predict behavior and is too strict Moreover: Children do not speak with formal training Therea re numerous deviations, midway changes, and false starts in speech There is NO STIMULUS that can produce a specific response because language is far too free form Skinner described language as operant conditioning Chomsky described language as a hard-wired ability Critical Period Paper (Friedmann and Dana Rusou) The Critical period is a point in which the brain MUST receive specific stimulus for it to grow/function A critical period in which the brain can be trained Neural Plasticity: The brains ability to restructure itself when learning new things Anything is easy to acquire when you still have neural plasticity Some monkeys can remember faces even if they were not exposed to or trained to do so in critical period’ Chomsky was a linguist, which was part of the reason why he took this th eory, as the behavioralist stimuli-behavior approach did not agree with what he observed in language Linguists Phonetics: How do we make or perceive the SOUNDS of language In an example, we realize that a piece of a sentence that represents the words “can get” to the sound “HNN” And the word “Friday Night” becomes “FRAN” When we listen to language, we can reconstruct sounds into words… This is why we cannot recognize other languages: We have not learned the mapping THIS MAPPING IS TOP DOWN Phonology: The study of the rules governing the combination of sounds Example: We could say that plork COULD be a word due to phonetic rules But fprok is NOT a word Phonemes (Speech Sounds) These are easily discriminated in small childrein In fact An hour after birth, you are able to distinguish speech sounds (Phonemes) from different languages This phenomenon also occurs IN THE WOMB Infants are clearny doing statistical learning, BUT there is NO STIMULUS or BEHAVIORIST EXPLANATION Statistical Learning: Attend to the properties of something within your environment and recognize thiem But this could be a more general type of statistical learning, which means that Skinner’s reinforcement learning was not entirely wrong Morphology: Pieces of words A Morpheme is the smallest unit of a word that has meaning Ex: Plural morpheme: /s/ Ex: 2 Morphemes in Teacher Bitter has 1 Warmth has 1 Infants can predict various sound or sequences because SOUNDS CONTAIN HIGHLY STRUCTURED INFORMATION How do Infants do this? If you hear specific sounds (bee goo la da ta) you can use them as clues as to what goes into words Ex: Pretty Baby Ti ba is a word that signals two separate words Pri tiba by Infants encode sounds (Morphemes), but some languages share morphemes, which makes mapping sounds to words kind of tricky We learn what is likely to occur and then try to make good guess based on other information Syntax: The structure of language Syntax is hampered if you are not exposed in the critical period Ex: Colorlous green ideas sleep furiously Vs Sleep Colorlous green furiously ideas We can impose meaning in the first sentence because of the hierarchical combination effect of adverbs, adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc Syntax is what animals seem to struggle with Chomsky proposes a Universal Grammer: A basic set of constraints that all human languages follow Chomsky also believes in the Poverty of the Stimulus and that children come with inherent abilitis to understand language