11.59, Review: Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff: The Origins of Grammar

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Subject: 11.59, Review: Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff: The Origins of Grammar

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1)
Date:  Mon, 10 Jan 2000 11:20:20 ­0500
From:  Dina Belyayeva <belyayev at phys.ufl.edu>
Subject:  Review of Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 10 Jan 2000 11:20:20 ­0500
From:  Dina Belyayeva <belyayev at phys.ufl.edu>
Subject:  Review of Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff

Hirsh-Pasek K. & Golinkoff, R. M. (1996). The Origins of Grammar:
Evidence from Early Language Comprehension. MIT Press. 201 pages.

Reviewed by Dina Belyayeva, CUNY

Synopsis:

This book provides a thorough description of a new methodological
tool,  the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, and outlines a
Coalition  Model of Language Comprehension.

Chapter 1. Introduction.

The introduction draws attention to the overwhelming complexity of a
task that children undertake to learn a language. The authors
present a very brief overview of presumptions held by prior theories
of language acquisition in  order to set a premise for further
discussion. They contend that only a  "biased learner" who relies on
varied coalitions of input sources can cope  with the task of such
enormity. They also introduce the reader to the structure  of the
book and the goals they pursue.

Chapter 2. Theories of Language Acquisition.

In this chapter the authors provide a taxonomy of pre-1996 language
acquisition theories. They use extreme nativist and empiricist
positions  as the opposite ends of the three continua that represent
the source of  initial language structure (innate vs. constructed),
the type of input (purely  linguistic vs. environmentally
constructed categories) and the mechanisms  employed in the
acquisition process (domain-specific vs. domain-general).  The
authors caution against the literal interpretation of the proposed
taxonomy,  since the primary purpose of their effort was not to
enter into the alliance with  any of the reviewed positions but
rather to use "previously undiscovered  consensus among the
theories" in order to establish the types of input that  help a
child to take the language learning process off the ground.

Chapter 3. The Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm.

The chapter is devoted to the detailed description of the Intermodal
Preferential Looking Paradigm introduced in this book. The paradigm
represents a new methodology for assessing early language
comprehension.  The beginning of this chapter provides a review of
methods used to assess  language production and comprehension in
nascent learners. The primarily  focus is given to methods for
studying language comprehension. The authors  outline general
advantages of using these methods in language development  research.
They contend that these methods provide more accurate account  of
the child's emerging language system, capture the time-window when
processing of a particular structure begins before the child
attempts to produce  it, and can be used as a means to control the
child's ability to comprehend  certain grammatical structures. In
addition to the above advantages, the  Intermodal Preferential
Paradigm offers two other benefits that make this  method especially
attractive to anyone working on early language assessment.  The
method requires "no overt action on the part of the child" and can
be used  to assess the knowledge of grammatical relationships via
presentation of  "dynamic" stimuli. The method is based on the
procedure that makes use of the  child's visual fixation responses;
that is, whether the child looks more at one  stimulus than at the
other. It was adapted from the work of Spelker (1979) who  studied
intermodal perception in infants.



Here is a much simplified outline of the paradigm. During an
experimental  session an infant is seated on a parent's lap between
two television screens.  A concealed speaker plays a linguistic
stimulus that matches an action going on  on one of the screens. An
experimenter's task is to register whether the child  allocates more
attention to the action that matches the auditory stimulus. The rest
of the chapter provides a detailed account of the general
experimental procedure,  apparatus, materials, experimental
variables, participant solicitation, and the criteria  used for
discarding data.

Chapters 4, 5 & 6 present a series of studies with the two general
goals:

(1) to determine the time-window when infants become sensitive to
meaning  differences in various linguistic structures, and

(2) the type of input that they chose to rely on at every given
time-window.   The purpose of the study described in Chapter 4 was
to identify whether infants  who have only single-word utterances in
their repertoire can isolate sentence  constituents (e.g., verb
phrase). To test this processing ability, the infants were
presented with two similar-looking video events. For example, on one
screen they  saw a woman kissed a ball while moving a set of keys on
the foreground, whereas  on the other screen a different woman
kissed the keys while moving the ball in the foreground. The
auditory stimulus "She is kissing the keys" was played to test
whether infants can identify the verb phase by directing more of
their attention to the matching action on one of the screens. A
series of experimental conditions were  introduced to control for
the factors such as name familiarity, action typicality,  sentence-
final position. The results revealed that 13- to 15-month-old
infants were  able to process the verb phrase without reliance on
their extralinguistic knowledge  that could be be manifested in
better performance on the sentences describing more  typical events.

Chapter 5 describes a series of experiments that tested the ability
single-word  speakers to comprehend word order in active reversible
sentences. (e.g. "Look!  Big Bird is feeding Cookie Monster!")
Although the results demonstrated infants' comprehension of word
order, it was not entirely clear whether the infants carried  out
syntactic (subject-verb-object) or semantic (agent-action-patient)
analysis.

Chapter 6 presents a series of experiments that were conducted with
the purpose  to distinguish between the two types of analyses.
Children were presented with  sentences hat contrasted transitive
and intransitive frames of the same action verbs.  (E.g., "Big Bird
is bending Cookie Monster!" vs "Big Bird and Cookie Monster are
bending!"/"Big Bird is bending with Cookie Monster!") The authors
used the cross- sectional comparison of three age groups, 18-, 24-
and 29-month-old children.  The results revealed that only the two
older groups were able to override the "agent- action-patient"
interpretation of word order by demonstrating their preference for
the intransitive event. This ability was lost when intransitive
frames were presented in  the bare sentence condition, without the
grammatical markers such as the preposition  "with" and the plural
form of the auxiliary verb "are". (E.g., "Watch Big Bird and Cookie
Monster bending!") The developmental picture that emerges from the
study suggests  that older children are able to switch from greater
reliance on semantic processing to  more prominent reliance on
syntactic processing when additional structural information  was
made available to them.

