Starting big : the role of multi-word phrases in language learning and use
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Why are children better language learners than adults despite being worse at other cognitive tasks? Previous accounts have focused on biological, cognitive or neural differences between children and adults. In this dissertation, I suggest the answer lies, at least in part, in the linguistic units that children and adults learn from and how those shape subsequent learning. I propose the Starting Big Hypothesis: children learn from units that are larger and less analyzed than the ones adults learn from. Children's early inventory includes multi-word fragments (e.g., give-it) and short multi-word utterances (e.g., I-don't-know, It's-my-turn). These multi-word units facilitate grammatical and lexical learning and are part of the native adult inventory as well. I argue that adults' prior knowledge and experience with language leads them to 'break language down' in a way that hinders the learning process. I explore three concrete predictions of this hypothesis 1) that children's morphological knowledge is facilitated in frequent sentence-frames 2) that multi-word phrases are part of the native adult lexicon, and 3) that L2 learning of grammatical gender will improve when learners are first exposed to larger chunks of language. I test these predictions using several experimental tasks: corpus studies of natural speech, elicited production with children, lexical decision, and artificial language learning in adults. The combined findings offer a novel perspective on the difficulty that adults experience in learning a second language. The findings enhance a usage-based view of first language learning that emphasizes the importance of multi-word phrases in the construction of grammar, and present evidence in support of an emergentist view of language where all linguistic experience (be it atomic or complex) is processed by the same cognitive mechanism.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Copyright date | 2010 |
| Publication date | 2009, c2010; 2009 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Arnon, Inbal |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Linguistics |
| Primary advisor | Clark, Eve V |
| Thesis advisor | Clark, Eve V |
| Thesis advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- |
| Thesis advisor | Ramscar, Michael |
| Thesis advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
| Thesis advisor | Wasow, Thomas |
| Advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- |
| Advisor | Ramscar, Michael |
| Advisor | Sumner, Meghan |
| Advisor | Wasow, Thomas |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Inbal Arnon. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Linguistics. |
| Thesis | Ph.D. Stanford University 2010 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2010 by Inbal Arnon
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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