frames

and

cognitive/linguistic development

across the lifespan

starting with the child

Frames

Kovecses: ‘a frame is a structured mental representation of a conceptual category’

-- script, scenario, scene, cultural model, cognitive model, domain, schema, gestalt

knuckle: hand :: Friday: week/weekend

Frames for Shrek lesson

characteristics of frames

• Evoked by particular meanings of words

• Can be ‘profiled’

• Impose a perspective on the situation

• Provide a history

• Assume larger cultural frames

• Are idealizations – linked to prototypes

What do you see?

What point of view?

Point of view, again – where are you positioned?

Thumbnail has PoV, too

Changing frames-1

your impression?

Changing frames - 2

Your impression?

Changing frames - 3

Your impression?

Cognitive and language development: starting with the

childThe six discoveries: learning schemes, cause and effect, use of tools, object permanence, how objects fill space,

imitation

On learning language

“Children’s mastery of a language in the first few years of their lives is one of the most remarkable things humans can do.

Among their impressive achievements is word learning: children learn tens of thousands of words by age 8 or so (according to one study of English learners), averaging 10 or more per day for many years….”

P. Brown, [Review] The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(2), 293-4

Words and concepts

“Words label concepts; children either have to map sounds to concepts they already have or they have to create concepts on the basis of their experience with words”

[nobody can agree on how this happens] P. Brown, [Review] The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(2), 293-

4

Must infer words from context

Words refer, but children have to infer from how they are used in contexts what they refer to. Since many different aspects of the situation could be being referred to when a particular word is used, children have to be attuned to the speaker’s communicative intention in the context, to figure out what aspect is the intended referent.

The evidence children have for what words mean is indirect: no one explicitly teaches children the meanings of most words.

P. Brown, [Review] The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(2), 293-4

Taking a perspective

“People don’t always use the same word to label “the same” situation; children have to learn to take a perspective on a scene and to understand the perspective others are taking.

They have to extend the meanings of words on the basis of their experience of how they are used in contexts; they have to create categories of many different kinds and levels of abstraction (e.g., “dog”, “Michael”, “brother”, “run”, “nap”, “love”, and eventually, “debate”, “algorithm”). Many grammatical terms have abstract, subtle and elusive meanings that even adults often cannot articulate.”P. Brown, [Review] The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(2), 293-4

Mintz 2003: Frequent frames

• …”evidence from behavioral studies suggests that infants and adults

• are sensitive to frame-like units, and that adults use them to categorize words. This evidence,

• along with the success of frames in categorizing words, provides support for frames as a basis for the acquisition of grammatical categories.

learn different senses from a word’s different contexts

Cullen Case’s story in New South Voices uses core kindergarten vocabulary

“The Blankenships had an apple tree in their back yard and we would go and we’d pick apples and take them back to her place and make apple pies.”

Draw pictures showing different uses of ‘apple.’ Students can also mime actions as teacher reads the sentence.

• had an apple tree• we would pick apples• (we would) make apple pies

Semantic differential

Frames for the concept ‘saying’

Learning the verb ‘buy’

When we learn the verb buy, we also learn that the sentence holding the verb must have a person doing the buying – the buyer – and something to buy – the goods. We sometimes extend those features to new uses, such as phrasal verbs or idioms like buy in to or buy out. Sometimes the frame itself is the context cue for ‘guessing’ a new word or usage.

‘buying’

Buyer The verb Goods (seller) (price)

Angela

George

The Brady Bunch

bought

bought into

bought out

the owl

The plan

Belks

from Pete

[don’t know]

[Belks]

for $10

[for XXX?]

Can you figure out ‘send’?

with your name and address. Or send a card to GH (Cookery Book), PO ing examples of all eight cards send a stamped, addressed envelope

effort. The government says it will send five military transport aircraft to a selection of K Shoes, please send for our main,64 page Autumn e Shadow Health Secretary, to send her son to grammar school. `She's been asking me to send her somebody.She's kind of old, wn trays.She says she'd rather send her daughters to school than the to migrate, and earn money to send home to buy food and pay debts,u don’t have anything else,let’s send out for pizza

Premier John Major is ready to send in RAF Hercules planes as part of arding: Lets you automatically send incoming calls to another number to total re-wiring. Simply send off the attached coupon or call

Stages in cognitive development

Social development: recognizes self in mirror, smiles….

Recognizing a self

Six substages of infancy

sensory motor

CHILDES: baby sounds

3 months 6 months

9 months 12 months

Piaget’s stages

peekaboo

Jocie baby talk

Piaget’s stages – 1 and 2

conservation

Minsky (1988) Society of Mind p. 108All this reminds me of a visit to my home from my friend

Gilbert Voyat, who was then a student of Papert and Piaget and later became a distinguished child psychologist. On meeting our five-year-old twins, his eyes sparkled, and he quickly improvised some experiments in the kitchen. Gilbert engaged Julie first, planning to ask her about whether a potato would balance best on one, two, three or four toothpicks. First, in order to assess her general development, he began by performing the water jar experiment. The conversation went like this:

Gilbert: "Is there more water in this jar or in that jar?" Julie: "It looks like there's more in that one. But you should

ask my brother, Henry. He has conservation already." Gilbert paled and fled. • Moral: Don't try to perform psychological experiments on

the children of psychologists!

The Child by Two and a Half

theory of mind

The Child by Around Four

Spelling bee

Spelling bee - oops

tug of war

a metaphor with which to look at adolescent and adult language & cognition

Tannen, What’s in a frame

Converting experience (however defined) into words

Determine the schema which refers to the identification of the event

Determine the frame for the sentence-level expression

Choose category to name parts of eventMatch internal representation with

prototypes

Back to Shrek….

Scripts/frames in conversation

• The restaurant script

• The telling-troubles script

• The I don’t like you but we have to talk script (Antaki tutorial incorporates this)

• The did I tell you about what happened to me on the way to class script

• The I remember when… script (Norrick)

• The you won’t believe….script

Scollon and Scollon handouts

The Scollons ‘reframe’ politeness theory asFeatures of involvement and independence

in conversationsA very useful heuristic, particularly for our

looking at those conversations in which somebody is trying to share memories or stories

Linked on our website as Scollon handout,With an example by Jen Cleary, linked as

Cleary