The Field of Psycholinguistics - Essay Example

Running Head: Lexical Children appear capable of using lexical information to resolve syntactic ambiguities, but their ability to use referential information is questionable ______________ ___________ _______________________ 1 Children appear capable of using lexical information to resolve syntactic ambiguities, but their ability to use referential information is questionable 2 3 Introduction 4 Language acquisition commences from infancy and traverses the process of exploiting multiple probabilistic constraints over various types of linguistic and nonlinguistic information. The field of psycholinguistics is covered distinctly by two classes of studies one, pertaining to: language acquisition and the other pertaining to language processing. These two sub-disciplines reflect the core interests of the field in the mental representation and manipulation of linguistic knowledge, and in the acquisition of this knowledge. Since adults are largely thought to have acquired the linguistic facts of their language, the focus of adult psycholinguistic research has been on how they process language as they hear or use it. On the other hand, the focus of child language research has been on the documentation of children’s knowledge states at various points in development; with very little emphasis on how they process their language. This appears to be an area needing further investigation as, logically, children need also apply a meaningful analysis to their inputs in order to learn language. That is, acquisition necessarily implies that parser. This paper examines the aspect of difficulties and limitations encountered by children in using referential information while they deploy with ease lexical information to resolve syntactic ambiguities. Psycholinguistic and Children 5 The main emphasis of the Psycholinguistic research has been on comprehending as to how adults interpret language in real time. Several authors (Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1991; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy, 1995;Altmann & Steedman, 1988; Britt, 1994) have uncovered ,within this domain of examination a complex and interactive language 6 processing system capable of swift and almost instantaneous coordination of linguistic characteristics of the message with contextual or scene specific information. Trueswell et al (1999) investigated the moment by moment language learning process in children using a technique that involved recording eye movements, done deploying a head-mounted eye-tracking system to monitor eye movements, as participants responded to spoken instructions. This research found that,” systematic differences in how children and adults process spoken language: Five Year Olds did not take into account relevant discourse/pragmatic principles when resolving temporary syntactic ambiguities, and showed little or no ability to revise initial parsing commitments. Adults showed sensitivity to these discourse constraints at the earliest possible stages of processing, and were capable of revising incorrect parsing commitments”.(Trueswell et al,1999) This clearly indicates that children had trouble revising the comprehension deficiencies and had strictly limited abilities with referencing other knowledge sources to make good such deficiencies. After a series of subsequent experiments Trueswell & Gleitman (2004) concluded that,” this pattern arises from a developing interactive parsing system. Under this account, adult and child sentence comprehension is a “perceptual guessing game” in which multiple statistical cues are used to recover detailed linguistic structure. These cues, which include lexical-distribution evidence, verb semantic biases, and referential scene information, come “online” (become automated) at different points in the course of development. The developmental timing of these effects is related to their differential reliability and ease of detection in the input”. These researchers also conclusively state that ,” This finding could be interpreted as support for an early encapsulated syntactic processor that has difficulty using non-syntactic information to revise parsing commitments”.(Trueswell & Gleitman ,2004). Trueswell & Gleitman (2004) present a constraint-based lexicalist (CBL) learning theory in which,” multiple sources of information are used to converge as rapidly as possible on a single interpretation. The central component of this theory is a grammatical processing system that is highly tuned to the structural preferences of individual lexical items; hence “lexicalist.” The recognition of a word includes activation of rich argument structures that define the initial set of possible interpretations”. Trueswell & Gleitman (2004) almost overturned the findings of their research group as contained in Trueswell et al (1999) and concluded that children parsing were not limited by modular type. Their latest findings, in Trueswell & Gleitman (2004),went on to support that within the CBL framework children also had an interactive cue based statistical information processing system. In fact such a system appeared to be more robust than that possessed by adults. The researchers state that,” children’s comprehension is already highly nuanced and efficient early in life. Much like adults, children can make use of detailed statistical facts about verbs’ individual complementation preferences and the details of the discourse and scene contingencies to converge on an interpretive choice under conditions of ambiguity. As the CBL theory predicts, then, the young learner—like the adult—appears to be a statistics-based incremental device, sensitive to varied cue types as it tries to recover the sense of what is meant by the sequence of words arriving at the ear. This incremental, multicue picture of the child parser contrasts with some interpretations of our initial studies (Trueswell et al, 1999), in which the child parser is perceived as modular at least in the sense of being subject to severe limitations on the types of evidence it will recruit at all. Although not fully resolved at this point, because of the early state of this research endeavor, our current evidence lends strong support for a multiple-cue interactive and probabilistic system at work at all ages.” (Trueswell & Gleitman, 2004)These findings already had gathered good amount of support in earlier literature in that it was being fast recognized that lexical acquisition involves multiple kinds of bootstrapping in child language learners (Gillette et al., 1998; Jusczyk, 1997; Mintz et al., 1996;Morgan, 1986; Morgan & Demuth, 1996) and the research is growing in size to examine the degrees to which children are deploying and learning from various statistical and probabilistic aspects of the input. However the richness of the referencing source and the augmentation of such sources in the children have been cited as limiting their abilities to interactively parse. These account for differences in the adult and child modes of processing the language inputs. To conclude Trueswell & Gleitman (2004) can be cited with their following incisive comments,” Rather, the younger language user has yet to discover the full range of evidence pertaining to particular linguistic choices regarding the input. He or she needs to build up relevant linguistic databases, several of which vary cross-linguistically. Minimally, the learner must build up a library of English (or French, or Hindi, etc.) word forms and the sentential contexts (of other words and phrase types) in which each such word occurs, as well as a picture of the language-specific phrasal types and organization [….] This being so, and learning being what it is, it follows that the more frequent and reliable in the input is an observable property of the system being learned, the sooner a learner will exploit this property in making parsing decisions”. This leads to a conclusion that child learner also follow the same interactive, statistical and incremental parsing ‘however their responses to multiple cues and their abilities to correlate learning issues in deep meanings may be hampered by their limited referential abilities which are essentially gained out of temporal experience of which adults are a rich repositories. This seems to be such an important difference between a child and adult learner that children learning process appears to be limited to their ease with lexical interpretation of syntactic ambiguities. References 7 Trueswell, J. C., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1991). Tense, temporal context and syntactic ambiguity resolution. Language and Cognitive Processes, 6, 303-338. 8 9 Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-1634. 10 11 Altmann, G., & Steedman, M. (1988). Interaction with context during human sentence processing. Cognition, 30, 191-238. 12 13 Britt, M. A. (1994). The interaction of referential ambiguity and argument structure in the parsing of prepositional phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 251-283. 14 15 Trueswell John C., Sekerina Irina, Hill, Nicole M.& Logrip Marian.(1999). The kindergarten-path effect: studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition 73 (1999) 89-134. 16 17 Trueswell John C., & Gleitman, Lila. (2004). Children’s Eye Movements during Listening: 18 Developmental Evidence for a Constraint-Based Theory of Sentence Processing. In J.M. Henderson & F. Ferreira (Eds.) Interface of Vision, Language & Action. 19 Gillette, J., Gleitman, H., Gleitman, L., & Lederer, A. (1998). Human simulations of vocabulary learning. Ms.submitted for publication. 20 Jusczyk, P. W. (1997). The discovery of spoken language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 21 Mintz, T. H. (1996). The roles of linguistic input and innate mechanisms in children’s acquisition of grammatical categories, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester. 22 Morgan, J. (1986). From simple input to complex grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 23 Morgan, J., & Demuth, K. (1996). Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 24 25 Read More