performance/competence, cooperation, and the future

[JAN R EDWARDS]

Dear Tom,

If it's possible, I'd like to find out more about the meeting
on assessing children's learning in different European languages.
I have an NIH-funded grant on cross-linguistic phonological
acquisition (so far, we are looking at American English, Greek,
French, Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean --
see http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~edwards/) and we have done
some preliminary work on developing some measures for Greek.
I wasn't aware of a more organized effort in this regard.  Could you
put me in touch with the organizers of this?  Thanks so much.

Yours,
Jan

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roeper, Tom" <roeper at linguist.umass.edu>
Date: Friday, November 2, 2007 8:37 am
Subject: performance/competence, cooperation, and the future
To: Info-CHILDES <info-childes at googlegroups.com>


> Info childes    performance/competence and cooperation
> 
> Dear  Performance/Competence discussion-
> 
>     I'd like to shift the discussion-if it continues-- from that of
> errors, which are incontrovertible signs of performance, to questions
> of interfaces which is in many ways a new thrust in linguistic theory
> partly aimed at incorporating in a single mechanism many phenomena
> previously associated with performance.  I think it offers an exciting
> future and many avenues for cooperation---let me illustrate.
>       I have been silent because I was in Cyprus attending a
> fascinating meeting sponsored by the European Union, organized by Uli
> Sauerland from ZAS, aimed to developing
> instruments to assess children's language in a wide variety of
> European
> languages.    In the group of 40 were many people associated with Dan
> Slobin and Michael Tomasello.  Issues linked to "performance" are
> a constant factor in designing experiments---hardly something ignored
> in practical terms, because speech pathologists were also a central
> part of the group.   How to build those factors into
> a language interface that is connected to the subtleties of grammar is
> a
> real theoretical challenge, but being sensitive to them in day to day
> experimental design is just a given.
>       Let me offer more  about thiis conference.  After some
> discussion we got to work designing experiments.  Using insights
> gained from the DELV test,  which Harry Seymour, Jill deVilliers and I
> (and many others) devised for English, we looked at  exhausitivity in
> "who bought what" (where many children answer  with
> one person or a single pair-not all required) and quantifier spreading
> in "every dog as a bone", where some children think it means "every
> bone".  Now these sentences will be explored in up to 17 different
> languages and dialects.   Experimental ideas from many other quarters
> were incorporated as well.
>       These questions   are askable precisely because they are linked
> to linguistic universals that transcend language differences.  They
> come straight from linguistic theory---yet everyone who hears about
> them  gets interested whether they are followers of generative
> linguistics or not.  Experimentation in Polish, Bulgarian, and Romani
> has already begun, with interesting results.
>       Recent work in linguistic theory has focused on Interfaces,
> which includes pragmatics and semantics, and the leader of the
>  EU group, Uli Sauerland, is a specialist in precisely these domains.
> and a major focus has been how implicatures work.
>         The challenge I raised before remains---and it is a tough one-
> without obvious answers: how do we build a mechanism---commensurate
> with the speed of language---that can build other
> compuatational abilities into  language while realizing their
> creative and generative power.  How do we represent creativity
> in memory to match the creativity of recursion?  How do we
> generate unique implicatures in unique situations?  Any model
> which avoids the creative algorithms misses the essence of the
> mechanism---and I believe ultimately leads to an image of children
> that does not honor their dignity.  This is the argument I make
> in my book The Prism of Grammar.
>        An analogy might help.   While syntax perhaps captures the
> skeleton of language---one might holler "how about all the muscles
> that enable movement?". Good question, but it requires exactly a
> concept of the interface: where exactly do muscles connect to bones so
> that they can move them efficiently and how does the physics of
> movement
> get represented.  A theory of muscles that ignores exactly how
> they are connected  with bones won't tell us much.
>      Take an example (from Christ Potts) on implicatures and
> Point of View.  If  I say "honestly you can climb a mountain"
> it is my honesty that is implicated, if I invert the auxiliary
> "Honestly, can you climb a mountain" it is yours.   And we
> get different readings for: "honestly who can report" and
> "Who can report honestly".  The implications are tightly
> linked to the syntax.  There is a natural experiment for someone.
> to do: when do children control that switch.  (Anna Verbuk has
> done interesting relevant work.)
>      I think the discussion can be much more productive if we
> discuss real examples and project precise theories of how they
> can work.  That is the challenge we can explor together, much
> more beneficially than by a debate that too heavily linked to
> imprecise abstractions.
> 
> Tom Roeper
> 
> See you at BU if you are coming--
> 
> 
> > 

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