Chapter 6 Flashcards
Cognition and Language
-Cognitive development in children is related to increased memory and the ability to acquire symbols (language and gestures)
-Development of grammatical constructions reflect cognitive development
-Organization of longer utterances requires better…
short term memory
knowledge of syntactic patterns
knowledge of word classes
Reversibility
- The ability to trace a process backward
- Related to the concepts of the words “before, after, because, why”
- To answer “why”, child must use “because” and reverse the order of events
Knowledge Structures That Guide Acquisition:
Event-based Knowledge
- used by toddlers aged 12-24 mos
- consists of sequences of events or routines like a birthday party or reading a book
- routines are temporal or causal and organized towards a goal
- routines have actors, props, roles, options
- scripts: sets of expectations that aid in memory
Knowledge Structures That Guide Acquisition:
Taxonomic Knowledge
- consists of categories and classes of words
- new words are compared categorically and organized for retrieval
- by age 7-10 kids use taxonomic categories like “food”
Comprehension and Production
- comprehension occurs before production
- perception of speech-sound differences precedes expression
- intonational patterns are discriminated at around 8 months
- children understand around 50 words before they produce 10
- by age 7-9 kids use language to acquire more language
Language Learning Strategies
- Less is more
- Short, simple sentences are easier to process
- Late learners of a language (bilingualism) take longer than native learners
Language Learning:
Before children recognize words, they learn _____
Before children recognize words, they learn how sounds go together to form syllables of the native language
Language Learning:
English exposed infants favor words with emphasis on the __ syllable and locate _____
English exposed infants favor words with emphasis on the 1st syllable and locate word boundaries such as initial consonant blends
Language Learning:
By __ months, infants are sensitive to word boundaries and phonological characteristics of their native language
By 11 months, infants are sensitive to word boundaries and phonological characteristics of their native language
Learning Language: basics
Less is more!
Short, simple sentences are easier to process
Bilingualism
Late learners of a second language exhibit poorer performance relative to early (native) language learners
Clinical Application: How would you relate this information to a parent?
Lexical Principles of Toddlers
- Reference Principle
- Extendability Principle
- Whole-Object Principle
Reference principles
Word stand for entities to which they refer
Each referent has a unique symbol
Toddler must be able to determine the speaker’s intention to refer, linguistic patterns used, and entities to which they refer
Extendability principle
Similarity that enables use of one symbol for more than one referent (shared perceptual attributes)
Ex: calling every utensil a “spoon”
Whole - object principle
A label refers to a whole entity, rather than a part or attribute
Basic level terms are often accompanied by pointing (teaching strategies match child learning preferences)
Basic level terms occur before more restricted terms
Lexical Assumptions of Toddlers: definition and 3 types
- Categorical Assumption
- Novel Name-Nameless Assumption
- Conventional Assumption
-Need for toddlers to quickly form hypothetical definitions and use syntactic information
Categorical assumption
—Used by children at 18 months to extend a label to related entities
Novel Name-Nameless Assumption
- –Enables a child to link a symbol and referent after only a few exposures
- –Assisted by naming, pointing, holding, and manipulating objects
Conventional assumption
—Caregivers don’t change the word’s meaning with each use
Expressive Strategies
Young children use strategies to gain linguistic knowledge
Toddler Expressive Strategies: Evocative Utterances, Hypothesis-Testing Utterances, Interrogative Utterances
Evocative Utterances
- –Statements a child makes naming entities
- –After a child name, adult gives feedback about the statement that causes the child to maintain or modify meaning
Hypothesis-testing utterances
- –Direct method of acquiring linguistic knowledge
- –Child says word with rising intonation - serves as a question seeking a Y/N response
- –Adult confirms or denies the hypothesis
Interrogative utterances
- –Child asks a question for information for an unknown entity label
- –This behavior is found prior to 1st words via pointing and vocalizing
- –At age 2, there is positive correlation between the number of interrogative utterances used and vocabulary size
Approximately __% of infant language is an imitation of other speakers.
