Lecture 12课件.ppt

Lecture 12 Language Acquisition Knowledge of language A baby’s first language acquisition is a spontaneous process. Babbling Once a child produces meaningful words and starts pairing sounds with meaning, he will abruptly stop producing all kinds of non-native speech sounds. It is postulated that children babble because language development involves a process of biological maturation. The baby’s ability to spontaneously decode adults’ utterance 宝宝乖。 嘿嘿！ 宝宝不乖。 哇！！！！！ 宝宝可乖了。 唔… 可乖了，宝宝。 唔… 可坏了，宝宝。 哇！！！！！ Prosodic bootstrapping syntactic bootstrapping by Leila Gleitman, which means that semantics builds on top of syntax. semantic bootstrapping by Steven Pinker , which means that syntax builds on top of semantics. prosodic bootstrapping.  What a new baby perceives is neither words nor sentence structures but a string of sounds from an adult’s mouth – a string possibly with pausing, vowel lengthening, stressing, and a certain pattern of intonation. A baby is quite sensitive to such prosodic features. If a baby gets familiar with such features of an adult’s pronunciation of milk, next time when that adult says Want milk, he may infer that this string of sounds consists of two segments – Want and milk. Error-marked creation Language acquisition cannot be mere imitation but a creative, self-regularized process with predictable error types as landmarks. Child L1 acquisition A process better described as “growth” than “learning”. Universally successful The knowledge acquired is largely of an unconscious sort. The poverty-of-the-stimulus argument On the one hand there is the complexity of language knowledge, on the other there are the impoverished data available to the learner. If the child’s mind could not create language knowledge from the data in the surrounding environment, the source must be within the mind itself. Internal mechanism of language Computational procedure lexicon Cognitive competence Vs Pragmatic competence When to combine sounds? I’m gonn