Language, Mind, and Brain by Ewa Dabrowska

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Language, Mind, and Brainby Ewa Dabrowska

• Chapter 9 Syntactic constructions, pt. 1

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Is syntax like morphology?

• Q What kinds of points is Dabrowska going to
  make that parallel morphology?

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Is syntax like morphology?

• Q What kinds of points is Dabrowska going to
  make that parallel morphology?
• A
• the same mental mechanism can account for both
  regular and irregular constructions
• speakers extract patterns at varying degrees of
  abstraction
• associative memory plays a prominent role

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1. Ties between lexical and grammatical knowledge

• Q How can we account for these facts?
• Very strong statistical correlation between
  vocabulary size and grammatical complexity
  mastered by young children age was not
  statistically a predictor
• Equally strong correlation between lexicon and
  grammar in impairment

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1. Ties between lexical and grammatical knowledge

• Q How can we account for these facts?
• Very strong statistical correlation between
  vocabulary size and grammatical complexity
  mastered by young children age was not
  statistically a predictor
• Equally strong correlation between lexicon and
  grammar in impairment
• A People use chunks form-meaning pairings
  that combine lexical items and grammatical
  constructions

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2. Multi-word units in acquisition

• Q What is premature usage?

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2. Multi-word units in acquisition

• Q What is premature usage?
• A Children often use chunks containing
  grammatical morphemes long before they use the
  morphemes in novel utterances.

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Q What is a developmental U-curve?
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Q What is a developmental U-curve?

• A Early limited correct usage of a form followed
  by absence or incorrect usage, later followed by
  reliable use in a range of situations. E.g.
  Whats this? (chunk!) gt What this is? gt What is
  this?

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2.3 Inappropriate and ungrammatical usage

• Q Is it true that childrens errors result from
  faulty abstract rules?

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2.3 Inappropriate and ungrammatical usage

• Q Is it true that childrens errors result from
  faulty abstract rules?
• A Not necessarily. They can also arise from
  inappropriate combination of chunks.

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2.4 Pronoun reversals

• Q What is a pronoun reversal? What theories
  are there about them and what does the author
  suggest?

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2.4 Pronoun reversals

• Q What is a pronoun reversal? What theories
  are there about them and what does the author
  suggest?
• A Children use you to refer to themselves. It
  is theorized that they dont understand deixis.
  But maybe they are just echoing what they heard
  said to them!

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2.5 Filler syllables

• Q What are filler syllables, and what do they
  indicate?

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2.5 Filler syllables

• Q What are filler syllables, and what do they
  indicate?
• Filler syllables are underspecified unstressed
  syllables (schwa /or nasal). They indicate that
  children are working with a phrase-level
  structure, not word-level, gradually filling in
  larger patterns.

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2.6 Lexically based patterns

• Q Tomasello is famous for the verb-island
  hypothesis. Can you guess what it is?

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2.6 Lexically based patterns

• Q Tomasello is famous for the verb-island
  hypothesis. Can you guess what it is?
• A A theory that children dont form rules for
  constructions of verbs, but rather use lexically
  specific chunks, like X fall down, ride X, X
  gave Y Z

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• Michael Tomasellos webpage
• http//email.eva.mpg.de/tomas/index.html

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2.6 Lexically based patterns

• Q How much of childrens speech shows evidence
  of lexical patterning and when do children gain
  competence to produce syntactic patterns with
  novel verbs?

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2.6 Lexically based patterns

• Q How much of childrens speech shows evidence
  of lexical patterning and when do children gain
  competence to produce syntactic patterns with
  novel verbs?
• A In children up to 3yrs 60 is lexical formulas
  and 30 is frozen phrases. Children dont succeed
  in reliably forming new transitive constructions
  until age 8.

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2.7 Mosaic acquisition

• Q What is Chomskys claim about acquisition?

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2.7 Mosaic acquisition

• Q What is Chomskys claim about acquisition?
• A That once a rule is learned, it is applied in
  all contexts. But is this true? This is not
  corroborated by research.

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2.7 Mosaic acquisition

• Q What is mosaic acquisition?

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2.7 Mosaic acquisition

• Q What is mosaic acquisition?
• A Piecemeal, gradual, probabilistic (not
  rule-governed), often lexically-specific
  acquisition of grammatical features and the range
  of their application.