Chapter 6 Flashcards
Toddlerhood ages
1 - 3 yrs of age
- time of exploration
A baby’s first word marks
the beginning of a transition from preverbal to verbal communication, and ushers in a new and exciting period of language development.
- average at 12 months
- usually people and objects in babies everyday lives
A lexical entry contains
a series of symbols that compose the word, the sound of the word, the meaning of the word, and its part of speech
3 criteria to be considered a true word
- baby must produce the word with clear purpose
- a true word must have recognizable pronunciation similar to the adult form of the word. ( @ 18 months its only 25% intelligible
- a true word is a word a child uses consistently and extends beyond the original context.
phonetically consistent forms (PCFs)
describes the idiosyncratic word like productions children use consistently and meaningfully but that do not approximate adult forms.
- not true words
toddlers come to rely less on gestures and more on words when making
inferences about how to categorize or label new objects.
14 months old: use both words and gestures
22 months: rely on words but not gestures alone
referential gestures
children who are beginning to transition from the prelinguistic stage to the one-word stage
- is one that indicates a precise referent and has stable meaning across different contexts.
Toddlers who use more gesture + speech combinations at 18 months also demonstrate
greater sentence complexity at 42 months of age
when children begin to use two-word utterances
- they stop combining two referential gestures
- recognize that that when different speakers say two identical words, they are the same word.
children’s gesture use at 14 months is
a significant predictor of their vocabulary size at 42 months, above and beyond the effects of parent and child word use at 14 months
Mirror neurons ( visuomotor neurons)
activate when people perform actions (including communicative actions) and when they observe other people perform actions.
- are responsible for the evolution of gestures and language in humans.
- when adults read and produce spontaneous speech, the excitability of the hand motor cortex increases in the left hemisphere of the brain.
measure of ToM development
- False-belief tasks assess whether children demonstrate understanding that another’s beliefs can differ from one’s own beliefs.
- language appears to play a vital role
- toddlers (18 to 21 months of age) who spend more time in coordinated joint engagement (active coordination of atten-tion between objects and social partners) and toddlers (27 to 30 months of age) who spend more time in symbol-infused joint engagement, including conversations and pretend play, demonstrate higher scores on false-belief tasks in the preschool years (between 42 and 66 months of age)
customary age of production
describes the age by which 50% of children can produce a given sound in multiple positions in words in an adultlike way
age of mastery
describes the age by which most children produce a sound in an adultlike manner.
phonological processes
- systematic, rule-governed patterns that characterize toddlers’ speech
- an effort to simplify their inventory of phonetic elements and strings
- include syllable structure changes, assimilation, place-of-articulation changes, and manner of articulation changes.
- suppressed usually by 3 if not after 5 yrs of age
Syllable structure changes
- changes to syllables in words.
repeat, or reduplicate: stressed syllable in a word (Water + wawa)
cluster of consonants: fewer sounds (stong instead of strong)
Assimilation
process by which children change one sound in a syllable so it takes on the features of another sound in the same syllable.
Place-of-articulation changes
when children replace a sound produced at one location in the mouth with a sound produced at a different location in the mouth.
fronting
children often replace sounds produced farther back in the mouth (e.g., /k/) with sounds produced farther forward in the mouth (e.g., /t/), so a child’s pronunciation of cake becomes “take”
Manner-of-articulation changes
children replace a sound produced in a particular manner with a sound produced in a different manner
- stopping: replace an affricate sound with a stop sound.
transitional period
- 18 months of age (vocabulary spurt)
- developmental time frame during which language abilities are emerging and changing
- toddlers’ successful learning of novel nonneighbors (new words that are not phonologically similar to known words) and difficulty in learning novel neighbors (new words that are phonologically similar to known words).
partial phonetic information.
toddlers become increasingly adept at recognizing words after hearing only parts of the words
Grammatical morphemes begin to appear in children’s speech between
ages 18 and 24 months—at about the time when they have learned their first 50 words.
- first grammatical morpheme children tend to produce is the present progressive -ing, @ 18 months master by 28 months
- in and on, which children start to use at about age 2 years
two-word stage
which toddlers begin to combine words to make utterances, marks the true beginning of syntax, or the rules that govern the order of words in a child’s language.
- commenting (“Baby cry”), negating (“No juice”), requesting (“More juice”), and questioning (“What that?”).
For a toddler to learn a new word—or create a new lexical entry—he or she must minimally do the following:
segment the word from continuous speech; find ob-jects, events, actions, and concepts in the world; and map the new word to its cor-responding object, event, action, or concept.
mapping
mapping
is the key to learning a new word successfully and may require more than meets the eye.
mapping problem, induction problem, or Quinean conundrum.
dilemma—the uncertainty surrounding the mapping of a word to its referent in the face of seemingly endless interpretations
lexical principles framework
This framework consists of two tiers: The first tier includes the principles of reference, extendibility, and object scope; the second tier includes the principles of conventionality, categorical scope, and novel name–nameless category
First-Tier Principles
- reference: words symbolize objects, actions, events, and concepts.
- extendibility: words label categories of objects and not just the original exemplar.
- object scope: words map to whole objects.
whole object assumption
which means words label whole objects and not object parts
Second-Tier Principles.
