Communicative Development Flashcards
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language A communication system in which words
and their written symbols combine in rule-governed ways and enable speakers to produce an infinite number of messages.
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productive language The production of speech.
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receptive
language Understanding the speech of others.
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phonology
The system of sounds that a language uses.
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semantics The study of word meanings and word combinations.
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grammar The structure of a language; consists of morphology and syntax.
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morphology The study of morphemes, language’s smallest units of meaning.
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syntax The part of grammar that prescribes how words may combine into phrases, clauses and sentences.
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pragmatics A set of rules that specifies appropriate language for particular social contexts.
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The debate between learning and nativist approaches
to language development corresponds to the nature versus nurture theme in developmental psychology,
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Language acquisition device (LAD) Chomsky’s
proposed mental structure in the human nervous system that incorporates an innate concept of language.
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infant-directed,or child-directed,speech - motherese
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recast A technique adults use in speaking to young children in which they render a child’s incomplete sentence in a more complex grammatical form.
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Expansion - A technique adults use in speaking to
young children in which they imitate and expand or add to a child’s statement.
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Parents’ help with children’s language development is
one of the most important features of parental involvement from a young age. In Chapter 13 we discuss other ways in which parents play avital role in other aspects of development, too.
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protoimperative A gesture that either an infant or a young child may use to get someone to do something she or he wants.
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protodeclarative
a gesture that an infant uses to make some sort of statement about an object.
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categorical speech perception The tendency to perceive as the same a range of sounds belonging to the same phonemic group.
Intentional communication
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From dyadic to triadic interactions
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Infants’ use of gestures
culture-specific gestures
not always universal
reachign up
waving goodbye
sticking out tongue as greatings
pointing - fingers in west, lips elsewhere
Pointing development in human infants
9 months - begin to follow points
developmental - closer objects first
12-15 months - begin to produce points
18 months can turn around to follow pointing
pointing imperatices
proto impertaives
pointing to request
Goal-directed behaviour; blocked goal
trying to get apple
Attention-getting behaviour; tailored for attentional status of mother
Response- waiting
they may vocalise
Response- waiting - Gaze alternation
Referential/ directive (visual) gesture - Gaze alternation
Pointing to Request (Proto-imperative)
Goal- Delivery of food/ object
Means- social partner
Reinforcer: Delivery of item
Cognitive prerequisites: Expectation that social partner will deliver requested items, based on past experience; means-ends reasoning.
Pointing to comment (Proto-declarative)
Rich vs. lean interpretations
Rich Interpretation (Tomasello)
Declarative pointing involves communicative intent
For a pointer and recipient to understand a pointing gesture, they need to ‘‘know some things or are attending to some things together’’ (Tomasello et al., 2007, p 706)
Communicative Intent
Common Knowledge/ Joint Attentional Frame
Communicative intent needs…
I know things
I want things
I act to achieve goals
My social partner knows things, wants things, and acts to achieve goals
My social partner and I both want/ know the same thing/ want to achieve the same goal
Concept of self and other as intentional agents
Recognise that the intentions of self and other are the same
Rich interpretation of proto-declaratives
Infants point to influence other’s intentional/ mental states
Infants recognise that when others point, they intend the infant to attend to something
Pointing to comment (Proto-declarative)- Rich Interpretation
Goal: Joint attention to distal object
Reinforcer: Successful joint attention
Cognitive prerequisite: Ability to represent others as beings with attentional foci; i.e., at least second-order representational thought
Pointing to Comment (Proto-declarative)- Lean interpretation (e.g. Moore & Corkum, 1994)
Goal: Affective response from caregiver (e.g. smiling)
Reinforcer = Emotional signal (e.g., smile)
Cognitive prerequisites: Expectation that social partner will exhibit positive emotion, based on past experience; means-ends reasoning.
Liszkowski et al. (2004)
75 babies (12 months old)
10 trials per subject
Four conditions:
Joint Attention (Looks to object + Positive Affect)
Face (Positive affect but no look to object)
Event (Look to object but no positive affect)
Ignore (Look to own hands, no positive affect)
Liszkowski et al. (2004) results
children expecting a postitive head turn and affect
Liszkowski et al. (2004) interpretation
“…this study suggests that infants at 12 months of age do understand something about attention and the independent attentional perspective of others when sharing attention and interest” (Liszkowski et al., 2004, p. 306)
suggesting sophicitcated cognitve abilities
A leaner interpretation?
“the infant may understand that the point will tend to lead to an adult head turn and an interesting subsequent response from the adult” (Moore & Corkum, 1994, p. 362, emphasis added)
Findings are consistent with both learning and representational accounts.
