Chapter 6 - Language Development

Question 1

what is language?

Answer 1

• Language is a symbol system
• Symbol systems represent and convey information
• 1 thing stands for something else (Eg. Numbers, maps, language)
• Words are social conventions (arbitrary relationships agreed upon by a social group)

Question 2

what makes something a language?

Answer 2

• Researchers agree that the human language is a language due to “generativity” - the ability to convey an infinite number of novel concepts
• Ex. “last night around 11:19pm I was sitting in the middle of the road eating chicken and watching a TV show about Santa Claus and aliens throwing a birthday party” -> even though I’ve never heard this exact sentence before, I understand the concept
• So things like stop lights, thermostats, crying babies, and bee dances aren’t a language -> can’t convey infinite concepts

Question 3

4 components of language

Answer 3

• Phonology
• Semantics
• Grammar
• Pragmatics

Question 4

phonology

Answer 4

Phonological development: learning about the sound system of a language (phonemes)

Question 5

Semantics

Answer 5

Semantic development: learning about expressing meaning (morphemes)

Question 6

Grammar

Answer 6

Syntactic Development: learning rules for combining sounds/words (syntax, grammar)

Question 7

Pragmatics

Answer 7

Pragmatic Development: learning how language is used (metalinguistic knowledge)

Question 8

Language comprehension vs. language production

Answer 8

• Language comprehension: understanding what others say (or certain aspects)
• Language production: actual speaking (or manually producing) those aspects
• Language comprehension precedes production
• Proof: infants recognize their own name at 4.5 months; can look at the correct person at 6 months when they hear “mommy” or “daddy”; 12-14 month olds listen longer to sentences with normal word order rather than scrambled order; 13-15 month olds appreciate word combinations carry meaning beyond the individual words (eg. “She’s kissing the keys” vs. Kissing a ball -> kids can look at the right image depicting the phrase)

Question 9

Language development stages

Answer 9

• cooing stage
• babbling stage
• holophrastic period
• telegraphic speech

Question 10

cooing stage

Answer 10

• starts 6-8 weeks
• Produce simple speech sounds (goo, ahh) and vocal gymnastics (smacks, clicks, bubbles)
• Improved motor control of vocalizations
• Imitate sounds of sounds of their partners, high pitched for mom and lower for dads
• Will imitates speech sounds they hear from a tape

Question 11

babbling stage

Answer 11

• starts 6-10 months
• Produce vowel consonant syllables in repetition (bababa)
• Babble only a limited set of sounds, some not in their native language
• Gradually it takes on the sounds, rhythm, and intonation patterns of the language they hear around them
• Adults can pick out the babbling of an infant from their own language from infants in other languages
• Deaf infants exposed to sign language manually babble

Question 12

holophrastic period

Answer 12

• starts 10-15 months
• One-word utterances that express a whole phrase/message in one word (ie. “drink”, “up”, etc.)
• First words include mostly nouns (ie. Mama, dada, ball), frequent events or routines (ie. Bye-bye, night-night), some modifiers (mine, all gone, uh-oh)
• Overextensions sometimes occur (ie. Dog for other animals, daddy for all men) - probably due to their limited vocabulary rather than lack of knowledge)

Question 13

telegraphic speech

Answer 13

• begins at end of 2nd year ~24 months
• Begin to combine words into simple “sentences”
• Only 2 word utterances (simplifying the message by only including essential elements - like in telegrams) ie. More juice, hurt knee, eat cookie
• Gradually child begins to add first person pronouns, verb endings, plurals, e.g. “I eating cookies” then
  functions words etc. a, the, of, in…
• Practice on their own “Crib-talk”
• Begin to combine words into simple sentences -> “internalization of grammatical rules”

Question 14

evidence for internalization of grammatical rules

Answer 14

• Consistent word order (ie. Never “cookie eat”)
• Overregularization errors (ie. Goed, foots, mans)
• Application of rules to novel words (eg. The Wug test)

Question 15

UG (Universal Grammar) and IGR (Internalized Grammatical Rules)

Answer 15

• UG: abstract concept that there are components that exist across all languages (ie. All languages have verbs)
• IGR: acquired, learned, and specific to the particular language you’re learning

Question 16

Parts of Brain relevant for language

Answer 16

• Wernicke’s area: language comprehension

- Broca’s area: language production

Question 17

Language learning facts

Answer 17

• We know 60,000+ words by the time we graduate high school. That’s ~10 words a day (or 100 1/10ths of a word)
• Recovering facts = slow, hard; but recovering words = fast, effortless
• Fast-mapping: Mapping words to its referent from brief single exposure or incidental exposures rather than direct teaching. The word can be used by contrasting familiar and unfamiliar but need not be
• Ex. Can learn words like “chromium” just by experiencing it once (ie. Study where there was a red and silver tray, kids could bring them the silver/chromium tray easily even if they didn’t know what the word meant, because they knew that the red tray was red)

Question 18

2 problems kids encounter when learning languages

Answer 18

1. the word-segmentation problem (parsing problem)

2. the Quinean reference problem

Question 19

What is the word segmentation problem (parsing problem)?

