Chapter 7: Language Development Flashcards
What would Piaget say about language acquisition?
No special language acquisition psychology
Children are good at perceiving patterns
Language as symbols, development during preoperational
What would associationists say about language acquisition?
Skinner and others give credit to imitation. Thought speech sounds were accidental and reinforced by parents’ encouragement. Thought language was a behaviour that could be studied like any other.
What would systems theorists say about language acquisition?
Language is a developmental resource (all resources are equally valuable)
What would evolutionary psychologists say about language acquisition?
Language is universal; part of our human psychology
Language is not more complex in complex societies
Language is not an artifact or innovation
Noam Chomsky (list and describe his contributions)
- argued that general-purpose learning mechanisms could not acquire language.
- Why? Because we use complex rules governing word order and sentence formation & children learn language incredibly fast. Imitation is not sufficient because adults make mistakes & because children form novel sentences they’ve never heard before.
- children have a language acquisition device: the learning mechanisms that allow children to analyze the language they hear and to acquire and produce their own native language.
- coined “deep structure”- a term for the wordless structure that is common to phrases with the same meaning
- we have universal grammar: the set of principles and adjustable parameters that are common to all known human languages.
___A___ happens before ____B_______ and _____B_______ happens before _C_____
perception; comprehension; production
Infants discriminate universal speech sounds. When does this stop and through what process?
they lose this ability around 10 months through perceptual narrowing.
*this happens very suddenly due to brain maturation. Gestational age determines when this window closes
The experiment with “ba” and “pa” reveals what about infants?
There is evidence of categorical perception in infants as young as 1-month-old. The experimental group listened to sounds that cross category boundaries and dishabituated, while the control group listened to sounds within the same category and did not dishabituate.
If adults speak sign language, babies…
babble in sign language. It happens in all language communities.
Age ranges and stats about word learning
8-18 months is the normal range for first words to be spoken.
at 6, kids have vocabulary of 10,000 words
from 2-6 kids learn about 6 new words a day without being explicitly taught
Fast mapping
the learning mechanism that allows a child to learn a new word based only on a single exposure to the word paired with the new concept.
*This happens due to constrained learning.
The Problem of Reference
- Quine
- we teach kids by pointing to and naming something, but we could be referring to an infinite number of things.
- *something in our mind is narrowing these hypotheses
Three Rules for Word Learning
the whole-object assumption: novel words will refer to whole objects
the taxonomic assumption: novel words refer to objects that are grouped conceptually and categorically rather than thematically
the mutual exclusivity assumption: a novel word does not duplicate a known word but means something else (a specific property of a known object)
Three Social Cues for Word Learning
adult’s attention: at 18 months, adult attends to something and names it and infant will bring them that object if asked
adult’s emotion: at 18 months, adult names something new in front of two objects. Infant assumes name applies to object that elicits positive rather than negative emotion.
adult’s intention: if adult uses new word to refer to action, baby assumes name can be applied to action followed by “there” and not one followed by “whoops”.
Adults are more likely to correct _______ than ________ errors
factual; grammatical