Chapter 7. A Coalition Model of Language Comprehension.

In this chapter the authors recapitulate the experimental finding
within the new  theoretical framework. The framework was proposed
with the purpose to answer the  question that is considered to be
the source of major disagreement between the  language acquisition
theories. What inputs drive the language-learning system? The
framework uses language comprehension as its major functional
element. Along the developmental continuum, comprehension evolves
from internalization to interpretation. Internalization involves
extraction of "acoustic packages" from the speech stream.

At this point of development (phase I) infants form associations
between perceptual correlates that provide building blocks for
future interpretations. Phase II marks  transition from
internalization to interpretation when children use their ability to
parse  the speech sequence to "carve the observed world into events
and sequences."  At this phase they rely on redundant cues from the
coalition of environmental,  contextual, social, prosodic, semantic
and syntactic cues with a bias toward  semantic analysis. Phase III
represents an advanced stage in language development. Children
become less dependent on correlated cues in the input and gradually
switch to relatively independent syntactic analysis. Although the
cues are available  at all times, they are differentially weighted
in the tree phases. In Phase I children  are biased to focus on
prosodic cues, whereas in later phases (II & III) they are  biased
to rely on semantic and syntactic cues, respectively. In conclusion,
the  authors contend that the proposed coalition of cues resolves
the controversy about  the as the driving force that helps to take
the language learning process off the ground  (e.g., the controversy
between the semantic and syntactic bootstrapping). By  achieving
that they hope to take the discussion "beyond the traditional
nativist- empiricist dichotomy that permeates much of the field".

 Evaluation:

One of the goals that the authors set in the Introduction was "to
make the domain  of language acquisition accessible to psychologist
through clear and relatively  jargon-free exposition." The authors
achieved that goal. In fact they were so  successful in their effort
that the book can be recommended for a much wider  audience. The
manner in which the book is composed and written makes the
experimental methodology and theoretical considerations behind it
highly  accessible to anyone interested in the issues related to
language acquisition.  The book in its entirety presents a useful
supplemental reading for the graduate- level course. Parts of it can
be used to introduce undergraduate students to the  variety of
theoretical positions permeating the field. The overview of language
acquisition theories in Chapter 2 offers a concise yet thorough
reference guide  to an array of theoretical issues in language
acquisition. Exceptional clarity of  research objectives and
painstaking thoroughness in the description of the  experimental
paradigm can be used as a handbook for anyone learning how to
conduct experimental research in the field of language development.

The authors were also successful in attaining their primary goals.
The new  method, the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm, was
proven to offer a  tool that would enable a researcher to
investigate the nascent knowledge of  language structure, such as
sensitivity to constituent structure & verb  subcategorization
frames. Among other advantages mentioned in the book  the method
offers a way to measure duration of infants' attentional states
without the need to use cumbersome eye tracking equipment. The
intermediate  position that the authors adopted in respect to their
theoretical affiliation allowed  them to take their investigation
beyond the plateau of the nature-nurture debate.

There are a few points that I found open for critique. One of them
is the taxonomy  offered in Chapter 2. Although the authors
explicitly warn against the literal  interpretation of their
hyperbolic dichotomies, I find it difficult to ignore the fact  that
innate and constructed structures are portrayed as the opposite ends
of the  same continuum. Even the most medial position (in respect to
the position on the  nature-nurture spectrum of theories), the
Emergentist Approach (MacWhinney  1999) would not accept the
continuum as a way to define its position on the  "grammar organ."

In Chapter 6 the liberal use of the term 'active' (p. 147) entails
that sentences with  intransitive frames are not active sentences.

In their discussion of the role language comprehension plays in the
overall  cognitive development, the authors claim that mental models
are constructed  via the processes involved in language
comprehension. Although a serious  attempt was made to define the
notion of a mental model, little ground was  provided to
substantiate that claim. The stronger version of this claim can be
rooted in the assumption that preverbal infants do not have mental
models of  their own, which is hard to prove. The weaker version may
be rooted in what  constitutes the anatomical basis of language
capacity. Caplan (1987) in his  review of Geschwind's work points
out that humans are the only species able  to form direct
connections between visual, auditory and somesthetic (i.e.,
sensory) association areas. According to such neural organization,
"acoustic  packaging", the comprehension process of phase I,
constitutes one type of the  stimuli involved in formation of
cross-modal associations that contribute to  construction of mental
models.

The mechanisms proposed to motivate a transition within and between
phases  (the guided distributional analysis and Bloom's Principles
of Discrepancy and  Elaboration) do not differ significantly in
respect to their major driving force. In fact,  they are essentially
the same mechanism that has different manifestations at  every
developmental phase due to different cognitive and communicative
demands  at a given stage of language development.

The above critical remarks do not diminish the significance of the
proposed model.  The reader should bear in mind that the authors
consider their model as a work in  progress. This work could only
develop out of the new experimental methodology  presented in the
book.

 Bibliography:

Caplan, D. (1987). Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasiology.
Cambridge University Press.

MacWhinney, B. (Ed.). (1999). The Emergence of Language. Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Mahwah, NJ.

Spelke, E. (1979). Perceiving bimodally specified events in infancy.
Developmental Psychology 15, 626-636.

 About the reviewer

Dina Belyayeva is a Research Associate at the City University of New
York. She earned her Ph. D. in Lingusitics at the University of
Florida.  In her doctoral dissertation she proposed a model of the
bilingual memory  that has implications for many language
acquisition phenomena.  Language Acquisition and Bilingualism are
currently the major areas of her  research interests. Other areas of
interest include semantic memory disorders  and models of language
production and comprehension.






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