Ling 411 – TA: Helen Stickney

Email: hstickne [at] linguist [dot] umass [dot] edu

Office hours:

Mon 11-12, Thurs 1-2, and by appointment

316 South College

[the things kids say…]

Resource LINKS

Tom’s website

Keep an eye on this page for information related to how I might be able to help you with this course.

PRESSING INFORMATION

PLEASE NOTE:

Papers are due May 8. You may consider this a draft. We will look at your papers and schedule presentation times. Presentation days are May 9, 11 & 23.

The final version of your paper is due May 23.

Paper Guidelines:

· 5 pages (but definitely can be longer)

· Include a description of the problem you are looking at –both in terms of the English language and in terms of linguistic structure

· Include a section for methods and results

· Your discussion section should contain some linguistic analysis but it can also have reference to what the experience of experimenting was like; what went wrong? What was interesting?

· You may also want to review papers from previous 411 courses

The final draft will be included in a web volume of papers from this course.

Below I have posted thoughts or references (or answers to questions) in relation to various classes. Scroll down for earlier classes.

April 20 & 25, 2006

Telicity & Aspect

(notes to follow)

April 13, 2006

The exam was passed out today.

Please please, if you are panicking about the exam, write me an email. I may be able to provide some clarification for you.

April 6, 2006

Today I spoke on quantification.

Take home points:

Children (up to age 8 or 9 sometimes) have odd interpretations when sentences contain quantifiers. For example:

(a) Scene: 14 blue circles, 2 blue squares, 3 red squares.

Q: Are all the circles blue?

Child: No, there are two blue squares.

(b) Scene: blue circles, blue squares, red squares

Q: And are all these squares red?

Child: No, because there is a blue one.

Q: And are all the blue ones circles?

Child: Yes.

Q: Well, look, are all the circles here blue?

Child: Yes ... no

Q: Why?

Child: There are red ones.

Q: Where?

Child: There are red squares and blue circles

(d) Scene: 4 garages and 3 cars, each occupying 1 garage.

Q: All the cars are in the garages.

Child: No.

(e) Scene: Children presented with a series of pictures containing circles in various states of coloring: “mark: ‘some of the circles are black’”

Children interpret as: “mark: ‘some of the circles have some black’”

(f) Scene: 5 apples and 3 pigs eating 1 apple each.

Q: Every pig is eating an apple ... Does this picture go with the story?

Child: No. Those two apples have no pig.

Various linguists have tried to account for this behavior with varying theories:

v The quantifier spreads onto every NP in the sentence – roeper & matthei

v Quantifier + Noun is interpreted as an adverbial quantifier – Philip & Takahashi

v Quantifier + Noun is interpreted as an Event quantifier – Philip

v Children have complete competence with quantifiers, the experiments are just set up badly, causing kids to appeal to pragmatics, rather than their linguistic knowledge – Crain et al

v Children interpret strong quantifiers as if they were weak – Drozd & Loosbroek

The hypotheses above dealt with experiments that looked at “every.” I described some of my trials and tribulations in investigating whether “most” behaved like “every” in kid’s grammars.

April 4, 2006

Today we talked about words like “home”

Tom argued that “home” has three salient properties:

Ø It is effected by point of view

Ø It is distributive

Ø It is anaphoric

Point of view:

If I say that “I’m going home,” I’m talking about my home not yours. (speaker oriented)

If I say, “Bill’s going home,” I’m now referring to Bill’s home, not mine. (subject oriented)

If Tom says to his wife, “Will Bill bring the visitor home?” this can have three different interpretations.

Distributivity:

If I say, “everyone went home,” it implies that each person went to his own house.

Anaphoric:

“home” is dependent on a pre-mentioned entity for its referent.

In general, “home” is restricted to referring only to antecedents within its own clause

· [Jim told Bill [that Sheila went home]].

· --- this can only be Sheila’s home, not Jim’s or Bill’s (unless Jim or Bill lives with Sheila, but that’s a non-linguistic issue…)

Mar. 28, 2006

Today we talked about the DELV test. This was a test designed to be dialect-neutral. It looks at core syntax that is the same for normally developing Mainstream American English (MAE) speakers and for speakers of African American English (AAE).

If you’d like to learn more about this test/project you can look here.

We talked again about the following topics:

Wh-questions

· Double WH “who bought what”

n paired & exhaustive = correct

n singleton or non-exhaustive = incorrect

· Long Distance vs. Short Distance movement “When did the boy say he hurt himself?”

· Barriers to Wh-movement “When did the boy say how he hurt himself?”

Passives

· Simple: Testing for movement “the elephant was pushed

· Complex: Testing for hidden properties

n agents, results, different subjects

n “the boy’s face was painted” versus “the boy’s face was being painted”

· By-phrase

n focus on –ed versus –ing

n “the ball was dropped by John” versus “the ball was dropping by John” (the second one is not a passive)

Articles (no pictures)

· “a bird flew out of a cage because something was open, what was it?”

