ANTHRO 33 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Gerontocracy, Baby Talk, Noam Chomsky
Document Summary
Time and space reference - more here and now. Parents in child-centric cultures construct sentences and narratives cooperatively with their children by providing a structure and prompting them to fill in pieces. Parents expand their own utterances and the child"s utterances, building on what was just said. Child is active participant in the conversation, parent contextualizes what child says to have them involved in talk. Elders are more in charge than younger. Poverty of stimulus need for innate structure. Idea that children don"t have enough examples to become proficient at language. Claim: children"s understanding is more sophisticated than their exposure to language can explain (poverty of stimulus) Requires underlying template of language (ug), which is then fine-tuned through exposure to language. Note upper and lowercase use of language. Setting one feature can have cascade effect. Others argue that generalized learning mechanism can explain language acquisition and no lad is needed.
