Communication Flashcards
Human vocal tract is special - say 2 quotes
“….humans have a higher risk of choking while eating but are better at producing carefully controlled vocalizations”
“…convergent fossil evidence indicates adaptations for complex vocalizations at least as early as the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans”
What else other than the vocal tract is crucial? Why?
Coevolution of vocal cords and SOUND PROCESSING
o Vocal cords are important for us to be able to make distinctions
o Chimps also sign when they talk (sign language)
o Specialized hearing - “…human (and Neanderthal) hearing is specialized for speech, because it is more sensitive to frequencies in the range of 2–4 kHz”
o Need to be able to understand and process what is going on
What is the developmental trajectory of human communication system?
• 4 months: Babbling/ vocalization (even in the deaf)
o Even in the deaf they babble but it disappears. Shows us at first that its built into our system and dont need input. But disappears if have no feedback loop. They start sign babbling. Sign language goes through same stages.
• Within the first year: Gesture, gaze, joint reference
(shared attention/ point and look at same thing )
• 12 months: Onset of vocabulary
• 18-24 months: First combinations, word order, semantic roles
• 2-3 years old: Modulation of basic meanings
• Negation: Starts outside of the sentence, e.g. “No I can come”
• Question: First, intonation only, e.g. “I can come?”
• Tense, number (and overgeneralizations, e.g. I jumped, runned, breaked, two shoes, two foots, etc.)
Listening to different sounds/ languages
o children younger than 8 months are universal listeners. They can hear all the sounds in different languages
o before 9 children wont have an accent. Ability to tell distinction between all sounds goes away then.
What should they know?
Basic Linguistic Knowledge of Children
• Phonological Knowledge o (Phonology is just sounds) • Morphological Knowledge o (Morphology is sounds combinations that have meaning. Like prefexis and suffixes) • Word Knowledge • Grammatical Knowledge
Phonological Knowledge
• Are younger children smarter than older ones?
Morphological Knowledge - 1st Example
Children’s use of language can be funny!
• A child looks at someone with torn shoes. She looks over to her mother and says: “Mommy, look. She had broken feet!“
Classic example of OVEREXTENSION of “feet”. Overextension occurs when a categorical term (a word used to describe a group of things) is used in language to represent more categories than it actually does. This happens in particular with very young children. An example is when a child refers to all animals as ‘doggie’ or refers to a lion as a ‘kitty.’
Morphological Knowledge - 2nd Example
CHILD: My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them. ADULT: Did you say your teacher held the baby rabbits.
CHILD: Yes.
ADULT: What did you say she did?
CHILD: She holded the baby rabbits and we patted them. ADULT: Did you say she held them tightly?
CHILD: No, she holded them loosely.
What’s going on with morphological knowledge?
Often a U-shaped development.
o first stage they are just imitating (went, came, saw, walked)
2nd stage they have to learn the rules themselves (goed, comed, seed, walked)
3rd stage they understand there are rules but also exceptions to the rules (went, came, saw, walked)
Morphological knowledge - 3rd example
o Wug is a non word in English. When shown picture of 2 wugs: 1.5 yr olds say wugs, which shows that they aren’t just imitating and they know the rule bc they never heard wug before. They know that plural marker is independent of word itself.
Word Knowledge
o Importance of magic triangle/ joined attention, adult points to object and then child looks at object allows them to learn identity. If adults are not looking at object while saying words the child wont learn it.
If the parent is looking at the toy when saying a new name, the child will assign the name “dax” to the toy
If the parent is looking at something else while saying a new name, the child will NOT assign the name “dax” to the toy
Grammer
o Universal grammer is hard wired. Combinatorial property, children will form 2-3 word sentences that adults would never say but that demonstrate the understanding of how to combine. “more outside!”
Chimps combination skills are very limited, that is the major difference btw us and them.
Grammer Part 2
17 month olds:
know that different NP positions denote different roles
Depending on direction of action, they understand which:
“The mother tickles the baby”
“The baby tickles the mother”
23-25 month olds: use this information to learn new verbs Depending on direction of action, they learn: “The penguin and the duck are gorping” “The penguin is gorping the rabbit”
Nicaragua woman who grew up deaf
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