Educational Psychology TD

Educational Psychology TD

Motherese
There have been a number of observation studies of the language addressed to small children by mothers, other adults or older children. These studies have shown that this so called caretaker speech has a number of characteristics which distinguish it from typical speech between adults. These characteristics are:
1- It is generally spoken more slowly and distinctly
2- It contains shorter utterances
3- It is more grammatical with fewer broken sentences or false starts
4- It contains fewer complex sentences (two clauses for example)
5- There is less variety of tenses
6- The range of vocabulary is more limited
7- There is more repetition
8- The speech is more closely related to the here and now


Performance does not reflect competence


1st interpretation:
 They do not support Chomsky’s claim, children are guided and assisted.
1- What makes the adult speaker speak more slowly and distinctly?
The law of shapeness is at work (concerning n°1 & 2 & 4 & 5 ).
3 against Chomsky’s idea speaker listener.
6 corresponds to the restricted environment of the child
7 confirms the stimulus response theory
8 motor activity & perceived reality connection

Compare the characteristic with Chomsky’s claim: the child can process concrete utterances, performance phenomena… The child is offered a kind of a simplified language to extract the rules from. He is not left with that crude material.

2nd interpretation
It may be the case that motherese rather than being the result of some unconscious effort on the part of the mother to teach language is just a response by the mother to the child’s linguistic system. That is the change in the mother’s speech is caused by the child rather than the mother actively affecting the child’s development.

The objective of the mother is not to facilitate or to make the child understand, her purpose is to communicate with him. She adjusts her speech to the child’s developing grammar. This code switching makes part of our linguistic intuition. The 2nd version does not undermine Chomsky’s claim given that the mother is simply adjusting her speech. (language growth hypothesis, the child goes thru developmental stages till he reaches a the steady state)

1- The psychologist can get many interesting insights from electro-encephalography. Can you specify them and illustrate their actual relevance to psychology?
2- When do the phenomena of synchronization and desynchronization occur? What kind of activity does each engender? How many rhythms can we identify?
3- Is awareness measurable?
4- The delta rhythm is vital for the survival of the young baby. Explain
5- What conclusions can we draw from Fuller’s experiment with dogs?
6- What is the difference between the Cortex and the sub-cortical parts of the brain?
7- Which learning theory do these arguments support: empiricism or rationalism?
8- Try to write your own definition of learning
9- Are the terms mind and brain interchangeable?
10- Is psychology the science of mental life or the science of behavior?
11- Can you visualize any similarity between behaviorist psychology and computing science?

The substance of the cortical cells is similar between animals and humans. The difference is in the number of the cortical cells and the interconnections between them.


Notes and argument concerning Behaviorism
Behaviorism resolved the mind/body problem is a most direct way. Behaviorists self-consciously did their best to eliminate mind and consciousness from the vocabulary of psychology. Using mind as an explanatory concept was not scientifically justified for them, the behaviorists were extremely successful in their endeavor because for them, the definition of psychology changed from the science of the mind to the science of behavior. In general, behaviorists tended to focus on environmental influences (we should make the distinction between the environmental influences as viewed by constructivists and behaviorists) rather than genetic ones; the major issue for them was learning. What are the conditions by which organisms change their behavior? This included everything from learning to reach for a mother’s nipple, to carry on a conversation, to solve calculus problems, social behavior, cognitive behavior, personality and eating disorders were all a functions of conditions of learning. The problems facing all behaviorists were to articulate the learning processes and with them the particular conditions that lead to different behaviors. Theoretical psychologists (academic and experimental) studied the general principles of learning. Social psychologists studied the conditions under which social behaviors were learnt. Clinical psychologists studied how to teach the mentally ill to unlearn their negative behaviors and to learn to replace them with more appropriate behaviors. Educational psychologists wanted to establish methods to apply learning principles to children so that they could learn academically appropriate behaviors easier. According to the behaviorist doctrine, psychology is essentially the study of understanding the varied conditions of learning, varied human behaviors so that behavior could be predicted, modified and controlled.
The major figures of behaviorism
Pavlov 1839 1936
- Pavlov was an excellent experimenter; he studied the sequence of secretions from the insertion of food into the mouth through its breakdown and absorption by the body.
- Pavlov discovered conditional reflexes by investigating irregularities of reflex action. At times, certain secretions were emitted by the organism without an identifiable cause, the so called psychic secretions
- He attempted to find the source of the irregularities and showed that they were explainable on the basis of past experiences of a particular kind
- Pavlov argued that what is mental should be reduced to measurable (cortical interconnection, acids conveyed by the cortical circuits) physiological quantities. His concept of conditional response was extremely influential and Pavlov believed that they were due to nervous system processes and many of his explanations depended on his concepts of excitation and inhibition of nervous activity.
John Wattson 1838 1958
First founded behaviorism a strong environmentalist extremely influential in setting the pattern for American psychology for more than a generation. For him, conditioned and unconditioned reflexes can account for all of our behavior. For him, consciousness plays no greater role in psychology than in physics. That’s why Watson psychology was viewed as mechanistic.
Clark Hull 1884 1952
His basic ideas derived from Pavlov. He proposed a hypothetico-deductive system (guided by prior hypotheses) with independent dependent and intervening variables who hoped to write the laws of behavior of organisms similar to Newton’s laws of motion in physics arguing that if one knew the initial conditions, s/he could predict the behavior by applying a formula. He argued that behavior was a consequence of innate reflexes as they were modified by previous learning the current situation and the motivational state of the organism. The different components of behavior could be independently assessed and entered into the equation of behavior. Behavior was under the control of the stimulus situation and the state of the organism. The state of the organism was represented by intervening variables which entered in the equation to derive the observed behavior.

