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An Introduction To The Event Related Potential Technique

Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery. New data show that infants use computational strategies to detect the statistical and prosodic patterns in language input, and that this leads to the discovery of phonemes and words. Social interaction with another human being affects speech learning in a way that resembles communicative learning in songbirds. The brain's commitment to the statistical and prosodic patterns that are experienced early in life might help to explain the long-standing puzzle of why infants are better language learners than adults. Successful learning by infants, as well as constraints on that learning, are changing theories of language acquisition.

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Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

The complete title of this book runs ‘Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R’ and as such it very well reflects the purpose and spirit of the book. The author guides the reader in about 350 pages from descriptive and basic statistical methods over classification and clustering to (generalised) linear and mixed models. Each of the methods is introduced in the context of concrete linguistic problems and demonstrated on exciting datasets from current research in the language sciences. In line with its practical orientation, the book focuses primarily on using the methods and interpreting the results. This implies that the mathematical treatment of the techniques is held at a minimum if not absent from the book. In return, the reader is provided with very detailed explanations on how to conduct the analyses using R [1]. The first chapter sets the tone being a 20-page introduction to R. For this and all subsequent chapters, the R code is intertwined with the chapter text and the datasets and functions used are conveniently packaged in the languageR package that is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). With this approach, the author has done an excellent job in enabling researchers and students alike to reproduce the analyses and learn by doing. Another quality as a textbook is the fact that every chapter ends with Workbook sections where the user is invited to exercise his or her analysis skills on supplemental datasets. Full solutions including code, results and comments are given in Appendix A (30 pages). Instructors are therefore very well served by this text, although they might want to balance the book with some more mathematical treatment depending on the target audience. After the introductory chapter on R, the book opens on graphical data exploration. Chapter 3 treats probability distributions and common sampling distributions. Under basic statistical methods (Chapter 4), distribution tests and tests on means and variances are covered. Chapter 5 deals with clustering and classification. Strangely enough, the clustering section has material on PCA, factor analysis, correspondence analysis and includes only one subsection on clustering, devoted notably to hierarchical partitioning methods. The classification part deals with decision trees, discriminant analysis and support vector machines. The regression chapter (Chapter 6) treats linear models, generalised linear models, piecewise linear models and a substantial section on models for lexical richness. The final chapter on mixed models is particularly interesting as it is one of the few text book accounts that introduce the reader to using the (innovative) lme4 package of Douglas Bates which implements linear mixed-effects models. Moreover, the case studies included in this

Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R

A grammar of spoken Chinese = 中國話的文法

Contents: Preface. J.L. Morgan, K. Demuth, Signal to Syntax: An Overview. Part I: The Nature, Perception, and Representation of Input Speech. P.D. Eimas, The Perception and Representation of Speech by Infants. B.E. Dresher, Introduction to Metrical and Prosodic Phonology. P. Lieberman, Some Biological Constraints on the Analysis of Prosody. P. Price, M. Ostendorf, Combining Linguistic With Statistical Methods in Modeling Prosody. Part II: Speech and the Acquisition of Words. A. Cutler, Prosody and the Word Boundary Problem. J. Mehler, E. Dupoux, T. Nazzi, G. Dahaene-Lambertz, Coping With Linguistic Diversity: The Infant's Viewpoint. R.N. Aslin, J.Z. Woodward, N.P. LaMendola, T.G. Bever, Models of Word Segmentation in Fluent Maternal Speech to Infants. N.B. Ratner, From "Signal to Syntax": But What Is the Nature of the Signal? C.H. Echols, A Role for Stress in Early Speech Segmentation. K. Demuth, The Prosodic Structure of Early Words. Part III: Speech and the Acquisition of Grammatical Morphology & Form Classes. E. Selkirk, The Prosodic Structure of Function Words. A.M. Peters, S. Stroemqvist, The Role of Prosody in the Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes. L.B. Leonard, J.A. Eyer, Deficits of Grammatical Morphology in Children with Specific Language Impairment and Their Implications for Notions of Bootstrapping. M. Kelly, The Role of Phonology in Grammatical Category Assignments. J.L. Morgan, R. Shi, P. Allopena, Perceptual Bases of Rudimentary Grammatical Categories: Toward a Broader Conceptualization of Bootstrapping. Part IV: Speech and the Acquisition of Phrase Structure. J.J. Venditti, S-A. Jun, M.E. Beckman, Prosodic Cues to Syntactic and Other Linguistic Structures in Japanese, Korean, and English. R. Mazuka, Can a Grammatical Parameter Be Set Before the First Word? Prosodic Contributions to Early Setting of a Grammatical Parameter. M. Steedman, Phrasal Intonation and the Acquisition of Syntax. C. Fisher, H. Tokura, Prosody in Speech to Infants: Direct and Indirect Acoustic Cues to Syntactic Structure. A. Fernald, G. McRoberts, Prosodic Bootstrapping: A Critical Analysis of the Argument and the Evidence. P. Jusczyk, D.G.K. Nelson, Syntactic Units, Prosody, and Psychological Reality During Infancy. Part V: Speech and the Acquisition of Language. L. Gerken, Phonological and Distributional Information in Sytnax Acquisition. J.F. Werker, V.L. Lloyd, J.E. Pegg, L. Polka, Putting the Baby in the Bootstraps: Toward a More Complete Understanding of the Role of the Input in Infant Speech Processing. K. Hirsh-Pasek, M. Tucker, R.M. Golinkoff, Dynamical Systems Theory: Reinterpreting "Prosodic Bootstrapping" and Its Role in Language Acquisition.

