LING 1010 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Lexifier, Hawaiian Pidgin, Phrase Structure Rules

• School: UConn
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 1010
• Professor: Jon Gajewski

Document Summary

Children are able to learn language despite not having enough evidence to learn it. Positive evidence is evidence about which items are present in an infinite set. Negative evidence is evidence about which items are absent in an infinite set. Modern nativism- substantial innate knowledge, but experience plays a small role as well. Modern empiricism- experience plays the largest role in learning, though innate knowledge plays a small role. The mind displays categorical perception by imposing sharp boundaries on continuous physical input and by treating physically distinct stimuli as identical for some purpose. Children are born universal listeners, able to distinguish any two sounds found in human language. Around 10-12 months children have learned to attend only to the distinctions in their language. Children s babbling narrows to the sounds of their language by age 10-12 months. Word segmentation problem- the problem of how children decide where the breaks are between words in the speech stream.