Miller
Coleman
Skinner

Based on illustrations:
Proximity causes us to group the dots or to perceive the dots into three pairs of vertical columns. Proximity is given and not acquired and it determines our perception of the stimulation Similarity causes us to see vertical rather than horizontal lines of dots.


Proximity and similarity are opposed and the resultant grouping is unstable.

The G admit the source of knowledge is the external world. We are left with a sort of common denominator between the empiricist behaviorist who claims that the true source of knowledge is the external environment and the G psychologists.

Questions
1- The basic differences between empiricist behaviorism and the G theory, difference between the G theory and the modular view or the rationalistic claim.
Specific features for modular view and general ones for the G theory (genetically determined features which are behind by any environmental stimulation perceived by the organism)
Modular view G theory Empiricist behaviorism
Active Less passive Passive subject
Theoretical framework of x bar theory
The sub-theory of UG which is related to the structure of phrases is known as x-bar theory. The structure of phrases used to make sentences in all languages is of unique basic type. It consists of a main or head category which is the core of the phrase and two different types of modifiers: a specifier and a complement. They are called so because they are not obligatory. Complements are modifiers closely linked to the head and form with it a constituent. Specifiers modify this head + complement constituent and form another constituent. [specifier[head + cpl]].
(A)
X

Specifier Y

Head cpl
(N)
Head categories include major syntactic categories as N, V, A…. as the head is the core of the phrase, it plays a crucial role in selecting the appropriate specifiers and complements and that’s why we must reflect the importance of the head in the structural labels given to the phrase.
Ns  head: noun phrases (NPs)
Vs  head: verb phrases (VPs)
Ps head: preposition phrase (PPs)
In between the heads which are called sometimes 0 level categories, N°, V 0… and the maximal projections NP, VP, AP… occurs the constituent composed of the head and its complement. We label this constituent as the head + diacritic bar , this the structure of the NP in English:
(B)
NP

Specifier

N Cpl

The author’s book on linguistics
The structural configurations illustrated in (A) and (B) are thought to be common to all phrases whatever the head, accordingly, we can say that in all languages any X° projects into another constituent of type consisting of the head and its complement and this constituent projects into the maximal projection XP (V or N or A…) consisting of the and its specifier VPs, NPs, APs, PPs in English will then have the same structure as NP. It follows that the structure of phrases is determined by an invariant universal principle which requires that X° projects into and that projects into XP consisting of + its specifier which is a complement. At the same time individual languages vary as to whether the head appears to the left or right of its complement and whether the specifier appears to the left or to the right of . For example in English, French and Italian specifiers typically precede the head and complements follow it. Whereas in Japanese and Turkish for example, both specifiers and complements precede the head. Thus:
XP
Specifier
Cpl X°
The linear ordering of specifier with respect to constituents and X° with respect to complements is a parameter of variation allowed within the invariant principle of UG determining phrase structure. Particular languages have selected different values of the parameter.

A certain empiricist and constructivist at the same time (Putnam) questions the scientific validity of Chomsky’s arguments: those that lead Chomsky’s argument about the precursors of language. If these arguments are put into question it is the whole theory which is questioned. Putnam has countered Chomsky’s argument by comparing the number of hours spent by a child in learning a language with that of an adult learning a 2nd language. He claims that a child of 4 or 5 years (the age by which Chomsky claims that the essentials of language are there) who has learnt the essentials of language spent much more time in the process than would an adult and that this time which is devoted by the child to processing the language is not a short period at all. To better understand Putnam’s argument let’s create our concrete example: first he says let’s compute the number of hours of exposure to the language that an ordinary four year old child gets. We could assume that the number of hours per day that the child devote to be exposed to language is about 10. He adds that when the child was younger, he would have slept more, but let us take 10 hours as a round figure. Since there are 365 days a year, that gives 10*365=3650 hours per year. Over a period of 4 years we have 14400 hours: is it a large number of hours or not? Let’s compare this number with the number of hours that, say a student, is exposed to in one language course at school over the period of a semester. If the student has 5 class hours per week, and studies for two hours after each class hour that makes 15 hours per week, if one semester lasts 18 weeks that would be a total of 15*18= 270 hours for the semester. Let’s say the student studies all the year round by taking 3 semesters of the language; that would make 270*3= 810 hours. If the student had as many exposure hours as the child, then the student would have to study a language at school for the equivalent of 17.8 years. Is 17 years long enough for an adult to learn the essential grammar of a language? Putnam thinks so, and so would most people. If the adult come trim some years from that 17 in order to accomplish the task , a not unlikely possibility, the adult, contrary to Chomsky’s presupposition would then be an even faster learner than the child. The number of hours that the child spends in learning its native language is not small contrary to Chomsky’s claim, this implies not so easy when compared to that of that an adult learning a 2nd language. That being the case there is no need to create something special to assist the child in language learning. Language acquisition, he concludes, can be accounted for by step by step learning a long empiricist life. There is no scientific need to posit the existence of innate language ideas maintains Putnam. Another problem concerns an implied premise for Chomsky’s argument. Because Chomsky states that Children learn faster than adults and that this higher or superior speed is the result of the child having UG to help out. The implication is that adults do not have the benefit of innate language ideas. Why should this be so? If adults are denied the benefit of UG, then, UG either weakens or dries out altogether with age. Yet, this could not be so because adults are able to learn languages. If Chomsky wishes to argue here that adults would with the weakening or loss of UG have to learn language in some step by step empiricist way then he would have to argue that such learning is not possible. Otherwise, he would be contradicting one of his other major arguments, for the existence of UG: the argument that every language has certain essential principles or functions that could no possibly be acquired thru experience (and whose counterparts in the G theory are not specific ‘general features responsible for the reorganization of the whole situation’). Yet, it is a fact that, given enough time and proper language and environmental input, adult language learners can learn a foreign grammar rather way. Everything considered, it would seem to Chomsky’s advantage to drop this argument in favor of Universal Grammar in its entirety. The argument suffers from both empirical and internal theoretical flaws.

