[Lingtyp] L1 English

[Arnold Zwicky]

> On Aug 9, 2024, at 12:21 PM, Stela Manova via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
> 
>  I am writing to ask for your help with the following issue. I have been working on the relationship between LLMs and linguistic theory and now it is time to check how language acquisition happens in humans and machines. I am therefore looking for the very first, at least, 100 words of children with L1 English (in the ideal case, data should come from different varieties of the language). ... Please feel free to forward the query to linguists that are not on the list. 

I appealed to my old friend and illustrious colleague Eve Clark, and here are her musings, for you to use as you wish. Please don't engage with me on this (this is not at all my field) or with EC (who just gave a quick reaction).

,,,,,

We know a lot about the first 100+ words children produce (their early comprehension isn’t as well documented) but parental reports can be somewhat unreliable at times. All this is in the CHILDES Archive, of course, with many further analyses of the CDI data also in Michael Frank’s recent book:
 
Frank, M. C., Braginsky, Mika; Yurovsky, Daniel, & Marchman, Virginia A.  2021. Variability and Consistency in Early Language Learning: The Wordbank project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    
Another source I’d recommend is an article by Warstadt & Bowman:
 
Warstadt, Alex, & Bowman, Samuel R.  2022. What artificial neural networks can tell us about human language acquisition. In S. Lappin & J.-P. Bernardy (eds.), Algebraic Structures in Natural Language (pp. 17-29). London: CRC Press.
 (They compare the actual amounts of input required for different models to learn from, compared to human infants…)
 
My general impression is that no-one in the LLM ‘field’ knows anything about human language acquisition, certainly not the details for early perception, phonological sequences, word identification/recognition, word combination, speech acts, etc.etc. For a recent taste of this, see the fourth edition of
Clark, E. V. 2024. First Language Acquisition (Cambridge UP) for all that will need to be accounted for…
.....

Arnold