Elissa Newport | Georgetown University (original) (raw)

Papers by Elissa Newport

The invention of language by children: Environmental and biological influences

Critical period effects on universal properties of language: the status of subjacency in the acquisition of a second language

Cognition, Jun 1, 1991

Recent studies have shown clear evidence for critical period effects for both first and second la... more Recent studies have shown clear evidence for critical period effects for both first and second language acquisition on a broad range of learned, language-specific grammatical properties. The present studies ask whether and to what degree critical period effects can also be found for universal properties of language considered to be innate. To address this issue, native Chinese speakers who learned English as a second language were tested on the universal principle subjacency as it applies to wh-question formation in English. Subjects arrived in the U.S.A. between the ages of 4 and 38 years. They were immersed in English for a number of years (a minimum of 5) and were adults at the time of testing. Non-native performance on subjacency was found for subjects of all ages of arrival. Performance declined continuously over age of arrival until adulthood, (r = -.63). When immersion occurred as late as adulthood, performance dropped to levels slightly above chance. In all of the analyses performed, subjacency did not differ from language-specific structures in the degree or manner in which it was affected by maturation. These results suggest that whatever the nature of the endowment that allows humans to learn language, it undergoes a very broad deterioration as learners become increasingly mature.

Statistical learning of syntax: The role of transitional probability. Language Learning and Development

Language Learning and Development, 2007

Page 1. Statistical Learning of Syntax: The Role of Transitional Probability Susan P. Thompson Ho... more Page 1. Statistical Learning of Syntax: The Role of Transitional Probability Susan P. Thompson Hobart and William Smith Colleges Elissa L. Newport University of Rochester Previous research has shown that, for learners to ...

Evidence from the probability learning literature indicates that when presented with simple situa... more Evidence from the probability learning literature indicates that when presented with simple situations that require making predictions, adults tend to probability match whereas children are likely to show maximization . The reason for this developmental difference is not fully understood, but one possibility investigated here is that children have fewer resources available to differentiate among the probabilities of the competing alternatives. To investigate this hypothesis at its origin, we used an anticipatory eye movement paradigm to gather twoalternative choice responses from 10-month-old infants. In two experiments we presented infants with either an entirely predictable (100-0%) or a probabilistic (70-30%) series of visual events. Infants showed evidence of probability matching rather than maximizing. These results are discussed in the context of alternative explanations for maximizing and the utility of eye-tracking as a window on infants' probability learning.

Cognitive Science 26 (2002) 393--424

ABSTRACT We present a series of three analyses of young children's linguistic input to de... more ABSTRACT We present a series of three analyses of young children's linguistic input to determine the distributional information it could plausibly offer to the process of grammatical category learning. Each analysis was conducted on four separate corpora from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) of speech directed to children under 2;5. We show that, in accord with other findings, a distributional analysis which categorizes words based on their co-occurrence patterns with surrounding words successfully categorizes the majority of nouns and verbs. In Analyses 2 and 3, we attempt to make our analyses more closely relevant to natural language acquisition by adopting more realistic assumptions about howyoung children represent their input. In Analysis 2, we limit the distributional context by imposing phrase structure boundaries, and find that categorization improves even beyond that obtained from less limited contexts. In Analysis 3, we reduce the representation of input elements which young children might not fully process and we find that categorization is not adversely affected: Although noun categorization is worse than in Analyses 1 and 2, it is still good; and verb categorization actually improves. Overall, successful categorization of nouns and verbs is maintained across all analyses. These results provide promising support for theories of grammatical category formation involving distributional analysis, as long as these analyses are combined with appropriate assumptions about the child learner's computational biases and capabilities.

Facilitating the acquisition of syntax with transforma-tional cues to phrase structure

Motherese: The Speech of Mothers to Young Children

Jnw, 1977

Plus or Minus 30 Years in the Language Sciences

Topics in Cognitive Science, Jul 1, 2010

The language sciences—Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Computational Linguistics—have not been... more The language sciences—Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Computational Linguistics—have not been broadly represented at the Cognitive Science Society meetings of the past 30 years, but they are an important part of the heart of cognitive science. This article discusses several major themes that have dominated the controversies and consensus in the study of language and suggests the most pressing issues of the future. These themes include differences among the language science disciplines in their view of numbers and symbols and of modular and distributed cognition, and the need for an increasing prominence of questions concerning language and the brain.