- conventionality: children to communicate successfully, they must adopt the terms that people in their language community understand
- categorical scope: builds on the Tier 1 principle of extendibility by limiting the basis for extension to words in the same category
- novel name–nameless category (N3C): rests on the principle of mutual exclusivity, which states that objects have only one label
social-pragmatic theorists,
Infants and toddlers can understand an array of sophisticated social cues at an early age. They can follow another person’s gaze and pointing gestures, engage in joint attention, and imitate actions by age 9–12 months (Baldwin, 1995). As early as age 12 months, infants can use social cues—including line of regard (the direction of a person’s gaze, which indicates what the person is looking at), gestures, voice direction, and body posture—to infer the intentions underlying other people’s actions
fast mapping
the brief exposure to the novel word and its referent, for which children form a lexical representation
- fast mapping is not an ability specific to word learning.
thematic role
the part a word plays in an event, and such roles include agent, theme, source, goal, and location
agent
is the entity that per-forms the action (Nicole ate pasta).
theme
the entity undergoing an action or a movement (Tamika flew a kite).
source
is the starting point for movement and a goal is the ending point for movement (Maurie drove from Richmond to Char-lottesville).
Location
is the place where an action occurs (Ryan hiked through the park).
Vocabulary sprut
18-24 months
children may learn up to seven to nine new words per day
Overextension, or overgeneralization
is the process by which children use words in an overly general manner.
3 kinds: categorical, analogical, and relational
- Toddlers overgeneralize about one-third of all new words
categorical overextensions
they extend a word they know to other words in the same category.
analogical overextensions
when they extend a word they know to other words that are perceptually similar.
relational overextensions
they extend a word they know to other words that are semantically or thematically related.
underextension
whereby toddlers use words to refer to only a subset of possible referents,
Overlap
When toddlers overextend a word in certain circumstances and under-extend the same word in other circumstances
three possible explanations have been offered as to why children use words in different ways than adults
- category membership errors
- pragmatic errors
- retrieval error
Discourse functions
These functions include instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, and informative functions, pg. 181
Conversational Skills
- toddlers do not display much skill is conversation.
- the ability to initiate a conversational topic, sustain the topic for several turns, then appropriately take leave of the conversation.
individual toddler
- you will most likely notice that his or her language development is not linear.
- a toddler might learn several new words within a week and then not learn any new words for the next few weeks
Interindividual differences
- in a group of toodlers note language-development differences among them.
- relate to a number of factors, including gender, birth order, and socioeco-nomic status.
Effects of gender
- 18-month-old girls understand an average of 65 words and produce about 27 words,
- boys of the same age understand an average of 56 words and produce about 18 words.
- neurological development,
- parents may interact differently with boys and girls
Effects of Birth Order
toddlers between the ages of 18 and 29 months, firstborn children exhibit more advanced lexical and grammatical development than their later-born counterparts, whereas later-born children exhibit more advanced conversational skills
- firstborn children receive much more one-on-one attention
- younger siblings receive input from their older siblings and such input likely affects their language development as well.
Effects of Socioeconomic Status and Parental Education
- SES is associated with toddlers’ receptive and expressive language development.
- parents’ education level is more closely associated with the complexity of par-ents’ language than family income
- SES is related to the amount and complexity of speech parents use with their children, which in turn is related to children’s own language outcomes
Production tasks
allow toddlers to demonstrate their competence in various areas of language development. In these tasks, researchers ask children to produce, or say, the language targets under investigation.
Naturalistic Observation.
- when researchers can analyze children’s morphology and syntax for the first time.Probably the most famous naturalistic observations are Roger Brown’s (1973) longitudinal observations of children with the pseudonyms Adam, Eve, and Sarah. As a result of Brown’s analysis, we know, for example, that children’s earliest utterances containing forms of the verb to be (am, is, are, was, were) include contractions (e.g., it’s).
Elicited Imitation Tasks.
- which take advantage of children’s natural ability to imitate other people’s movements and speech sounds.
- In elicited imitation tasks, researchers assume that for a child to successfully imitate a target, it must be a part of the child’s grammatical repertoire
Elicited Production Tasks
tasks are designed to reveal aspects of children’s language abilities (e.g., syntax, morphology, pragmatics) as they produce specific sentence structures.
- Researchers elicit sentence structures in the context of a game, during which the child must ask questions or make state-ments in response to an experimenter’s prompt.
Wug Test
investigate children’s acquisition of English morphemes, including the plural marker. English plural nouns are marked by adding one of three allomorphs (variants of a morpheme with the same meaning but different sounds) of the morpheme -s
- Berko elicited these three allomorphs by presenting children with a pseudoword and then prompting them to say what two of the same word would be called.
The Picture Selection Task.
- Comprehension Tasks
an experimenter pres-ents a language target and asks the child to choose the picture corresponding to the target.
The Act-Out Task.
- Comprehension Tasks
an experimenter presents a child with a series of props and instructs the child to act out the sentences he or she hears.
Truth Value Judgment Tasks
children must judge certain language constructions to be correct or incorrect. These tasks take two forms: yes–no tasks and reward–punishment tasks. In a yes–no task, an experimenter presents a scenario and asks the child a question.
Grammaticality Judgment Tasks.
- Grammaticality judgment tasks are generally suited for preschoolers, older children, and adults
Screening
Screening measures in toddlerhood, like those in infancy, use common early language milestones, against which the clinician or a parent can compare the child’s own language abilities.
Comprehensive Evaluation
- to determine whether a child has a language disorder and, if so, to learn more about the nature of the disor-der.
- evaluations are generally structured, standardized, norm-referenced (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of norm-referenced measures), and limited in duration rather than ongoing
Progress Monitoring
- progress monitoring tools measure and monitor a child’s prog-ress in a certain area of language development
- Clini-cians can administer progress monitoring instruments multiple times and they are generally quick and easy to administer
