Module 1

Dr Atul Aman
VIT Bhopal
Outline
1. Basic concepts of language acquisition process
2. Language Acquisition and Learning
3. Role of language in computation (linguistics) and cognition
4. Language and Linguistic Theories
(Ferdinand De Saussure, B.F Skinner, Noam Chomsky)
Basic Concepts of Language
Learning Process

A. The nature and Importance of Language

B. Language Acquisition and Development

C. Language Learning: A Shared responsibility

D. Thinking and Learning Through Language

 Design Features of Language
Charles Hockett in the 1950s and 1960s

1. Spontaneous use-(Acquisition and Usage)

2. Turn Taking-(Natural Phenomena)
3. Redundancy
4. Displacement
5. Dual Structure
6. Discreteness
7. Semanticity
8. Arbitrariness
9. Structure Dependence
10. Prevarication
11. Reflexivity
12. Productivity
Language Learning Vs Language
Acquisition
Role of language in Computational
Linguistics
• to create software products that have some
knowledge of human language.
• Communication with computers using spoken
language will have a lasting impact upon the work
environment, opening up completely new areas of
application for information technology.
• It deals with formal theories about the linguistic
knowledge that human needs for generating and
understanding language.
• Combination of methods and strategies from the
humanities, natural and behavioural sciences, and
• Goal of computational linguistics is to understand
the acquisition, comprehension and production of
human languages in information processing
terms.
• Several research areas have developed, including
speech synthesis, speech recognition, automatic
translation, the making of concordances, the
testing of grammars, and the many areas where
statistical counts and analyses are required (e.g.,
in literary textual studies).

• Formulate 10 important questions from the given

material on the topic: “Brief Introduction to
Role of language in Cognition
• Why do children acquire language by the age of six,
while taking a lifetime to acquire cognition? What is
the role of language and cognition in thinking?
• Is abstract cognition possible without language? Is
language just a communication device, or is it
fundamental in developing thoughts?
• Why animals with human thinking exists without
human language?
• Emergence of fields such as: cognitive neuroscience,
neurolinguistics, bio linguistics.
• three main cognitive factors: perception, memory, and
Language and Linguistic
Theories
1. Ferdinand De Saussure Concepts of Linguistics
i. Sign-Signifier-Signified,
ii. Langue & Parole,
iii. Synchrony & Diachrony,
iv. Prescriptive vs Descriptive,
v. Syntagmatic vs Paradigmatic relations
2. B F Skinner- Behaviourism
(behaviorist movement in psychology)
3. Noam Chomsky
i. Universal Grammar
Ferdinand De Saussure
Concepts of Linguistics
i. Sign-Signifier-Signified
concepts of the school of thought known as structuralism
The central tenet of structuralism is that the phenomena of human life, whether
language or media, are not intelligible except through their network of relationships,
making the sign and the system (or structure) in which the sign is embedded primary
concepts.
the signifier and the signified are the components of the sign.
• A signifier (signifiant): the form which the sign takes.
• A signified (signifié): the concept it represents.
The relationship between the signifier and the signified is referred to as 'signification‘
For Saussure, there cannot be a signifier without a signified or a signified
without a signifier.
ii. Langue & Parole
- general linguistic system of a given language, e.g. English.
- In contrast to Chomsky's competence, langue does not refer to a single person's
knowledge about his or her language, but to the system as a whole, the shared
knowledge in a given community. In that regard, langue also highlights the social
attributes of language.
- Parole, on the other hand, can be used synonymously with Chomsky's concept of
performance. Both terms describe a given utterance, a recording or a text. It is not
possible for linguists to directly examine langue; they can only study parole and infer
from it.
- Finally, language is the term Saussure uses to describe the abstract ability
to learn and communicate via language. Since this understanding of
language is most commonly associated with language acquisition or
neurolinguistics, it lacks common ground with the then-dichotomy of
langue and parole, and it is often left out of the discussion of these two.
iii. Synchronic & Diachronic
• Before Ferdinand de Saussure, there was historical linguistics, a
prescriptive perspective on language that dealt with language change
from past to present. Saussure came along and dubbed this kind of
approach diachronic, as opposed to a synchronic approach, i.e. a
descriptive look at language at a certain point in time. The dichotomy
of synchrony and diachronic is often explained by the metaphor of time
slices. If you were to cut time into slices, with each slice being a certain
moment in time, then a synchronic approach would look only at a
single slice, whereas a diachronic one would look at several slices and
compare them to each other.
• In diachronic, one can also study two language varieties of same time
period and compare them.
iv. Prescriptive vs Descriptive
• Saussure focused on Synchronic study of language and as a result a
paradigm shift came into linguistics. Descriptive linguistics started and
became dominant till Chomsky’s generative revolution came.
• This dichotomy evolves more or less naturally from Saussure's lectures,
but is not formulated in them. Prescriptive linguistics is a normative
approach concerned with what is »right« and »wrong«. On the other
hand, descriptive linguistics is only concerned with describing
what is (rather than what should be). If we take grammar as example,
prescriptive grammar would give you grammar rules, how it should be
whereas descriptive grammar would tell you how people actually use it
– which is often not how their language teacher would have wanted it
to be. Most of the traditional grammars (Greek-Latin based) are
prescriptive grammars.
v. Syntagmatic vs Paradigmatic relations
• The last of Saussure's key dichotomies is also the one most difficult to grasp. It
concerns the way signs are combined and thus belongs to the linguistic field of
semiotics (the study of signs). The relationship between signs, according to
Saussure, is a syntagmatic one, i.e. linear and direct. If you take a sentence, we
have one sign following another, the whole sentence having a distinct meaning.
•
• The paradigmatic relationship is between similar signs taking up the same spot in a
syntagm. In linguistics, this spot is called slot. Saussure called this associative
relation. Paradigmatic is the term used by Roman Jacobson and this term is used
now.
B F Skinner- Behaviourism