Between nativism and empiricist behaviorism Piaget’s constructivism summarized in his famous maxim “there is no genesis without structures, there are no structures without genesis” seems to offer a new explanatory solutions.
Genesis: formation of knowledge (learning)
Structure: biological counterpart
Piaget’s Schemata (knowledge is constructed) and Chomsky’s precursors of language (language growth, does not depend on the environment)
- Number of schemata and their properties
- fuller’s experiments depriving animals
a certain Papert suggests “if you make a list of structures and notions and rules or whatever you call them found in adult intelligence and if you ask which of them is innate the answer will be none. When we transpose the observation to the problems raised by Chomsky, the observation turns into the suggestion that the hard work here will be discovering the precursors out of which linguistic structures emerge. And then, we will have to understand the precursors of those precursors and by a longer or shorter chain of genesis eventually arrive at the properties of the initial state. This is what developmental studies are about.”

Relate Papert’s view to the first:
- Papert stipulates that structures, notions and rules are not innate; Piaget: genesis and structures are interdependent:  knowledge is constructed
- Piaget stipulates that knowledge is not passively acquired and the human mind is not an empty slate in which we pour knowledge. Papert confirms this and says that we have to understand the precursors of the precursors of the linguistic structures  There is a mental and cognitive counterpart for the biological counterpart of language
- Try to account for the environment in terms of the nativists theory and of the environmentalist theory. What is the difference? The environment is given a specific function in the nativists theory (ignition key, it doesn’t determine the components and their relatedness of the system) Environment is given another function in the constructivism/ it determine the complexity and Systematicity of the engine itself.

The case of deaf children doesn’t refute Chomsky’s nativists claim,
A new explanatory solution is needed:
- Implications of Piaget’s constructivism on language learning;: when we transpose the observations,
- Piaget considers all cognitive acquisition, language included, as the product of a progressive construction (regulated by accommodation and assimilation). What is innate for Piaget is a general ability to recombine the successive levels of a more and more intensive cognitive organization which explains the snowball effect envisaged by Piaget. (it reorganizes the structures, it is not added to the older layers) (Phenocopy: some exogenous factors can modify the genetically determined potential. This modification can be transmitted through generations to the individual. It concerns the individual (vs. group with Natural selection) and it is not about developing a new function)
- Can we explain the learner’s conversion of the input into actual knowledge by the two way process (assimilation and accommodation)?
• The book that I bought yesterday accommodation: student noticed the difference between the two pronouns tried to modify the relative construction of Arabic so that it fits the relative construction of English. It is not thru a simple addition, that his happens, the learner reorganizes the relative construction. Or he creates a new file to receive the specificities the new construction in English. That’s why many researchers claim that we learn only the difference between the native language and the target language.
• * The book that I bought it yesterday assimilation: the relative construction is conceived of thru the Arabic schema

• * Quand je prendrai, he ferai attention
• * he goed to school => he adds to his previous schemata (past= v+ed). He imposed his internal pattern that he constructed on the new verbal stimulus to go. This is an instance of assimilation.
• * are you interested with music
In terms of Piaget’s schemata, the learner can modify the simple past schema in such a way that it fits the new verb. Seeing the subcategorization given the considerable number of irregular verbs he feels the need to create a new file for the irregular verbs.
Those invariable principles (similarities) described by Chomsky are there and they account for what is correct and what is not and the parameters of variation (resetting). Roussou and Simpli’s suggest that the learners do not have to reset the parameters, rather he misanalysis the material of the TL to make it fit the material of the NT. The learner is misanalyzing the relative construction of English.