It was just called to my attention that in the “check” I gave you initially in the CHILDES lab description, I suggested that I found 18 of the first verb, and 24 of the second verb (for Part 2). It’s actually 24 for each of them (I missed 6 initially when I wrote that up).
CHILDES lab: Getting to eat
In the CHILDES lab, one of the early steps is to pick a verb that is used a lot (as reported by freq). The idea was to pick the most common verb, except have, go, want, and see. Although it’s maybe giving away something that I wanted to you answer, just to keep us on the same page, I picked eat for the first one (there were 24 forms of eat) and get for the second one (there were 24 forms of this too). 24 is not a huge number, but the hope is that by checking these 24 verbs, we might be able to extrapolate the child’s behavior on, say, eat, to estimate their behavior on all verbs. So, the more the better, except that we want to avoid verbs in that list I gave above (have, go, etc.).
CHILDES lab: Clarification on part 6
In response to a question I got about part 6 of the CHILDES lab (where you are to count up the wh-questions): What we’re counting here should be just the cases where the child utters a wh-question (not cases where the child is responding to a wh-question).
Nina18 is between Nina17 and Nina19
It was just called to my attention that the nina18.cha file has a typo in the date given at the top. Specifically, it claims that nina18.cha was from 1970, but it must be from 1971, given that the age attributed to Nina increases by 4 days (not -361 days) between nina17.cha (in 1971) and nina18.cha.
So, in case you found that confusing or worrying, I can pretty confidently say that’s a typo in CHILDES.
If you find any other typos like this, let me know.
CHILDES lab ready to go
I have now finished the formatting and tests on the CHILDES lab at this point, so you can at any point now go and take a look at it and try to do it. Click on the CHILDES lab item above to get there.
The last part makes reference to “topic drop” accounts, which we will discuss on Thursday. The rest of it is mostly counting, really. Note that it will take you a while to do the counts. I gave two weeks for this for a reason, don’t wait until the day before it is due to do this!
Low humor, perhaps
The CHILDES search I was attempting to perform in class was a combo search with these parameters, from the Eng-USA/Brown/Eve/ directory:
+s"time^away" +t*MOT +w2 -w2 eve19.cha
You can go to the CHILDES transcript browser, select “combo” in the popup menu, copy and paste the command above into the text box, and press “Run.”
Or, if you just want to see the result: http://tinyurl.com/evepassingtime.
Roger Brown commented on this early on in his book as well.
It’s probably funnier when it comes up as a search result for something else you were looking for.
If the source text isn’t familiar to you, you can try substituting “+t*CHI” in for “+t*MOT” in the command above to see Eve, earlier in the transcript, running through the more canonical words to this relatively well-known American folk song.
HW3: What I meant by “sentence 5”
This is coming a bit late, but in case you had been puzzling over this on homework #3, the third question refers to how people did with respect to sentence 5. Unfortunately, the autonumbering I used to set up the questions to be answered continued with the example French sentence (giving the glosses) at the very end of the homework, and so that was labeled “(5)”. Question (3), however, is intended to refer to the fifth sentence of the test.
The fifth sentence of the test is in an order that is ungrammatical in both Dutch and French, and the 1st graders mostly rejected it (correctly). The 3rd graders and adults also rejected it (correctly). But the 2nd graders mostly accepted it (incorrectly). So the question was to think about why the 2nd graders might have erroneously been accepting it, even though they used to reject it and would come to reject it again later.
Lydia White: Fri Feb 5, 3pm, KCB 106
As I’ve announced a couple of times: Lydia White is coming to BU to give a talk tomorrow (Friday). This is definitely worth going to, I hope everyone in the class can attend.
Prof. Lydia White (McGill University) will be talking about some of her current research in second language acquisition, with a focus on the “definiteness effect” in sentences like “There is a talk on Friday.” A basic background in linguistics will be assumed, but will be accessible to non-specialists. If you are (or think you might be) interested in what’s going on in theoretically-informed second language acquisition research, this is a great opportunity to hear about it from one of the most prominent researchers in the field today.
Lydia White is James McGill Professor of Linguistics. She has a BA/MA in Moral Sciences and Psychology from Cambridge University (1969), and a PhD in Linguistics from McGill (1980). Lydia White is Co-Editor of the book series Language Acquisition and Language Disorders (published by John Benjamins) and she is on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of Applied Psycholinguistics, Language Acquisition, Second Language Research, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and the Japanese Second Language Association
HW2: Short elaboration
As for the question on homework #2 (“Why is this interesting?”), I have posted a revision that includes the following elaboration:
Why is this interesting? Here are some things you might comment on: None of those forms in the table are actually infinitives—the infinitive has a distinct form, and there were essentially zero. How might this relate to the ATOM model? To the truncation model? Given what we see in the adult data (last line) to what extent are the children’s productions governed by what they are hearing?
This is a pretty free-form question. Feel free to add any additional thoughts you have. The basic idea of this exercise is to look at a small amount of data from a language we haven’t talked about (Swahili) and see how it bears on the models of first language acquisition (from 2-3 years) that we’ve discussed so far. It is probably relatively obvious how it relates to the ATOM model, but it is worth thinking about how difficult it is to understand from the perspective of the other available models of acquisition we’ve looked at.
HW2: Typo notes
I’m in the process of working up an elaboration on homework #2, but just at the outset, there are two relatively incidental typos on the one I handed out.
The first is in the title. “Development of knowledge…to an SVO L2” has nothing to do with this homework. As you’ll discover, this relates to homework #3, which I will hand out next week. Copy and paste error.
The other copy and paste error is in (3). There should be no “mw-ingine” in (3), that’s accidentally copied from (2).
Neither of these make a lot of difference, ultimately, but they are not what was intended.
Shortly I will post here some things you might think about as you answer the one question on homework #2 (“Why is this interesting?”).