The Advantages of Being Helpless

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deaptor
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#1

Сообщение deaptor »

There is an interesting article in 'Scientific American' about the difference in language acquisition between children and adults. The article is based on a few peer-reviewed papers, but links to those papers do not work anymore. (I can try to find those papers if anyone is interested.) Anyway, the article is a good read and contains some thought provoking ideas: https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... -helpless/
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#2

Сообщение deaptor »

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#3

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

deaptor, I guess this would explain the mechanism behind children's tendency toward morphological overgeneralization. You know, the famous three-phase model, usually demonstrated by the acquisition of irregular past forms:

Phase 1: children learn the standard irregular past tense forms (caught, saw).
Phase 2: children learn the -ed inflection rule and overgeneralize it to irregular forms (catched, seed, wented).
Phase 3: children grasp the idea of exceptions and incorporate them back into their speech.

However, according to recent research, adults generally follow the same route, especially if they are learning from input. The jury is still out on this whole issue, and I think such research should be considered with caution.
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#4

Сообщение tourist »

children grasp the idea of exceptions and incorporate them back into their speech.
I understaned now
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#5

Сообщение deaptor »

Easy-Breezy English пишет: 18 июл 2019, 19:18 However, according to recent research, adults generally follow the same route, especially if they are learning from input.
Following the same general path does not preclude some noticeable differences. I'd really appreciate if you post links to those studies.
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 18 июл 2019, 19:18 The jury is still out on this whole issue
Absolutely! Especially if you speak about how it was written in Scientific American. I like the article, but there are some oversimplifications in the interpretation of the results. If you look at peer-reviewed papers, they are much more careful worded. No one claims that age is the only factor here, but it is a factor that you can't completely ignore.
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#6

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

deaptor пишет: 18 июл 2019, 23:34 I'd really appreciate if you post links to those studies.
I could see that one coming. :-) My books are at home, and I won't be back for quite some time. So, unfortunately, I can't back up my statement to your satisfaction. Quick googling only produced fairly dated and not nearly detailed enough texts. However, as far as I know, no significant breakthroughs have been made since those were published.

Here's a classic:
S. Palermo and H. E. Howe, Jr., 'An Experimental Analogy to the Learning of Past Tense Inflection Rules," Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9 (1970)

" ...the resulting performance followed the pattern observed in the acquisition of past tense inflection by young children."

This is also pretty well-known:
Taylor, Barry P. (1974). "Toward A Theory Of Language Acquisition 1 ." Language Learning 24(1)

"...errors made by children learning a second language are similar to those that children make in learning their native language. These errors typically involve syntactic simplification, rule overgeneralization, and the reduction of syntactic redundancies. Recent work in error analysis in adult second language acquisition suggests that the adult operates under a similar strategy of grammar simplification. ... The overgeneralization of past tense endings on irregular verbs ... is a common error in both children and adults."

Vivian Cook wrote a lot on the subject, too. His conclusion is basically that if increased memory span in adults is cancelled out in experiments, the differences between child and adult language acquisition mechanisms are negligible, and that applies to overgeneralizaion, too.

Not that I necessarily subscribe to this position, but the issue remains highly controversial to this day. As I'm sure you know.
Последний раз редактировалось Easy-Breezy English 19 июл 2019, 02:22, всего редактировалось 1 раз.
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#7

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

deaptor пишет: 18 июл 2019, 23:34 I like the article, but there are some oversimplifications in the interpretation of the results.
I looked through the actual research, and I have one major problem with it. There are two articles that focus on cognitive control and maturation of the prefrontal cortex. And then there's the article that deals with language development. The latter attributes stronger tendency to regularize in children to their deficient memory capabilities as compared to those of adults. Nothing about cognitive control or any of that. So, how do they make that leap in the SA article? What am I missing? Granted, the articles are quite long, and I mostly skimmed through them, but still.

Generally, though, any kind of conclusions in this particular area are always a bit of a stretch. There are SO many various factors to control for that the chance of arriving at some convincing verdict is still outside our reach, if you ask me.
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#8

Сообщение deaptor »

Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 01:41 I could see that one coming. :-)
This is not a game. If you need more time just say so. As I said, I would like to read them to make my own conclusion. If it takes more time to find them, it is fine. I just hate to operate based on hearsay. I need to read the original article myself.
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 01:41 This is also pretty well-known:
Taylor, Barry P. (1974). "Toward A Theory Of Language Acquisition 1 ." Language Learning 24(1)
It is well-known indeed, but how does it contradict to to articles that I mentioned above? No one denies that there is some similarity between children and adults, but differences do exist, and finding them was the primary objection of those studies.
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 01:41 Vivian Cook wrote a lot on the subject, too. Her conclusion
I think it should be "his conclusion" unless "he" has happened to change to "she" very recently :) But in the world we live in now, you never know what pronoun to use. Some people think that they can wake up as "he" in the morning but go to bed as "she" in the evening... I doubt that theory somehow, but, anyway, what pronoun should I use when refer to you? :)
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 01:56So, how do they make that leap in the SA article?
I'm sorry I 'm not sure what leap you refer to. Could you provide a quote from the SA article that seems to be unjustified? (I am not saying that everything in it is completely justified)
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 01:56 Generally, though, any kind of conclusions in this particular area are always a bit of a stretch.
When it comes to popular articles, I agree. In most cases, their authors don't care to be accurate enough to preserve all nuances of the original paper. Of course, mistakes happens in peer-reviewed papers too, but not so often and those papers are retracted when it happens.
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#9

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

deaptor пишет: 19 июл 2019, 03:53 This is not a game.
Huh? I meant I fully expected you to ask me to substantiate my claim, is all.
deaptor пишет: 19 июл 2019, 03:53 I think it should be "his conclusion"
Yeah, I know. I actually went back and corrected myself, but it's not the first time I'm making this mistake. I made it in a term paper once. This "Vivian" always throws me. What kind of a name is that for a guy?

As for the rest, I'm not interested in this topic enough to engage in a scientific debate here, to be honest. I made a casual observation, but anything more than that would require some serious commitment of time and effort. If you want to stick to your guns, that's fine with me. :-) No beef.
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#10

Сообщение Yety »

deaptor пишет: 19 июл 2019, 03:53 in the world we live in now, you never know what pronoun to use. Some people think that they can wake up as "he" in the morning but go to bed as "she" in the evening...
Yeah, and in the very article one stumbles across these 'gender-neutral' extremes...=)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/advantages-of-helpless/ пишет:A kitten can amble across a room within moments of birth and catch its first mouse within weeks, while its wide-eyed human counterpart takes months to make her first step, ...
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#11

Сообщение deaptor »

Easy-Breezy English,
I'm sorry for sounding rough. I did not mean to offend you, it's just I wanted to read papers by myself rather than relying on someone else's interpretation. And, yes, it takes time and effort to read and analyze scientific papers, but I think it is totally worth it if you are interested in the topic.
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 04:40 This "Vivian" always throws me. What kind of a name is that for a guy?
I think many Americans would agree with you :) but he is from the UK, and historically 'Vivian' was used only as a masculine name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_(personal_name)

Yety,
I'm not sure what is your point. English does not have a gender-neutral personal pronoun ('it' is not used for people), so you have to choose between 'he' or 'she'. In the past, 'he' used to refer to a person whose gender is unknown. However, nowadays, to avoid accusation in sexism, many authors prefer to use 'she' instead. Not that it matters much...
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#12

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

deaptor пишет: 19 июл 2019, 03:53 I'm sorry I 'm not sure what leap you refer to. Could you provide a quote from the SA article that seems to be unjustified?
Here it is:
"While it may not be immediately obvious what this has to do with language learning, it just might have everything to do with it, because language relies on conventions."

They go from A to Z in an instant. Pure speculation. Look at the Cognition without control article they are referring to. It's not an experiment but a PROPOSAL. An interesting one, but completely unsupported by any kind of experimental research. They suggest that regularization in children stems from the immaturity of control mechanisms. While Hudson Kam and Newport, who conducted actual experiments, attribute it to deficient memory. And that would in fact tie in with what Cook is saying.

Also, was feeling bored and found this:
Wonnacott, E. (2011) Balancing generalization and lexical conservatism: An artificial language study with child learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 65
Some excerpts:

However, considering
the behavior of individual children, we saw that 33% of
children (7/21) produced responses that were regularized
in some way. ... the extent of regularization
seems to be less than in previous experiments. For example, given similar language input, Hudson Kam and
Newport (2005) found that around 70% of children created
some systematic pattern of particle usage, and Austin et al.
(2006) found almost 100% of productions used the more
frequent particle.
...
the central finding of this work is that children’s learning is very similar to that of the adult learners
...
we have
seen that generalization in child and adult learner is affected by the same sorts of statistical considerations, but
we cannot say from the current data whether children
are any more or less likely to generalize.


