The Gavagai problem
In a book called Word and Object, Quine put forward a simple scenario which illustrates the problem of children learning a new language. In this scenario, you are trying to learn a language which you don't speak, and the person you are trying to learn from speaks not a word of English.
As you walk along together, across the field in front of you runs a rabbit.
"Gavagai!" says the other person. What do they mean?
Well, a rabbit, obviously. Unless they meant, "Oh, look!", which could be possible. Or "Wow, a fat one!" Or "Tasty!" Or running, or long ears, or brown, or vermin, or mammal, or bunny rabbit, or...
Even with quite a simple scenario, the possibilities for meaning are very large. So how do children - who don't have even have our years of experience in knowing what people are likely to want to say - figure it out?
Some first guesses
Demonstrate and repeat
In the 17th century, Locke suggested that words were learnt by showing things to children, and repeating the words for them. You've probably heard parents doing this, or even done it yourself."Oh look, it's your teddy! Hello teddy! Do you want teddy?" etc etc...
This might explain some aspects of acquisition, but by no means all. It is very rare that an adult performs this kind of repetition for adverbs, for example:
"Look, it's going quickly! Can you go quickly? I like going quickly..."
And we never attempt to explain function words like "of"!
Imitation
A second possibility: children just imitate what they hear adults saying in the same situations.
But children come up with all kinds of things which indicate that they've learnt something, and it wasn't something an adult said:
"Don't giggle me"
"Joey will get there first than Jason" (from the Kuczaj corpus)
"They drived to the shops and goed inside..."
But children come up with all kinds of things which indicate that they've learnt something, and it wasn't something an adult said:
"Don't giggle me"
"Joey will get there first than Jason" (from the Kuczaj corpus)
"They drived to the shops and goed inside..."
They have clearly understood some rules of English grammar and sentence formation - the door shuts, you shut the door; the vase breaks, you break the vase; I giggle, you giggle me. Perfectly logical - but not arrived at through imitation.
Similarly, Joey will get there faster than Jason; Joey will get there first; so Joey will get there first than Jason. Why should "before" have a different sentence structure than "taller than, faster than, louder than"? Again, this is a logical position to take - just like "goed" for went, and "drived" for drove - but not one copied from an adult.
Similarly, Joey will get there faster than Jason; Joey will get there first; so Joey will get there first than Jason. Why should "before" have a different sentence structure than "taller than, faster than, louder than"? Again, this is a logical position to take - just like "goed" for went, and "drived" for drove - but not one copied from an adult.
Correction
Whilst adults may spend a fair amount of effort trying to correct some aspects of their children's speech, it is clearly not the main method by which they learn.
There is a widely-cited illustration of this from Martin Braine (including in Steven Pinker's popular linguistics book The Language Instinct):
Child: Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Father: You mean, you want the other spoon.
Child: Yes, I want other one spoon, please Daddy.
Father: Can you say “the other spoon”?
Child: Other…one…spoon.
Father: Say “other”.
Child: Other.
Father:
“Spoon.”
Child: Spoon.
Father:
“Other spoon.”
Child: Other…spoon. Now give me other one
spoon?
Adults often don't notice mistakes, and even when they do, children may reject their corrections, if they even figure out what the adult is unhappy about in the first place!
Far more common is adults correcting rudeness, lies or ignorance - if children assumed all corrections were linguistic, they would miss the more important social lessons which adults are trying to impart.
If not that, then what?
So if the meaning of words is not obvious from adults repeating them for children, or using them in the certain contexts, or correcting them, how can children ever learn to associate words with meanings?Over the next few posts, we will look at a series of biases which push children to jump to one conclusion over another. We will look at:
- Whole object bias
- Taxonomic and Shape biases
- Mutual exclusivity and the Principle of Contrast
- Syntactic and semantic bootstrapping
Acknowledgement and further reading
This post, and the following ones. are my summary of a talk I attended by Kristen Syrett on Semantics in Language Acquisition. For a more detailed view of the field, without my misinterpretations, here are some suggested readings from her course:
On verbs:
Gleitman, Lila. (1990). The structural sources of verb meaning. Language Acquisition, 1, 3-55.
Grimshaw, Jane. (1994). Lexical reconciliation. Lingua, 92, 411-430.
Pinker, Stephen. (1994). How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics? Lingua, 92,
377-410.
On gradable adjectives:
Kennedy, Christopher, & McNally, Louise. (2005). Scale structure, degree modification, and the
semantics of gradable predicates. Language, 81, 345-381.
Syrett, Kristen, Kennedy, Christopher, & Lidz, Jeffrey. (2010). Meaning and context in
children’s understanding of gradable adjectives. Journal of Semantics, 27, 1-35.
On scope and quantifier raising:
Gualmini, Andrea, Hulsey, Sarah, Hacquard, Valentine, & Fox, Danny. (2008). The questionanswer
requirement for scope assignment. Natural Language Semantics, 16, 205-237.
Lidz, Jeffrey, & Musolino, Julien. (2002). Children’s command of quantification. Cognition, 84,
113-154.
Syrett, Kristen, & Lidz, Jeffrey. (2009). QR in child grammar: Evidence from Antecedent-
Contained Deletion. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics, 16, 67-
81.
Syrett, Kristen. to appear. Experimental support for inverse scope readings of finite-clause
embedded Antecedent-Contained Deletion sentences. Linguistic Inquiry.
Syrett, Kristen, & Lidz, Jeffrey. (2011). Competence, performance and the locality of Quantifier
Raising: Evidence from 4-year-old children. Linguistic Inquiry, 42, 305-337.
On plurals:
Caponigro, Ivano, Pearl, Lisa, Brooks, Neon, & Barner, David. (2012). Acquiring the meaning of
free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions. Journal of Semantics, 29, 261-293.
Syrett, Kristen, & Musolino, Julien. (2013). Collectivity, distributivity, and the interpretation of
numerical expressions in child and adult language. Language Acquisition: A Journal of
Developmental Linguistics, 20, 259-291.
Syrett, Kristen, & Musolino, Julien. to appear. All together now: Collectivity, distributivity, and
the semantics of together in child and adult language. Language Acquisition: A Journal of
Developmental Linguistics.