(The above description of the DELV is really basic stuff that’s probably in your notes. I will be consulting the PP slides that Tom used and trying to put up some more specific info over the next couple days)

Mar. 14, 2006

Today we discussed more regarding wh-movement. The two big topics were covered were exhaustivity and superiority.

Exhuastivity:

· It seems to be universal that when someone asks you a question using a wh-word you must answer completely. e.g. if someone asks “who is holding a ball?” you must name or point out every person who has a ball, not just one. (note: we can restrict the answer if the context requires we only give a singleton answer. e.g. “where’s the bathroom?”)

· Children do not start reliably associating exhaustivity with WH until age six or so.

· What does this mean if exhaustivity is in UG? --possibly that this feature is maturational

Superiority:

· Some languages require wh-words to move to the front of the sentence, like English & German. (some languages require no movement, like Chinese; some require movement to the end of the sentence)

· If you have a sentence with two wh-words and your language requires movement to the front, but you’re only allowed to move one you will prefer to move a word from subject position rather than object position.

· Why? Because in terms of tree structure, this is a shorter movement, and the language processor prefers us to be economical in our syntactic choices/transformations.

You may have noticed that I put the words “the things kids say…” at the top of this page. This is a link to the very beginnings of a page I’m putting together with random odd things I’ve overheard children saying. I’ve posted a link here because I thought they might spark experiment/paper ideas for you guys.

If you have quotes of your own, please email them to me if you’re willing to share.

Mar. 7, 2006

Today we discussed more constraints on question formation, i.e. wh-movement.

I will try to get the slide online as soon as I can. They will go here XXX.

(I will also put the passive slides in the Feb. 16 entry)

This is a very busy week for me. My intention is to lay out here the various types of wh-constraints and examples from class. I don’t have time right now. If you have specific questions, please email me.

Links to the de Villiers paper:

http://people.umass.edu/hstickne/index_files/411/devilliers_wh_03.doc

http://www.people.umass.edu/roeper/411/devilliers wh-03 refs.doc

Mar. 2, 2006

Today we watched parts from the PBS Human Language Series (pt. 2, Language Acquisition) and I went over the work by Otsu that Tom discussed on Tuesday. If you have further questions on this, please email me. Because I was the lecturer (rather than Tom) it is hard for me to assess what might need to be clarified.

Feb. 28, 2006

NOTE: I was able to find databases for CHILDES in Japanese and other asian languages. If you are looking for a particular language please email me.

Today Tom reviewed Subset Theory and Maximizing Falsifiability. If you still have questions, let me know.

We also discussed Subjacency. I will be talking about this topic further on Thursday.

Your CHILDES search assignments are due March 16. When you write up this assignment, please include:

-- A description of what you were looking for

· In empirical terms

· In theoretical terms

-- The database you used (for example “Brown”)

· Which children you looked at (for example “Eve”)

· How much data you looked at (for example, Eve has 20 files. Did you look at all of them? How long were the sessions? Etc.)

· How old were the children (or child)?

-- A discussion of what you found

· In impressionistic terms

· In theoretical terms

As always, if you have any questions, please let me know.

Feb. 23, 2006

Today Tom talked about a number of different theories regarding how children acquire language. The assumption implicit in his lecture was that children are born knowing all the possible forms that language can take (the grammars –or subgrammars— all being specified in UG). From this vantage point all the child has to do is listen to the adult language and deduct which sort of grammar(s) his parents are actually speaking. Tom’s lecture addressed a few possible strategies that the child could be using.

It is most likely the case that there is more than one strategy in use by the child at any given time.

The main strategies that he talked about were:

Maximize Falsifiability: (Tom expressed this one in two different ways):

1) Children assume the more complicated grammar (e.g. the most features possible on an article) and keep it until they hear evidence to the contrary.

2) Children choose the option that can be disproven if wrong (this falls under subset theory, as well). If you choose an option that requires overt correction to disprove, then you may never acquire the correct/adult grammar.

· Why? Because adults rarely correct children’s grammar, and children must rely only on positive evidence for language acquisition.

Short & Simple grammar: (promoted by Chomsky) children initially choose the simplest grammar.

· What is meant by “simple”? Who knows. Chomsky tried to define it by counting how many symbols the grammar required (Tom talked about it in terms of symbols and also transformations).

If we avoid the definition of “simplest” for a moment we can state this theory as “children start off with the simplest grammar and then add additional features as they find that they need them.”

Subset Theory: Think of the Venn Diagrams on the handout. The idea is that kids start out with the most restrictive grammar (the inner circle of the circle inside a circle) and then expand their grammar as they hear evidence for a more complicated system. (Tom expanded on this idea and claimed that, in reality, children’s way of representing and changing grammars is not a circle within a circle but overlapping circles).

