Discussion Questions: 18 Feb

1. How does the notion of contrast speed up child lexical acquisition?
2. What is the significance of the fact that children learning two languages seem to learn large numbers of translation equivalents?
3. To what extent is the tendency for extension of semantic domains an relevant for innateness of language? Of the importance of environmental influence? Is there a common ground?
4. How is the transparency of an affix related to the structure of the category of it's meaning (that is, why is "makes a noun an adjective" more transparent than "makes a female noun an adjective")? Are there "basic" categories which are more transparent than others or is it all just relative?
5. Clark discusses children's novel word coins as attention to some regularities in the environment. Is this the same as Elissa Newport's statistical language learning hypothesis? She argues that speech directed at young children contains robust distributional information from which a learner could induce the grammatical categories of nouns and verbs. It would seem that learning that adding -er onto the end of a noun makes that noun an operator, but maybe this kind of knowledge is actually more difficult to learn.
6. Why might it be difficult to make direct comparisons of simplicity between languages? Will simplicity show up early in all children learning a new language?
7. How might you get a structural account of productivity? Would looking in the Oxford English Dictionary be a good way? How about doing word counts of books from the New York Times bestseller list?
8. What effect does contrast have on over-extension?
9. Around 2;0 children stop over-extending and begin eliciting new labels for unfamiliar objects. Why might this occur?
10. Does conventionality -- the targeting by children of adult forms -- have a semantic counterpart?
11. What are the implications of the fact that children do not have any difficulty with learning homonymy while they initially reject some kinds of allomorphs? Does this have anything to do with over-regularization?
12. What is the role of "consistency" in language learning? How is it treated in Markman's theory?
13. What would a possible explanation be for "fis" phenomenon?
14. How does productivity affect word-learning?
15. The non-linguist asks: Is Clark's "consistency" the same thing as "grammar?"
16. What exactly is the difference between conventionality and contrast? Do these two terms refer to two entirely distinct processes or are these descriptive terms which refer to two aspects of the same process? Are there any hints in the text of what this process might be?
17. Isn't the fact that kids don`t have trouble with homonymy inconsistent with the contrast (~mutual exclusivity) assumption? Are some "kinds" of homonyms easier to learn than others?
18. Clark argues that contrast "offers considerable economy of effort in acquisition," (p.91) but what does that suggest about word recognition? Must a child compare a new word to every word in his/her mental lexicon to see if it is new or not? What might be some other processes at work?
19. What are the two different views on Productivity in acquisition? How do they both account for the same data, and how could we begin evaluating the validity of these two accounts?