• B. F. Skinner, one of the founders of behaviorist psychology

• proposed a model of language acquisition in his book Verbal
Behavior
(1957). Two years later, in a devastating reply to Skinner
entitled Review of
Verbal Behavior (1959), Noam Chomsky showed that language
is a complex
cognitive system that could not be acquired by behaviorist
principles.
• https://
newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-6/supporting-m
aterial/skinners-behaviourism
Behaviourist Orientation to
Learning
• The behaviourist movement in psychology has looked to
the use of experimental procedures to study behaviour in
relation to the environment.
• John B. Watson, who is generally credited as the first
behaviourist, argued that the inner experiences that
were the focus of psychology could not be properly
studied as they were not observable.
• Adapting laboratory experimentation, generation of the
stimulus-response model was done, here the
environment is seen as providing stimuli to which
individuals develop responses.
 Three key assumptions underpin this view:
• Observable behaviour rather than internal thought
processes are the focus of study. In particular, learning is
manifested by a change in behaviour.
• The environment shapes one's behaviour; what one
learns is determined by the elements in the environment,
not by the individual learner.
• The principles of contiguity (how close in time two events
must be for a bond to be formed) and reinforcement (any
means of increasing the likelihood that an event will be
repeated) are central to explaining the learning process.
(Merriam and Caffarella 1991: 126)
Skinners input
• reinforcing what you want people to do again; ignoring or punish what
you want people to stop doing = Operant Conditioning
• Activity is important. Learning is better when the learner is active
rather than passive. ('Learning by doing' is to be applauded).
• Repetition, generalization and discrimination are important notions.
Frequent practice - and practice in varied contexts - is necessary for
learning to take place. Skills are not acquired without frequent
practice.
• Reinforcement is the cardinal motivator. Positive reinforcers like
rewards and successes are preferable to negative events like
punishments and failures.
• Learning is helped when objectives are clear. Those who look to
behaviourism in teaching will generally frame their activities by
behavioural objectives e.g. 'By the end of this session participants will
be able to...'. With this comes a concern with competencies and
product approaches to curriculum.
 Noam Chomsky principles of language sciences
1. Universal Grammar (UG): The system of categories, mechanisms, and
constraints shared by all human languages is called UG. UG argues that some
skills and behaviours come from innate abilities which is passed down from
parents to children.
• UG: Theoretical concept: Chomsky (full of criticism and controversy from
scholars of different community)
• innate ability
• a child has full access to universal grammar, whereas an adult has either limited
or no access.
• The role of parental input then becomes to trigger an appropriate value for
innately given or set parameters, specific to the language to which the child is
exposed.
• the brain contains a mechanism he referred as LAD.
• Children acquire their mental grammar without training-Children of same
speech community reliably learn same grammar.
• How the mental grammar comes into the child mind is a puzzle.
• Children equate their mental rules through the sample sentences, they
receive from parents. This information is not sufficient to establish the
underlying grammatical principles. This is called as poverty of stimulus or
the paradox of language acquisition and the solution is UG.
• Poverty of Stimulus is the ability of the Human brain to recognise the
correct and incorrect grammar in sentences.
• John is eager to please vs John is easy to please. (Aspects model 1965,
Chomsky)
• It is possible that an adult might explain the difference to the child or
some feature of the particular situation might make it obvious.
• Such accidental and improbable occurrences cannot explain why child
go through the same stages in acquiring eager/easy to please.
• If the child has not learnt the distinction from the input, he must have
done from some property of his own mind.
• Both examples exploit the same argument, known as poverty of
stimulus, to show that the child know things about language he could
not have learnt from outside, that important aspects of language are
not strictly speaking learnable.
• This is Chomsky’s UG)
2. Principles and Parameters
• It is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a
natural language is described in accordance with
general principles (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and
specific parameters (i.e. markers, switches) that for particular
languages are either turned on or off. For example, the distinction
between whether a language is head-initial or head-final is regarded
as a parameter which is either on or off for particular languages (i.e.
English is head-initial, whereas Hindi is head-final). Therefore, English
has preposition which precedes the noun phrase and Hindi has
postpositions which follow the noun phrase. E.g. [[under] the chair],
[[kursii] ke niiche].
• Principles and parameters was largely formulated by
the linguists Noam Chomsky and Howard Lasnik.
Today, many linguists have adopted this framework,
and it is considered the dominant form of mainstream
generative linguistics.

• The central idea of principles and parameters is that a

person's syntactic knowledge can be modeled with
two formal mechanisms:

• A finite set of fundamental principles that are

common to all languages; e.g., that a sentence must
always have a subject, even if it is not overtly
pronounced.
• A finite set of parameters that determine syntactic variability
amongst languages; e.g., a binary parameter that determines
whether or not the subject of a sentence must be overtly
pronounced (this example is sometimes referred to as the
pro-drop parameter). English must always have overt subject
whereas Hindi can drop the subject. E.g. I am coming vs. aa
rahaa huuM.

• Within this framework, the goal of linguistics is to identify all of

the principles and parameters that are universal to human
language (called: Universal Grammar). As such, any attempt to
explain the syntax of a particular language using a principle or
parameter is cross-examined with the evidence available in other
languages. This leads to continual refinement of the theoretical
machinery of generative linguistics in an attempt to account for
as much syntactic variation in human language as possible.
Activities