None of these strategies independently can account for all the various constructions that children acquire and the way in which they acquire them. Nevertheless, all of them may be in play in the child’s acquisition device and it is certainly a good exercise to think about how they work and what data seems to fit and what doesn’t.

Feb. 16, 2006

Passives seemed to be easier for the class as a whole to understand than some of the other topics we’ve covered. If you feel confused feel free to email me.

For those of you interested in looking at passive use crosslinguistically, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

Remember also to keep up with the assigned reading (preferrably reading it before the class on that topic). It will help your understanding a great deal.

I’ve been reading your Mistriggering assignments. A number of you wrote about things that you (or someone you know) misinterpreted as a child. Reading these assignments reminded me of an episode of This American Life which in part focused on misinformation we’d gotten as kids that managed to make it into our adult lives. (If you’re interested it’s Episode 293 from 7/22/05 and you can listen to it online here).

Feb. 14, 2006

ARTICLES: In class, Tom mentioned various ways of using “the.” He mentioned a few that were not in the handout, including:

Generic “the” : The lion is king of the jungle

Kind “the” : This morning I caught the train toPhilly.

Cultural “the” : I saw the president in the Bronx.

A full list of the different interpretations of “the” and “a” and their possible relation to syntax can be found in Tom’s paper Watching Noun Phrases Emerge. (This is the sort of thing you might read if you were interested in doing syntactic/semantic research in this area of language acquisition). Chapter 5 in the Prism book also talks more about the above.

I had a comment about the part/whole example that Tom gave. Remember that he drew a picture of a dog on the board and then drew something weird on its head. He then said, “Here’s a dog. Do you like the glug?” He said that this was okay because the strange object was on the dog’s head, hence making it part of the dog. But I think that the part/whole concept (or the concept of “framing” as one student referred to it) can include a section of context. If tom had showed us a piece of paper with a dog on it that also had an odd object in the corner (and nothing else) and said, “Here’s a picture of a dog. Do you like the glug?” the “the” here would still be acceptable because mentioning the picture has introduced everthing that can be construed as being in the picture. Perhaps this is redundant, but I thought it bore mentioning because Tom implied that the object had to be touching the dog.

Toward the end of class Tom mentioned how some children allow a member of a set to be referred to with “the” (where adults would say “a” or “one of the”). This behavior can actually extend quite late into childhood (and adults apparently do it in some contexts, as the discussion in class showed).

A great illustration of this occurred a few months ago: My 8-yr-old daughter and I were out to breakfast and she was sitting on the side of the table where all the condiments were --including a big container that had all sorts of jelly packets containing various types of jelly. I wanted jelly. I looked at my daughter and said, “Can you hand me the jelly?” I expected her to pass me the container with the jelly packets in it. Instead, she handed me one packet at random from the container. It wasn’t even a flavor I liked!

We got into a long conversation after this about when “the” could be used, and she made it clear (from answering a battery of questions that I stole from various linguistics-experiments) that “the” was perfectly acceptable to refer to a member of a set, even if there was no prior specific reference.

Feb. 7, 2006

CASE: Tom suggested in class that children who use accusative case in subject position stop doing this when they start using auxiliaries. There was another suggestion that they start using nominative case when they start inflecting the verb.

One of you asked how Speech Language Pathologists help children who have case disorders. I don’t know the answer to this question, but I’m looking into it. (click here for more on this)

Additionally: On February 8, while running a totally unrelated linguistics experiment, I happened to have recorded a 3-yr-old who uses “her” instead of “she” in subject position.

I thought that you all might find it interesting. (This is NOT mandatory. But it may be something that sparks an experiment idea for later this semester). I show it to you because it may be a counter example to the assertions that Tom was making in class.

Compare:

1) http://people.umass.edu/hstickne/index_files/videos/kdlph_her_1.mov -- In this clip she is telling me how she had been in this room before with her mom. (She also mentions her teacher, Randall). And she talks about her Strawberry Shortcake Kid.

2) http://people.umass.edu/hstickne/index_files/videos/kdlph_it_2.mov --In this clip we are having a conversation about jelly.

3) http://people.umass.edu/hstickne/index_files/videos/kdlph_he_her_3.mov -- In this clip we talk about smooth things, her dog(s) and her cat. Notice the difference between her masculine and her feminine subjects.

4) http://people.umass.edu/hstickne/index_files/videos/kdlph_whoisher_4.mov -- Short clip in which she interrupts to ask me about the woman in the picture I’m showing her, saying, “Who is her?”

Think about how complex her sentences are. Is there anything wrong with her speech other than case?

If you have any trouble deciphering what she’s saying, let me know. I was there, I can decipher it.

Feb. 2, 2006

Today Tom assigned a video assignment.

Links to videos of children. – early language video assignment (due Feb. 23)

Link to Helen’s homepage.