Paul Ibbotson

The attention-grammar interface: eye-gaze cues structural choice in children and adults

Abstract We investigated whether children (3- and 4-year-olds) and adults can use the active passive alternation – essentially a choice of subject – in a way that is consistent with the eye-gaze of the speaker. Previous work suggests the function of the subject position can be grounded in attentional mechanisms (Tomlin 1995, 1997). Eye-gaze is one powerful source of directing attention that we know adults and young children are sensitive to; furthermore, we know adults are more likely to look at the subject of their sentence than any other character (Gleitman et al. 2007; Griffin and Bock 2000). We demonstrate that older children and adults are able to use speaker-gaze to choose a felicitous subject when describing a scene with both agent-focused and patient focused cues. Integrating attentional and grammatical information in this way allows children to limit the degrees of freedom on what the function of certain linguistic constructions might be.

Prototype constructions in early language acquisition

Abstract In this paper we bring together several lines of cross-linguistic research to demonstrate the role of prototypicality in young childrens acquisition of the transitive construction. Much research has shown that young children are slow to form abstract constructions because they fail to see the more general applicability of syntactic markers such as word order and case marking. Here we attempt to explain this fact by investigating the nature of the language children do and do not hear, specifically, the reliability and availability of the linguistic cues they are exposed to. We suggest that constructions redundantly marked with multiple cues could have a special status as a nucleus around which the prototype forms—which makes it difficult for them to isolate the functional significance of each cue. The implications of this view for language acquisition are discussed within a usage-based framework.

The scope of usage-based theory

Usage-based approaches typically draw on a relatively small set of cognitive processes, such as categorization, analogy, and chunking to explain language structure and function. The goal of this paper is to first review the extent to which the “cognitive commitment” of usage-based theory has had success in explaining empirical findings across domains, including language acquisition, processing, and typology. We then look at the overall strengths and weaknesses of usage-based theory and highlight where there are significant debates. Finally, we draw special attention to a set of culturally generated structural patterns that seem to lie beyond the explanation of core usage-based cognitive processes. In this context we draw a distinction between cognition permitting language structure vs. cognition entailing language structure. As well as addressing the need for greater clarity on the mechanisms of generalizations and the fundamental units of grammar, we suggest that integrating culturally generated structures within existing cognitive models of use will generate tighter predictions about how language works.

The role of pronoun frames in early comprehension of transitive constructions in English

Case marking in English in available only on some pronouns and only in some cases. It is unknown whether young children acquiring English nevertheless make use of this highly restricted marking as a cue to sentence interpretation. The current study therefore examined how 2- and 3-year-old English children use case-marked pronoun frames and constructional word order cues (actives versus passives) to understand agent-patient relations in transitive sentences containing novel verbs. In a pointing comprehension test, 2-year-olds used pronoun frames containing two case-marked pronouns to help them interpret grammatical sentences, both actives and passives, but they were unable to assign agent-patient relationships in any consistent way with ungrammatical pronoun frames. Three-year-olds also used pronoun frames to interpret grammatical active and passive sentences (with either one or two case-marked pronouns) but varied in their interpretation of ungrammatical sentences according to pronoun frame. These results suggest that the role of case-marked pronouns has been underestimated in English language acquisition, and that even very young English children use multiple cues to comprehend transitive sentences.

Language in a new key

The article reports that 21st century cognitive scientists and linguists are presenting evidence that counters the mid-20th century universal grammar theory of Noam Chomsky, which states that peoples brains are hardwired to learn grammar. Topics discussed include the flaws in Chomskys linguistic theories when applied to language learning and the emergence of the alternative to Chomskys theory called usage-based linguistics which debunks the claim that grammatical structure is innate.

The communicative contexts of grammatical aspect use in English

In many of the worlds languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative context of the child performing actions. On average, 30% of verbal descriptions refer to child actions that are grounded in the here-and-now. Of these utterances, there are two features of the communicative context that reliably map onto the functions of the imperfective, namely, that events are construed as ongoing and from within. The findings are discussed with reference to how the context in which a child hears aspectual language may limit the degrees of freedom on what these constructions mean.

Inhibitory Control Predicts Grammatical Ability

We present evidence that individual variation in grammatical ability can be predicted by individual variation in inhibitory control. We tested 81 5-year-olds using two classic tests from linguistics and psychology (Past Tense and the Stroop). Inhibitory control was a better predicator of grammatical ability than either vocabulary or age. Our explanation is that giving the correct response in both tests requires using a common cognitive capacity to inhibit unwanted competition. The implications are that understanding the developmental trajectory of language acquisition can benefit from integrating the developmental trajectory of non-linguistic faculties, such as executive control.

Abstracting grammar from social–cognitive foundations: a developmental sketch of learning

Although the understanding of the development of infants’ social cognition and cooperative reasoning has progressed significantly, to date, it has yet to be worked through in any detail how this knowledge interacts with and constrains emerging syntactic representations. This review is a step in that direction, aiming to offer a more integrated account of the learning mechanisms that support linguistic generalizations. First, I review the developmental literature that suggests social–cognitive foundations get linguistic constructions “off the ground.” Second, I focus on building layers of abstractions on top of this foundation and the kind of cognitive processes that are involved. Crucially important in this explanation will be the fact that humans possess a unique set of social–cognitive and social motivational-skills that allows language to happen. Furthermore, early linguistic categories are formed around the underlying functional core of concepts and on the basis of their communicative discourse function. This, combined with powerful pattern-detection skills, enables distributional regularities in the input to be paired with what the speakers intend to communicate.

Little dictators: a developmental meta-analysis of prosocial behavior

Using the dictator game as a measure of prosocial behavior, we combined data from developmental studies from 14 different sites around the world (N = 1,601). We fitted several growth models to the developmental trajectories that varied in their complexity and levels of prosociality. The rationale we used here assumes we can infer something about where all children start on a generous-selfish continuum by looking at the shape of developmental change. We found the model that best explained the variation in developmental trajectories began with a sharing value of ~15%, more toward the selfish end of the spectrum. We also found tentative evidence that the rate at which these prosocial attitudes develop is dependent on the norm of the society. Essentially, if the adult-sharing norm is higher, as it is in non-Western societies, then the child needs to develop at a quicker rate to reach this norm by adulthood. Results are discussed with reference to whether the history of human evolution has left the content of a norm underspecified while leaving the cognitive architecture in place to acquire it—a process that we argue is analogous to imprinting.

The role of semantics, pre-emption and skew in linguistic distributions: the case of the un-construction

We use the Google Ngram database, a corpus of 5,195,769 digitized books containing ~4% of all books ever published, to test three ideas that are hypothesized to account for linguistic generalizations: verbal semantics, pre-emption and skew. Using 828,813 tokens of un-forms as a test case for these mechanisms, we found verbal semantics was a good predictor of the frequency of un-forms in the English language over the past 200 years—both in terms of how the frequency changed over time and their frequency rank. We did not find strong evidence for the direct competition of un-forms and their top pre-emptors, however the skew of the un-construction competitors was inversely correlated with the acceptability of the un-form. We suggest a cognitive explanation for this, namely, that the more the set of relevant pre-emptors is skewed then the more easily it is retrieved from memory. This suggests that it is not just the frequency of pre-emptive forms that must be taken into account when trying to explain usage patterns but their skew as well.