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EGH215 Weeks 1-5 - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Some errors that they do include are morphological overgeneralizations and sound substitutions
  - - - Caregivers are more likely to correct utterances for their truth value rather than grammar
        
        No negative evidence assumption: children are not systematically exposed to negative evidence (explicit information about what is ungrammatical) yet still don't make reasonable errors
        
        Poverty of stimulus/zero experience: there are many things known about language for which there is no evidence in the input
- - - - However, there are benefits to CDS e.g. auxiliary growth is quicker in children of caregivers who use more yes-no questions. The prosodic qualities of CDS may also provide information about constituent stress and prosodic bootstrapping, and the contours hold the infants' attention
- - - - Statistical properties of English (Cutler & Carter 1987):
        
        90% of lexical words are trochaic
        
        3/4 stressed/strong syllables are sole or initial syllable of lexical words
        
        2/3 unstressed/weak syllables are function words
      - Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS):
        
        Infants may use stress patterns as prosodic cues to word segmentation e.g. a listener encountering a strong syllable has a 3:1 chance of it being the onset of a new lexical word
        
        Note however that rhythmic structure is language specific, therefore raising the question of whether children need to know the timing of the language before prosodic cues can help
    - - Transitional probability is the likelihood of two syllables being adjacent to each other
        TP from X to Y = frequency XY/ frequency X
      - Statistical Learning Hypothesis: babies are sensitive to TPs and figure out word boundaries on this basis
        
        NB: TPs are not sufficient to completely segment language
- - - - Pinker proposed a competition model: if the irregular form is retrieved faster than the rule is applied it will be used
        
        For adults, the retrieval of the irregular form 'wins', blocking the application of the rule: blocking principle
        
        Children use the regular rule rather than blocking because it requires less working memory and is therefore 'easier' and 'faster'
        
        Overgeneralisation can therefore be seen as a matter of performance than linguistic knowledge; this is evidenced by children overgeneralising less frequent verbs more than they do with common words