LING 290 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Universal Grammar, First Language, Spectroscopy

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Linguistics
• Course: LING 290
• Professor: Marion Caldecott

Document Summary

Infants are born with the perceptual abilities to allow them to learn language. Infants possess many mechanisms to help them learn speech. General learning model: no special mechanisms for speech. Explains how we can still learn language even though we only ever hear positive input. What we hear, reinforces the mechanisms that we already have. We use general perceptual abilities to learn language. Poverty of stimulus is not super important because our brains are very powerful. The integration of signals to create patterns and meaning out of language. Kids can produce errors that they have never heard before. Imitation can play a role in the development of vocabulary but not so much grammar. Kids learn general grammar rules which they then apply. Babies in utero can perceive the prosody of their (cid:373)other"s la(cid:374)guage. Some aspects seem universal others are language specific. There seems to be a mostly universal timeline for the development of speech.