Language Acquisition

Spring, 1998

Time: Thursdays, 3-5 p.m., Room 311 Psychology

Instructor: Professor Jenny Saffran

528 Psychology, 262-9942

jsaffran@facstaff.wisc.edu

Office hours: Tuesday, 4-5 p.m.

This course will explore the most extraordinary feat universally accomplished by humans: the acquisition of language. We will focus on native language acquisition in infancy and childhood, with particular attention to issues of nature vs. nurture. During the first few weeks of the course, we will explore the theoretical frameworks within which the study of child language acquisition is embedded. The second section of the course will cover empirical findings regarding how, when, and why infants and young children discover the structure of their native language. The final section of the course will focus on the acquisition of language under unusual circumstances, including critical period effects for adult language learners, the acquisition of pidgin and creole languages, and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Course Requirements:

1. Participation (25%). You will be asked to each grade yourself on your participation. Grading criteria will be handed out later, but will be based primarily upon: (a) your preparedness for class, (b) relevance of your comments to ongoing discussion, and (c) your ability to integrate readings with the comments by other seminar participants. I will preview each topic the week beforehand.

2. Presentation (25%). Each seminar participant will be asked to lead a discussion on a particular topic. You will not be required to "teach" the course as all members of the group will be expected to participate. However, your role will be to direct the discussion to pertinent and interesting issues. Course auditors will also be required to lead a discussion.

3. Term paper (50%). Your paper should focus on the topic of your choice within the domain of child language acquisition. Papers should not exceed 20 double-spaced pages, and should therefore cover a topic that can be reasonably presented and discussed in a paper of that length.

A range of credit options are available for this class. Auditors will be required to lead a discussion, as well as to complete the readings.

Syllabus

January 22: Organizational issues and background

January 29: Central issues in the study of child language acquisition

*Read the Chomsky paper, and choose one of the other two*

Chomsky, N.(1957). A review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35, 26-58.

Gleitman, L., & Newport, E. (1995). The invention of language by children: Environmental and biological influences on the acquisition of language. In Gleitman, L., & Liberman, M. (Eds.), Language: An invitation to cognitive science (2nd edition). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pinker, S. (1990). Language acquisition. In D. Osherson & H. Lasnik (Eds.), Language: An invitation to cognitive science (1st edition). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

February 5: Introduction to the structure of language for non-linguists

Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct (Chapters 4 and 5). New York: Harper Collins.

Infancy

February 12: *Read Eimas et al., and at least one other article from each section*

Infant-directed speech:

Fernald, A. (1992). Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals: An evolutionary perspective. Reprinted in P. Bloom (Ed.), Language acquisition: Core readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Newport, E., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (1977). Mother, I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In C. Snow and C. Ferguson (Eds.), Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Infant speech perception:

Eimas, P., Siqueland, S., Jusczyk, P., & Vigorito, J. (1971). Speech perception in infants. Science, 171, 303-306.

Kuhl, P. (1993). Infant speech perception: A window on psycholinguistic development. International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 9, 33-56.

Werker, J., & Lalonde, C. (1988). Cross-language speech perception: Initial capabilities and developmental change. Developmental Psychology, 24, 672-683.

February 19: Word segmentation

Jusczyk, P., & Aslin, R. (1995). Infants' detection of the sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 1-23.

Jusczyk, P., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N. (1993). Infants' preference for the predominant stress patterns of English words. Child Development, 64, 675-687.

Saffran, J., Aslin, R., & Newport, E. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928.

February 26: Constraints on word learning

Carey, S., & Bartlett, E. (1978). Acquiring a single new word. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 15.

Markman, E. (1990). Constraints children place on word meanings. Cognitive Science, 14.

Gentner, D. (1978). What looks like a jiggy but acts like a zimbo?: A study of early word meaning using artificial objects. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 15.

Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition, 1.

The acquisition of grammar

March 5: Syntactic categories

Brown, R. (1957). Linguistic determinism and the part of speech. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55, 1-5.

Maratsos, M., & Chalkley, M. (1980). The internal language of children's syntax. In K. Nelson (Ed.), Children's Language (Vol. 2). New York: Gardner Press.

Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development (p. 37-62). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

March 12: Spring Break

March 19: Lexical structure and morphology

*Read the Kuczaj and Slobin papers, and choose one of the other two*

Gopnik, M., & Crago, M. (1991). Familial aggregation of a developmental language disorder. Cognition, 39, 1-50.

Gordon, P. (1985). Level-ordering in lexical development. Cognition, 21, 73-93.

Kuczaj, S. (1977). The acquisition of regular and irregular past tense forms. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16, 589-600.

Slobin, D. (1973). Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In C. Ferguson and D. Slobin (Eds.), Studies of Child Language Development. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

March 26: Syntactic structure

*Choose either the Miesel or Morgan papers, and read the other two*

Miesel, J. (1995). Parameters in acquisition. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The Handbook of Child Language. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Morgan, J. (1982). Input and learnability: On integrating formal and empirical approaches to language acquisition. Unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois (selected pages).

Morgan, J., & Newport, E. (1981). The role of constituent structure in the induction of an artificial language. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 67-85.

Slobin, D., & Bever, T. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflection. Cognition, 12, 229-265.

April 2: No Class

April 9: Connectionism and the acquisition of grammar

Pinker, S., & Prince, A. (1991). Regular and irregular morphology and the psychological status of rules of grammar. Proceedings of the 17th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Plunkett, K. (1995). Connectionist approaches to language acquisition. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The Handbook of Child Language. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Rumelhart, D., & McClelland, J. (1986). Learning the past tenses of English verbs: Implicit rules or parallel distributed processing? In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), Mechanisms of Language Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Seidenberg, M. (1997). Language acquisition and use: Learning and applying probabilisitic constraints. Science, 275, 1599-1603.

Contributions of the organism vs. the environment

April 16: Critical periods

Goldin-Meadow, S. (1978). A study in human capacities (review of Genie). Science, 200,649- 651.

Johnson, J., & Newport, E. (1989). Critical period effects in second language learning. Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60-99.

Lenneberg, E. (1967). Selections from Biological foundations of language. New York, Wiley. Pages 142-154, 178-182.

Newport, E. (1990). Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive Science, 14.

April 23: Pidgins and creoles

*Read the Singleton & Newport paper, and choose two of the other three*

Bickerton, D. (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 7,173-221

Newport, E. (in press). Reduced input in the acquisition of signed languages: Contributions to the study of creolization. In M. Degraff (Ed.), Creolization, diachrony, and language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Senghas, A. (1995). The development of Nicaraguan Sign Language via the language acquisition process. In D. MacLaughlin & S. McEwan (Eds.), BUCLD.

Singleton, J., & Newport, E. (1987). When learners surpass their models: The acquisition of American Sign Language from impoverished input. Unpublished manuscript.

April 30: Williams Syndrome and other language/cognition dissociations

*Read the Maratsos paper, and choose one of the other two*

Bellugi, U., Bihrle, A., Neville, H., Doherty, S., & Jernigan, T. (1992). Language, cognition, and brain organization in a neurodevelopmental disorder. In M. Gunnar & C. Nelson (Eds.), Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Karmiloff-Smith, A., Grant, J., Berthoud, I., Davies, M., Howlin, P., and Udwin, O. (1997). Language and Williams Syndrome: How intact is 'intact'? Child Development, 68, 246-262.

Maratsos, M., & Matheny, L. (1994). Language specificity and elasticity: Brain and clinical syndrome studies. In M. Rosenzweig & L. Porter (Eds.), Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 487-516.

May 7: Paper due, no class