2- Language Development

Question 1

what is phonology?

Answer 1

the ability to make sense of the incoming speech stream

Question 2

what is semantics?

Answer 2

The ability to understand word meaning

Question 3

what is grammar?

Answer 3

The ability to combine words into longer phrases

Question 4

when does phonology commence?

Answer 4

0-1 years

Question 5

when does semantics commence?

Answer 5

1-2 years

Question 6

when does grammar commence?

Answer 6

2+ years

Question 7

what did DeCasper & Fifer 1980 find?

Answer 7

that babies learnt and responded to their own mother’s voice more than the voice of a stranger.

ten 3day olds
-short bursts of sucking produce mothers voice and long burst produce strangers thus should suck more to hear own mother

8/10 sucked more often

Question 8

what did deCasper and prescott find? 1984?

Answer 8

that there was no preference for a fathers voice in regard to mother/stranger listening experiment and thus learning of voice didn’t happen in 3 days since birth but rather in the womb

Question 9

what did deCasper and Spence 1986 show?

Answer 9

babies have a preference for hearing cat in the hat over other passages- children can perceive rhythm

Question 10

what do all deCasper’s studies in general show?

Answer 10

These studies tell us that children can perceive the rhythm, pitch and intonation of the speech stream even in the womb.

Question 11

what are phonemes?

Answer 11

the smallest units of sound that speech can be decomposed into b/d/g

Question 12

when can infants distinguish phonemes by?

Answer 12

1-2 Months

Question 13

give e.g’s of phonemes that exist in English but not Japanese

Answer 13

I and R

Question 14

describe what happens with phonemes as a child ages?

what is this known as

Answer 14

6-moths- can initially discriminate between a wide range of phonemes (across languages) (EMIAS ET. AL 1971)

6-12 moths- loose ability to discriminate speech sounds which are not differentiated in their own language e.g. the two ‘t’ sounds used in Hindi

known as perceptual narrowing

Question 15

what did Kuhl et al. show?

Answer 15

english infants exposed to mandarin retained more of the phoneme discriminations made in that language at 12 months than those who weren’t trained

NB: only with interpersonal experience and not video

Question 16

what is motherese?

Answer 16

speach with a special structure, rhythm and content. (Newport et al.) characterised by high pitch, slow pace and exaggerated intonation (changes in pitch).

Question 17

how does motherese help babies?

Answer 17

breaks up the speech stream

Question 18

what have studies found about motherese?

Answer 18

pauses and pitch changes help with understanding phrases- Cutler

Infants prefer to listen to motherese than normal speech- Simon and Fernald

Question 19

how and why does a baby create an environment to get adults to speak to them?

Answer 19

by babbling- to induce reaction–> rich auditory environment

Question 20

Speech perception is driven by ….a…… combined with ….b…..with the languages in our environment during infancy.

Answer 20

a) innate mechanisms

b) socially scaffolded experience

Question 21

what will a baby with two deaf parents do?

Answer 21

will attempt to do some signing action instead of babbling.

Question 22

what do children produce in 6-9 months

Answer 22

speech like behaviours:
echolalia
babbling
turn-taking

Question 23

what is echolalia?

Answer 23

mumumum dadada

Question 24

what are the most common first words?

Answer 24

OBJECT NAMES (‘teddy’, ‘dog’, ‘mummy’)

Question 25

what age are first words and meanings present?

Answer 25

1-2 years

Question 26

why are actions and functions harder for children to pick up?

Answer 26

they are often spoken at a lower pitch (Kelly and Martin)

Question 27

which words are less common within 1-2 year olds although less common

Answer 27

actions (look) and fuctions (there, the)

Question 28

what do most words used by 1-2 year olds refer to?

Answer 28

things in the child’s immediate, actionable environment

Question 29

what may children use for words rather than existing language?

Answer 29

made-up oral labels

Question 30

what is often used by children to supplement speech for meaning?

Answer 30

gesture and intonation

Question 31

what did Rescorla show?

Answer 31

words used by 1-2 year olds may be over/ under-generalisations

Question 32

what did gleitman show with the sesame street experiment?

Answer 32

children’s grammatical composition may be poor, but they can use grammatical context to infer word meanings?

two vids:

1) big bird and CM turn together
2) birg pushes CM

two phrases

1) BB is gorping CM
2) BB is gorping with CM

child read one phrase but shown both vids- most children will then look at one vid.

Question 33

what do children use to help assign meaning to the words they hear (e.g. Gorping)

& what did Gleitman label this?

Answer 33

grammatical distinction

Syntactic Bootstrapping

Question 34

what age does a vocab spurt generally occur at.

Answer 34

18 months

Question 35

when does telegraphic speech occur and at what age does it become present?

Answer 35

combined words in two-word utterances e.g. baba go. Function words are often left out but the order is generally correct e.g. not “go baba”

18 months

Question 36

what is recastng and what does it encourage?

Answer 36

asking the child to follow up/ expand on what they have said

e.g. Child: “Donkey ran”.
Parent: “The donkey did run, didn’t he?”

This linguistic experience encourages more complex utterances in children.

Question 37

what did Berko show regarding grammar

Answer 37

children shown a single item with a novel name (a ‘wug’) will spontaneously label two ‘wugs’.

2+ years

Question 38

what is overregularisation?

Answer 38

Children dogmatically applying the gramatical rules they have learnt.

Question 39

what developmental pattern foes overregularisation have?

Answer 39

U-shaped

first children use the correct forms, then they overregularise, then they apply the correct forms again.

Question 40

what did Chomsky hypothesise regarding grammar?

Answer 40

that aspects of language learning are innate

this is possible because human languages have similar structure

We have An innate Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
perceives incoming speech, extracts grammatical regularities from it, and generates hypotheses about these regularities which allow the production of novel grammatical speech.

-core features common to all languages

Question 41

give cases for the role of experience in grammar learning and what these suggest?

Answer 41

• Isabelle discovered at 6 learned to speak language very rapidly- Brown
• A child discovered 14 didn’t manage to incorporate function words or prepositions into her speech- Curtis

cases suggest that early-to-mid childhood is a critical period for language & specifically grammatical learning.

Question 42

what did Johnson and Newport show regarding grammar learning

Answer 42

grammar learning has a critical window prior to the age of 7:

used children & adults who were native chinese/ korean and tested on english grammar tests who had arrived in US at different ages.