Approximately 20% of infant language is an imitation of other speakers
Imitation
-How it’s used, why it’s important, where it’s used
- Imitation is selective - children actively select what to imitate
- Used in the acquisition of words, morphology, and syntactic-semantic structures
- Approximately 20% of infant language is an imitation of other speakers
- Imitation is critical for vocabulary growth
- Imitation and early vocabulary growth take place within the context of daily routines, which may have predictable language
- The ends of utterances have particular perceptual importance to children
Children’s Processes of Language Acquisition: Intention-reading
Social cognitive skill for understanding language behavior of others
Child must determine the intentions of others
Children’s Processes of Language Acquisition: Pattern-finding (3 underlying rules for language too)
- A cognitive skill that enables use to find common threads in disparate information
- Seeking underlying rules for language:
- Schematization and analogy: children hear same utterances repeated with systematic variation
- Entrenchment and preemption: when we do something the same way successfully several times, the manner becomes habitual
- Functionally based distributional analysis: concrete linguistic items are grouped together into a category
Adult Conversational Teaching Techniques
- Parents spend little time directly teaching language
- Mainly daily activities facilitate language acquisition vis experiential learning
- Maternal education is highly correlated with child language development
Adult speech to toddlers
A primary caregiver’s verbal responses and supportive directions to the child influence vocabulary growth
Intrusive verbal directions adversely impact vocabulary growth
Parents facilitate acquisition by engaging in behaviors that affect the linguistic behaviors of their children
How do parents facilitate language acquisition? (child directed speech) (3 things)
→ modeling
→ prompting
→ responding
Modeling (child-directed speech)
- –As children become more verbal, parents modify their own behavior to require more child participation
- –Withholding names of objects
- –Asking the names of objects
- –By age 1, infants are aware of the subtle stress adults place on new words - this stress aids in learning
- –Adults use prosodic features (pitch, duration, loudness) to indicate new referents
- –Modeling strategies aid child’s bootstrapping
By age _, infants are aware of ____________ - this aids in learning
—By age 1, infants are aware of the subtle stress adults place on new words - this stress aids in learning
Child-Directed Speech: Characteristics
paralinguistic, lexical, semantic, syntactic, conversational
-Paralinguistic Slower speech (less words per minute) with louder pauses Higher pitch Exaggerated intonation and stress -Lexical Restricted vocabulary More concrete references (here and now) Simplification: diminutive (doggie) and syllable reduplication (mimis) -Semantic More contextual support -Syntactic Shorter, less complex sentences 50% are single words More directives and questions (about 60%) -Conversational More repetitions Fewer utterances per conversation
Adult-Child Conversation: general characteristics, scaffolding, turnabout, contingent query
- 2x as many words like Well and Now - signal that a response is coming
- High amount of redundant utterances
- High amount of acknowledgment
- Caregivers invite child utterances primarily via questions followed by self-responses
- Scaffolding is key when discussing non-present referents
- Turnabout: an utterance that both responds to the previous utterance and requires a response
- Fills a parent’s turn and then requires a turn by the child
- Resembles conversational dialogue
- Contingent query: request for information - used to gain information that initially was not clearly transmitted or received
Importance of Play
Significant Child language develops in the context of play
Play is fun and interactive
Attention is shared by interactive partners
Games have structure (like grammar) and turn taking (like conversations)
Types of Play: Solitary Play
- young babies
- unorganized
- limb and body movements–grasping, etc
- sensory
- all about learning about their bodies and sensory systems
Types of Play: Functional Play
Concrete
Depends on the here and now
Later, play becomes less tangible as children combine symbols (word combinations)
Types of Play: Symbolic Play
Using one play to represent another
Language is used to clarify and explicitly convey meaning
Ex: you be a ____
Ex: environmental noises
Types of Play: Parallel Play
Toddlers may enjoy playing near other children but may not interact
Begin to share toys with others
Types of Play: Associative Play
Longer play sequences of familiar routines
Increasingly creative endings to play sequences
Dolls or other play animals may become active participants in a play sequence
Types of Play: Cooperative Play
Usually by age 4 - children come together with others
Role play within complicated sequences of event using multiple props
Social play that uses explicit language to convey meaning
Individual Differences in Lang Dev: Intellect, Personality, Birth Order
Intellect:
-Intelligence impacts the rate of language development
Personality:
-More outgoing children may learn language faster because they are more apt to insert themselves into play and interact with others
Birth Order:
-Only children have more opportunities to engage with adults than peers with siblings
-Develop language more quickly
(these concepts are not necessarily related, just grouped together)
Individual Differences in Lang Dev: Cultural Differences
- Parental behaviors differ based on the number of gender of children in the household
- Parenting style impacts a child’s pragmatics and grammar
- Children from single parents households have better expressive and receptive language skills and fewer communication problems in comparison to peers with married, working parents
Individual Differences in Lang Dev: What Are They?
Intellect Personality Learning style Socioeconomic status Family structure Birth order Cultural differences
Prompting in CDS
3 common types of prompting
-adults eliciting a response from a child
Common types of prompting:
-FILL-INS:
This is a _________.
No response or an incorrect response will elicit more cues
-ELICITED IMITATIONS:
Say X.
Young children respond to ~50% of the elicited imitations addressed to them
-QUESTIONS:
What’s that?
Approximately 20—50% of parents’ utterances to young language learning
children are questions
Includes Yes/No or wh- questions
Responding in CDS
types of responses
-less than 10% of kids’ utterances are followed by a verbal approval Types: -imitation -acknowledgement (uh huh, yeah) -expansion -reformulations -request for clarification -extension
CDS: Expansion
-maintain word order while providing a more mature form of
a child’s utterance
-approximately 30% of parent responses to a 18-24 month old
-provides more semantic information
-used with younger children
CDS: Reformulation
-a recast utterance – a strategy for older children
beginning to create more complex sentences
CDS: Extension
-a comment or reply to a child’s utterance that provides more semantic information and provides a model of more mature language
Universal Language-Learning Principles (7 of them)
-principles of learning language that are universal across cultures
1-Pay attention to the ends of words
2-Phonological forms of words can be systematically modified
3-Pay attention to the order of words and phonemes
4-Avoid interruption and rearrangement of linguistic units
5-Underlying semantic relations should be marked overtly and clearly
6-Avoid exceptions
7-The use of grammatical markers should make sense
