Download Syntactic Knowledge

Syntactic Knowledge
ECSE 500 Spring 2014
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February 26
 Language learning activities –
 Morphology language sample activity
 Syntactic Knowledge
 Pragmatic Skills
Semantic Development
 Acquisition of words and their meanings
 First words at about 12 months
 Initially this is a slow, gradual process
 Maybe learn a couple of words a week
 Object words, commands, some social words (bye-
bye)
 Then, several months after it begins, word
learning speeds up dramatically
 Usually begins when child’s vocabulary is around
50-100 words
 The “Vocabulary Burst” or “Naming Explosion
The Vocabulary Burst
 Rapid increase in the rate of word learning in
very early childhood. Estimated that the
average 5-year-old knows about 6000 words
 If child knows 100 words at 18-months, this means
they learn 5900 words over the next 3 ½ years.
 Almost 5 words/day
 “Fast-Mapping”
 How do they do it?
 Naming insight: Everything has a name and
there’s a name for everything
 Application of word-learning strategies or principles
specific to this task:
Word-learning errors
 Undergeneralization
 Using a word to narrowly, e.g. only using “cat” for
your own pet
 More common in early word learning, prior to
naming explosion
 Overgeneralization
 Using a word too broadly, e.g. using “cat” to label
cats, dogs, cows, etc…
 More common after the naming explosion
 Do they really think a cow is a cat? More likely it is
“lexical gap filling”
The 14 Morphemes (Brown, 1970)
 14 early-learned morphemes that are essential to
learning English syntax
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plural –s, posessive –s, progressive –ing, past –ed,
irregular past, third person -s
in, on
the, a
copula be, auxiliary be (contracted and uncontracted)
 Vastly increase the complexity of language
 Use Mean Length of Utterance in Morphemes as a
measure of children’s syntactic development.
What are children learning?
 Are they simply remembering and imitating what
they hear or are they learning syntactic rules?
 Good evidence that they are learning rules
 How do children treat words they’ve never heard
before: The “Wug” Test
 Overregularization of syntactic patterns
The “Wug” Test (Berko, 1958)
This is a wug.
Now there are two
of them. There are two
--------.
Can do this for possessive, progressive, past morphemes
How do kids do?
 Children as young as 3 productively use all of
these morphemes on novel words
 -ing is acquired the earliest (consistency of
form)
 Plural, possessive, and past allomorphs next
 /wugz/ /wuks/ /wucIz/
 /wugd/ /wukd/ /wudId/
 Those adding the extra vowel are acquired a little
later, but even children as young as 4 regularly apply
the correct allomorph to the stem.
Overregularization
 Application of morphological and syntactic rules
 Typically see this with irregular forms
 Goed, eated, hurted
 Mouses, mooses, childs
 Children as old as 7 overregularize as will adults
learning a new language
 Syntactic rules are represented as such, the
exceptions are stored explicitly.
 Double markings: “wented” or “mices”
Syntactic development
 Shortly after the vocabulary burst, kids
begin to combine words.
 “mommy sock”
 Early word combinations typically express a
common set of meanings
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Recurrence “More bottle”
Negation “No bottle”
Possession “My bottle”
Actor-action “Baby eat”
Syntactic Knowledge
 Syntax refers to the rules used for combining words
to form sentences.
 – So that there is a systematic way to put words
together, NOT in a random order
 – E.g., Subject + Predicate + Object is the rule for
basic sentences.
 E.g., “ John reads a book” E.g., “Mary is happy”
Syntactic Knowledge
 The knowledge of how words can be combined in
meaningful sentences, phrases, or utterances.
 Mean length of utterance
 Complexity of sentences
 Negation
 Interrogatives
 Passive voice
 Pronouns
Syntactic Knowledge
 In English the basic order for a simple sentence is:
 Noun – verb – object
 The boy kicked the ball.
 The rule allows us to know that the boy did the
kicking and the ball was what he kicked.
 Kicked the ball the boy.
 Without rules for order we have no meaning.
Telegraphic Speech
 A simplified manner of speech in which only the most
important content words are used to express ideas, while
grammatical function words (such as determiners,
conjunctions, and prepositions) as well as inflectional endings
are often omitted.
 Why do children produce telegraphic speech?
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– Mainly because children possess only limited processing capacity,
consequently,
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– They choose more salient words which are nouns, verbs, and
adjectives in adult speech.
Telegraphic Speech
 Children’s use of telegraphic speech may indicate
their level of semantic and syntactic development.
 More juice
 Play more
 All gone
Complexity vs Word Count
 Measured by Mean length of utterance – MLUm or
MLUw
 MLUm
 More than number of words
 Accounts for complexity due to morphemes, and
syntax
 # of morphemes divided by the number of words
spoken
Mean Length of Utterance
 Stage
Age (M)
MLUm
 Stage I
15-30
1.75
 Stage II
28-36
2.25
 Stage III
36-42
2.75
 Stage IV
40-46
3.5
 Stage V
42-52+
4.0
Pronouns
 Enhance semantics and syntax
 Why?
 Pronoun takes the place of a noun –semantic (word
meaning)
 Pronoun refers to a previous noun in a sentence,
therefore, it is important to use correct positioning.
 Because of the reflective nature of pronouns it is
difficult for young children to learn to use them
correctly.
 I and me
Negation
 NO!
 No sleep
 I no want to sleep
 I don’t want to go to sleep
Negation
 Progression of use of negation:
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Stage 1: add no to the beginning or end of the sentence
 No want some food
No the sun is shining
Wear mitten no
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Stage 2: insert a negative element He no bite you.
 I no want envelope.
 I can’t see you.
 That no fish school.
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Stage 3: insert a negative element, include an auxilliary
 I don’t want no food.
I didn’t did it.
No, it isn’t.
Intonation and Interrogatives
 Intonation and Interrogatives
 Stage 1: external question marker (rising
intonation)
 I ride train?
Who that?
Where milk go?
 Stage 2: subj-aux inversion in Y/N, but not wh-Q
 Does the kitty stand up?
Did Mommy pinch her finger? Why kitty can’t stand
up? What you are smiling?
 Stage 3: subj-aux inversion in wh-Q, too
 What did you doed?
What does coffee taste like?
Passive voice
 Give me an example of passive voice.
Effects of disabilities
 Problematic syntactic structures include
relationships between words in sentences and
phrases.
 Understanding who a pronoun applies to and what
function is served by a direct object and an indirect
object are examples of this syntactic skill.
 Finally, at least one of these studies demonstrated
that oral language production did not automatically
improve with age for students with learning
disabilities as it does for other students (Wiig et al.,
1977).
Strategies to support syntactic
development
 Shared book-reading
 Parallel-talk and self-talk (modeling)