That's what I mean. The whole topic is controversial to a ridiculous extent. That's not to say they shouldn't keep researching. Of course they should. But I wouldn't be jumping to any conclusions at this point, that's for sure.
FRIN :-)
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#13

Сообщение Yety »

deaptor пишет: 19 июл 2019, 06:26 I'm not sure what is your point.
There was, in fact, no point=), just the 'diffused' opinion we discussed ad noseam here ... and there.
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#14

Сообщение deaptor »

Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 11:06 It's not an experiment but a PROPOSAL.
Hmm... I am not sure but this could be on me. I mean because the link in the SA article is broken, I tried to locate the original paper as best as I could, but unfortunately there is no way to identify it for sure. So it's possible I found their previous publication, which contained the proposal. I will try to search more carefully when I have time.
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#15

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

deaptor пишет: 19 июл 2019, 18:36 So it's possible I found their previous publication, which contained the proposal. I will try to search more carefully when I have time.
Don't worry about it. I checked Thompson-Schill's CV, and you got the right thing. She's a psychologist, btw, not a neuroscientist per se, as are two of her coauthors. And proposal doesn't mean an unfinished draft or something. It's just a particular type of article. Not any research result but an idea they are throwing out there that needs to be further investigated. This is from their article itself:
"we emphasize the need for future research to examine the strength of this proposal"

I'm pretty sure you know all that yourself, anyway.

I'm just saying it because not everything you see in an academic journal is supposed to be the ultimate truth of life. People share ideas and research results that aren't even necessarily consistent. Like in the article I quoted above, they point to two other similar studies that arrived at pretty different results.
The article you posted here is curious, so kudos for that, but it should be taken for what it is - an idea, a suggestion.

(Off topic: Is my understanding correct that you have bilingual children? I looked through some of your earlier posts and started to wonder.)
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#16

Сообщение deaptor »

Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 11:06 Here it is:
"While it may not be immediately obvious what this has to do with language learning, it just might have everything to do with it, because language relies on conventions."
I tend to ignore such phrases in popular articles, because every time when you hear something like "might have", you know it is pure speculation.
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 11:06 They go from A to Z in an instant. Pure speculation. Look at the Cognition without control article they are referring to. It's not an experiment but a PROPOSAL. An interesting one, but completely unsupported by any kind of experimental research. They suggest that regularization in children stems from the immaturity of control mechanisms.
Melody Dye (the author of the SA article) writes first that it is due to immaturity of PFC (which implies many things including memory), but then she moves to 'cognitive control', which appears to be poorly justified. However, the 'Cognition without control' (CWC) article does imply some connection with 'cognitive control', see 'Learning vs. Performance: The Case of Probability Matching' on page 3. I agree it is not based on any experiment. So, perhaps, Melody Dye should have been more forthcoming about this fact, still I don't think she was entirely wrong by saying that the authors of the CWC article suggested that cognitive control was the reason.
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 11:06 While Hudson Kam and Newport, who conducted actual experiments, attribute it to deficient memory. And that would in fact tie in with what Cook is saying.
They are author of another article ("Getting it right by getting it wrong: When learners change languages"). That article mentions some authors who attributed regularization to children’s more limited memory capacities, but it seems their own hypothesis is that retrieval difficulty leads to regularization. They even mentioned some experimental evidence in support of that:
Bybee and Slobin (1982) found that adults show overregularization of morphological forms even for words they already know when speaking under less than ideal conditions (such as severe time constraints on production). Also suggestive is a study by Pitts Cochran, McDonald and Parault (1999). They found that adults learning ASL while performing a secondary task, although showing poorer overall learning as compared to a control group with no secondary task, showed more evidence of having learned the regularities and patterns underlying the sentences in their input. These two studies, while consistent with our hypothesis, are only suggestive, and more research is clearly required.
There are absolutely right emphasizing the need of more research, because conducted experiments showed: "the result of the regularization appears to differ in adult and child learners" and "all of them [adults] showed quite different types of patterns than the children". Therefore their conclusion is:
It is possible that, with even more complex input, adult learners might be systematic at the same levels as children, but from the data at hand it appears that the manner in which adults and children change inconsistent languages may not be entirely the same: adults regularize, while children systematize.
Thus despite all similarities in learning between children and adults, there are also noticeable differences that are yet to be fully explained.
Easy-Breezy English пишет: 19 июл 2019, 18:59 not everything you see in an academic journal is supposed to be the ultimate truth of life
Huh? When did I said or implied that it is the ultimate truth? In fact, the very reason why I like to read articles myself (though it takes a lot of time and effort) is that I can see what exactly was tested, under what conditions, so I can form my own opinion about the given conclusion based on the presented results.
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#17

Сообщение Easy-Breezy English »

deaptor пишет: 23 июл 2019, 23:00 perhaps, Melody Dye should have been more forthcoming about this fact
So she should have. I still maintain that as it's written, the article is misleading. And Dye is a "researcher in cognitive science at Stanford University". She should have certainly known better than to put it together this way.
deaptor пишет: 23 июл 2019, 23:00 Thus despite all similarities in learning between children and adults, there are also noticeable differences that are yet to be fully explained.
Agreed. Будем ждать развития событий. Пока ясно, что ничего не ясно.
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