Chapter Three- Contributions of Nurture to Language Development

Question 1

What is Social Gating?

Answer 1

Infants exposed to a live speaker of a foreign language maintain those sound contrasts, but infants exposed to video of the same speaker
(infants and people are more attuned to information learned in social contexts’ )

Question 2

How does screen time impact language development ?

Answer 2

• infants: do not benefit and it it not recommended to let children under 2 have any screen time
• toddlers: seem to be able to learn new words but only if the video showed a social interaction as part of the learning process.
• Older children: learning a second language only from the TV, no learning

Question 3

What are the Negative impacts of screen time on language development

Answer 3

• it reduces the amount of time children can spend in human interaction
• turn-taking is crucial for language learning

Question 4

What is Joint Attention and when is it most important? What skills are included?

Answer 4

• joint attention is the state of which two people are attending to the same object of event, involves coordinating attention with others, this allows children to jointly attend to both an object and another person
• 9-12 months
• skills: pointing and gaze-following
• positive indicator of language development

Question 5

What is Intention Reading

Answer 5

The ability to interpret or read another persons intentions is a critical social skill
- starts around 18 months

Question 6

When and how do children use gestures?

Answer 6

• children use gestures before words

- gestures can be combined into utterances with words

Question 7

What are Referential Gestures

Answer 7

Gestures for objects often lead to referential for those objects (Referring to the object)

Question 8

Why does early gestural communication lead to language?

Answer 8

• can be an indicator of the child’s communicative abilities
• may support communicative interactions that support language learning
• may elict speech from others which facilitates language learning

Question 9

Early attention to speech in children

Answer 9

• newborn infants prefer human speech over other sounds
• infants expect speech to come from human faces
  eg. still face experiment

Question 10

Discrimination of speech sounds in infants

Answer 10

• infants can discriminate among essentially all sounds and languages, even ones they have not heard
• this ability shifts over the 1st year of life as their perceptual system to their native language

Question 11

What does Sensory Perception mean?

Answer 11

• from birth children can hear and discriminate the different sounds that spoken language makes use of
• distribution of acoustic signals
• syllables and words
• relation between prosody and structure

Question 12

Memory and Attentional Processes

Answer 12

• sleep is an important part of cognition: when we sleep we consolidate our learning
• research with infants has shown that they remember language patterns better if they take a nap between training and test phases

Question 13

Phonological Memory

Answer 13

• short term memory and refers to how many sounds in a new sequence one can remember

Question 14

Cognitive Foundations of Language development

Answer 14

• a critical first step is being able to understand the meaning
• 10 months: infants understand things as objects. but not separate objects
• 12 months: understand objects as separate objects
• they start to categorize things

Question 15

Central executive function in working memory

Answer 15

• helps juggle competing demands

- children with language disorders often have trouble with this

Question 16

Prosodic and Phonological Bootstrapping

Answer 16

speech cues help us to learn aspects of language (system and pattens)

Question 17

Motherese

Answer 17

Higher pitch, uses a wider range of pitches and exaggerated intonational contours
- it is slower
-exaggerated vowels
(infant directed speech)