Signal to syntax : bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition

Previous ERP studies have often reported two ERP components—LAN and P600—in response to subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations (e.g., the boys *runs). However, the latency, amplitude and scalp distribution of these components have been shown to vary depending on various experiment-related factors. One factor that has not received attention is the extent to which the relative perceptual salience related to either the utterance position (verbal inflection in utterance-medial vs. utterance-final contexts) or the type of agreement violation (errors of omission vs. errors of commission) may influence the auditory processing of S-V agreement. The lack of reports on these effects in ERP studies may be due to the fact that most studies have used the visual modality, which does not reveal acoustic information. To address this gap, we used ERPs to measure the brain activity of Australian English-speaking adults while they listened to sentences in which the S-V agreement differed by type of agreement violation and utterance position. We observed early negative and positive clusters (AN/P600 effects) for the overall grammaticality effect. Further analysis revealed that the mean amplitude and distribution of the P600 effect was only significant in contexts where the S-V agreement violation occurred utterance-finally, regardless of the type of agreement violation. The mean amplitude and distribution of the negativity did not differ significantly across types of agreement violation and utterance position. These findings suggest that the increased perceptual salience of the violation in utterance-final position (due to phrase-final lengthening) influenced how S-V agreement violations were processed during sentence comprehension. Implications for the functional interpretation of language-related ERPs and experimental design are discussed.

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Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study

Maturation and the Acquisition of the Sesotho Passive

Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda consonants cannot be produced. This paper evaluates this proposal by examining the development of word-final coda consonants in the spontaneous speech of four English-speaking children between the ages of one and two. Although there was no evidence of vowel lengthening, coda consonants were more accurately produced in monosyllabic target words with monomoriac vowels, suggesting earlier use of coda consonants in contexts where they can be prosodified as part of a bimoraic foot. One child also showed extensive use of vowel epenthesis and coda consonant aspiration concurrent with the production of codas. However, we show that this was due to the articulatory challenges of producing complex syllable structures rather than an attempt to produce well-formed minimal words. These results suggest that learners of English may exhibit an early awareness of moraic structure at the level of the syllable, but that language-specific constraints regarding word-minimality may be acquired later than originally thought.

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Word-minimality, Epenthesis and Coda Licensing in the Early Acquisition of English

It has long been noted that children’s early words are truncated in form, and that those forms show a certain degree of variability in shape. In this paper I argue that children’s early word productions can best be understood in terms of output constraints on surface form. First, I show that children’s early grammars allow for the emergence of the unmarked form of syllables (Core Syllables) and prosodic words (Minimal Words), and that these can be thought of as different stages of prosodic development. I then demonstrate how the prosodic development of children’s early words can be naturally accounted for in terms of prosodic

http://www.cog.brown.edu/People/demuth/articles/1995%20Demuth%20Markedness.pdf

Katherine Demuth

Papers

Signal to syntax : bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition

Effects of Type of Agreement Violation and Utterance Position on the Auditory Processing of Subject-Verb Agreement: An ERP Study

Maturation and the Acquisition of the Sesotho Passive

Word-minimality, Epenthesis and Coda Licensing in the Early Acquisition of English

Markedness and the Development of Prosodic Structure