Neural systems supporting linguistic structure, linguistic experience, and symbolic communication in sign language and gesture

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015

Sign languages used by deaf communities around the world possess the same structural and organiza... more Sign languages used by deaf communities around the world possess the same structural and organizational properties as spoken languages: In particular, they are richly expressive and also tightly grammatically constrained. They therefore offer the opportunity to investigate the extent to which the neural organization for language is modality independent, as well as to identify ways in which modality influences this organization. The fact that sign languages share the visual-manual modality with a nonlinguistic symbolic communicative system-gesture-further allows us to investigate where the boundaries lie between language and symbolic communication more generally. In the present study, we had three goals: to investigate the neural processing of linguistic structure in American Sign Language (using verbs of motion classifier constructions, which may lie at the boundary between language and gesture); to determine whether we could dissociate the brain systems involved in deriving meaning from symbolic communication (including both language and gesture) from those specifically engaged by linguistically structured content (sign language); and to assess whether sign language experience influences the neural systems used for understanding nonlinguistic gesture. The results demonstrated that even sign language constructions that appear on the surface to be similar to gesture are processed within the left-lateralized frontal-temporal network used for spoken languages-supporting claims that these constructions are linguistically structured. Moreover, although nonsigners engage regions involved in human action perception to process communicative, symbolic gestures, signers instead engage parts of the language-processing network-demonstrating an influence of experience on the perception of nonlinguistic stimuli.

Statistical cues in language acquisition: Word segmentation by infants

Cognitive Science, 1996

... edu Elissa L. Newport Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences University of Rochester Roch... more ... edu Elissa L. Newport Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627 newport@ bcs. ... effects to probabilistic prosodic expectancies to frequency-based contingency effects in parsing (eg, Kelly, 1988; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, &amp; ...

The role of constituent structure in the induction of an artificial language

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1981

... We would like to thank Jay McClelland and Judy Tschirgi for their helpful suggestions on the ... more ... We would like to thank Jay McClelland and Judy Tschirgi for their helpful suggestions on the conception and design of the experiment, and Norman ... Requests for reprints should be sent toJames L. Morgan, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, I11. ...

Why do languages share structural properties? The functionalist tradition has argued that languag... more Why do languages share structural properties? The functionalist tradition has argued that languages have evolved to suit the needs of their users. By what means functional pressures may come to shape grammar over time, however, remains unknown. Functional pressures could affect adults' production; or they could operate during language learning. To date, these possibilities have remained largely untested. We explore the latter possibility, that functional pressures operate during language acquisition. In an artificial language learning experiment we investigate the trade-off between word order and case. Flexible word order languages are potentially ambiguous if no case-marking (or other cues) are employed to identify the doer of the action. We explore whether language learners are biased against uncertainty in the mapping of form and meaning, showing a tendency to make word order a stronger cue to the intended meaning in no-case languages.

Structural biases in acquisition: Evidence from miniature language learning

I''d rather do it myself: some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style

Distributional Language Learning: Mechanisms and Models of Category Formation

Language Learning, 2014

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional... more In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for any distributional learning mechanism to operate effectively within the linguistic domain. In particular, how does a naive learner determine the number of categories that are present in a corpus of linguistic input and what distributional cues enable the learner to assign individual lexical items to those categories? Contrary to the hypothesis that distributional learning and category (or rule) learning are separate mechanisms, the present article argues that these two seemingly different processes---acquiring specific structure from linguistic input and generalizing beyond that input to novel exemplars---actually represent a single mechanism. Evidence in support of this single-mechanism hypothesis comes from a series of artificial grammar-learning studies that not only demonstrate that adults can learn grammatical categories from distributional information alone, but that the specific patterning of distributional information among attested utterances in the learning corpus enables adults to generalize to novel utterances or to restrict generalization when unattested utterances are consistently absent from the learning corpus. Finally, a computational model of distributional learning that accounts for the presence or absence of generalization is reviewed and the implications of this model for linguistic-category learning are summarized.

Language Sciences, 1988

The general question raised here is why the young child is superior to older children and adults ... more The general question raised here is why the young child is superior to older children and adults at language acquisition, while at the same time inferior to them in many other cognitive tasks. As an example of the general problem, the paper reviews our own work on the acquisition of complex verbs of American Sign Language (ASL). It begins with an outline of the structure of verbs of motion in ASL, along with possible inductive generalizations a language learner might make concerning this structure. Three lines of research on ASL acquisition are then presented. The first line of research demonstrates that young children, exposed to ASL as a native language, acquire ASL verbs in terms of morphological components, piece by piece, as do children learning spoken language. Moreover, they do so despite alternative generalizations which seem potentially simpler. The second line of research compares native learners of ASL with learners exposed to ASL later in life. This research shows that, while native learners make the morphological componential generalization described, later learners in fact do make alternative generalizations. The third line of research investigates native learners of ASL whose parental input models are late learners. Again it appears that natives perform a morphological analysis, despite the fact that their input is not well organized for such analyses. Taken together, the research shows a striking tendency for children-and only children-to acquire language in a particular fashion. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible explanations for these findings. One possibility is that children have a special set of skills for language acquisition which declines with age. A second possibility is that the cognitive limitations of the child provide the basis on which the child's componential learning occurs, and that the expansion of these cognitive abilities with age is in part responsible for the decline in this type. of learning.

We have had the unprecedented opportunity to observe a young, new language as its grammatical str... more We have had the unprecedented opportunity to observe a young, new language as its grammatical structure emerges. Because the changes taking place in the language are being driven by the children who are learning it, our observations also provide insight into children's biases in learning and organizing linguistic information. The present study examines the emergence of syntactic and morphological devices