Answer 19

• No way to use silences in the speech stream to mark boundaries of words
• We need to actually know what the word is

Question 20

how do infants solve the parsing problem?

Answer 20

• infants pick up on statistical regularities (eg. Co-occurrences)
• Ex. In the word “pretty”, the sound “pre” often co-occurs with “tty”, so infants can pick up on this pair once they hear it enough and associate it with one word: “pretty”
• Prosody
• Infant directed speech (IDS)
• Scaffolding: conversation and narrative schemes

Question 21

prosody

Answer 21

the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonation pattern, stress, etc. With which language is spoken

Question 22

infant-directed speech (IDS)

Answer 22

• characterized by emotional tone, slow and clear, exaggerated speech, exaggerated facial expressions
• Infants like IDS better than regular speech, perhaps because they learn more words in IDS
• IDS is not universal, but is very common

Question 23

what is the Quinean reference problem?

Answer 23

• Figuring out what words refer to

- When we hear a word in an unknown language, it could refer to pretty much anything (ex. “Gavagai”)

Question 24

how to infants solve the Quinean reference problem?

Answer 24

• behaviourist/associationist account
• whole object bias
• basic level bias
• shape bias
• function bias
• linguistic context
• syntactic bootstrapping
• mutual exclusivity bias
• theory of mind and pragmatics

Question 25

behaviourist/associationist account

Answer 25

• one theory as to how kids solve quinean reference problem
• Parents label objects for the child
• Child begins to associate the word it hears with the object it sees at the time the word is uttered
• Parents give positive or negative reinforcement or feedback (smiling, correcting, etc.)
• Ex. Child toddles after dog and mom says “Dog – that’s the dog. You’re chasing the dog”, and kid says “Daw”, and mom smiles and praises him

Question 26

arguments against behaviourist/associationist account

Answer 26

• 30% of the time a word is uttered the object it refers to isn’t present
• When parents do label things, it’s mostly nouns, not verbs
• They have to learn abstract terms and “non-nouns” with no word-world mappings (ie. Personal pronouns -> “I” means Bre when I say it, but “I” means Emma when she says it)
• Parents rarely give feedback, and it’s often ineffective
• Children learn language in cultures when parents don’t even speak to them

Question 27

whole object bias

Answer 27

• one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
• when kids learn new words, they are likely to think that it refers to the whole object, not a property or a part of it (ex. If you point at a truck and say “truck”, kids will assume you mean the entire truck. If you point at a truck and say “tire”, they’ll assume that the truck is called a “tire” unless they already have a label for truck)

Question 28

basic level bias

Answer 28

• one way kids solve the quinean reference problem

- they learn basic level (eg. Dog) before subordinate (eg. Poodle, hound) or superordinate (e.g., pet, mammal, animal)

Question 29

shape bias

Answer 29

• one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
• when you present a kid with an object and a name (ex. “Modi”), they’ll assume that anything else with that shape (regardless of size or texture) is also a “Modi”

Question 30

function bias

Answer 30

• one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
• shape is a good cue to function. When shape and function are pitted against each other function usually wins -> ex. If you tell kids “this is a Fendel and you sit on it, you can sit on these things too. Are these fendels?” Kids will say yes because they share the same function, even if the chairs themselves are different shapes.

Question 31

linguistic context

Answer 31

• one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
• using the context of the sentence they’re presented with to figure out the meaning of the words. Ex. the meaning of “sib” changes depending on the syntactic context (ex. Sibbing (verb) vs. Some sib (plural) vs. The sib (singular))

Question 32

syntactic bootstrapping

Answer 32

• one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
• children can figure out what “gorping” means by using the syntactic structure of the sentence. Ex. They know that “gorping” is the action Cookie Monster is doing, not what Big Bird is doing

Question 33

mutual exclusivity bias

Answer 33

• one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
• if you give them a choice of objects where they already have a label for one object and then ask them to get you the “Blicket”, they won’t bring you the object they already have a label for because they understand that it probably won’t have another name. Bilingual kids don’t show this bias as much.

Question 34

theory of mind and pragmatics

Answer 34

• one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
• Joint attention (eye gaze and intention reading)
• selective social learning/attributing knowledge (ex. Deciding who is the most knowledgeable source – ex. Ben and Jenny experiment)
• Tomasello’s bucket study (kids can read non-verbal cues like facial expressions to figure out when Tomasello achieved his goal of finding his “fep” in the bucket)
• intention reading explanation of Mutual Exclusivity Bias (ex. Jop and Bem example alternative explanations -> “the speaker wants 1 of the 2 objects. If she wanted me to give her the one she called jop, she would have asked me to give her the jop to make sure that I understood and gave her the right one, so I’ll give her the other one”, same thing goes for factual information (ex. Can you give me the one I keep in the kitchen?)