The learning perspective
Babies exhibit declarative pointing because caregivers respond with intense positive emotion
“…if the early motivations for babies’ pointing behavior in both protoimperative and protodeclarative contexts is the manipulation of the behavior of their social partners (delivery of objects in protoimperative pointing and elicitation of emotional engagement in protodeclarative pointing), then there is no compelling logical basis to postulate fundamentally different psychological processes underlying the two kinds of pointing” (Leavens, Russell, & Hopkins, 2005, pp. 292-293; also Leavens, 2012a,b, 2018; Leavens & Clark, 2017; Leavens et al., 2008, 2009).
Leavens and Todd (unpublished)
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Putting the joy into joint attention
Babies (9-18 mos.) express positive emotion during joint object play with their mothers (Adamson & Bakeman, 1985)
Babies (20 & 22 mos.) express more positive emotion during joint attention than when requesting objects (Kasari, Sigman, Mundy, & Yirmiya, 1990; Mundy, Kasari, Sigman, 1992)
Babies’ (6-18 mos.) parents synchronise their own smiles with their own pointing gestures when they point for their babies (Leavens, Sansone, Burfield, Lightfoot, O’Hara, & Todd, 2014).
Language Milestones
Start babbling around 6 mos.
• Say first word at around 1 year
• Experience a “vocabulary spurt” around 1.5 years
• Combine words around 2 years (simple sentences)
There is a lot to learn!
Phonology (phonemes are elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning, e.g., bear vs pear)
• Grammar (Syntax is rules for combining words)
• Morphology (morphemes are smallest unit of meaning in a language, e.g., car vs cars)
• Pragmatics (conventions, social rules and cues, e.g., follow pointing and other gestures)
• Semantics (word meanings)
There is a lot to learn!
Phonology (phonemes are elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning, e.g., bear vs pear)
- Grammar (Syntax is rules for combining words)
- Morphology (morphemes are smallest unit of meaning in a language, e.g., car vs cars)
- Pragmatics (conventions, social rules and cues, e.g., follow pointing and other gestures)
- Semantics (word meanings)
Using language
Comprehension: understanding what others say (or sign or write)
- Production: actually (or signing or writing) speaking to others
- Comprehension precedes production
Nativist theory of language development
Nativist argument: Language is too complex to be learned so easily and quickly by cognitively unsophisticated children
• If isn’t learned, how does it develop?
• Chomsky: Language Acquisition Device
Module in brain just for learning language
Starts out with necessary parameters and your native language tunes them over development
in the fifties - lots of experiments have overturned these theories
Behaviourist theory of language development
Behaviourist argument: Language learned by standard processes of operant and classical conditioning
• Skinner: correct usage is reinforced, incorrect usage is not.
Challenged with arguments about:
- poverty of the stimulus (come up with things we’ve never heard)
- negative evidence (no examples of what is wrong)
Interactionist theory of language development
Language is a product of the interaction of genes, environment, and experience
Bates: basic perceptual and learning abilities are moulded by culture and society to become language specific
Infant speech perception
DeCasper and Fifer (1980): How do we recognise speech sounds? Test: High Amplitude Sucking 24-hour infants Headphones, dummy connected to computer Measured sucking rate
DeCasper and Fifer (1980)
Infants worked to produce mother’s voice
Infants had a preference for their own mother’s voice
Prenatal auditory experience helps shape voice preferences and parent-infant interactions after birth.
Prenatal learning
DeCasper and Spence (1987): 3rd trimester, mum reads story aloud twice a day
3 groups: 2 test groups read different Dr Seuss passages, one control (no reading)
55-hour-old infants, HAS procedure
Mum reading familiar or novel passage OR stranger reading familiar or novel passage
Infants worked to produce the familiar story - recognised prosody
Who read the story (own mother or another mother) had no effect
The control group (no prenatal stories) had no preference between stories, but did prefer own mother (which replicates DeCasper and & Fifer, 80)
More findings with HAS method
- Infants prefer mother’s voice filtered to approximate what it sounded like in the womb
- Infants prefer mother’s voice over father’s voice
- Infants prefer mother’s and father’s voices over other females and males, respectively
- Infants generally prefer stranger’s speaking their parents’ language than another language
Categorical Perception
Categorical perception: The classification of continuous stimuli into distinct categories with sharp boundaries
One can discriminate stimuli between categories, but not within a category
• Colour is another example of categorical perception
/ba/ and /pa/ are the same sound except for when you start making the sound
You start making a sound earlier when you say /ba/
Universal Phonetic Sensitivity
All infants can discriminate all speech sounds (regardless of native language)
Around 6-8 months, infants are able to distinguish contrasts that are not used in their native language.
This ability declines over the first year
• By 12 months infants only retain contrasts used in their native language, (they lose those that aren’t used)
Phonetic sensitivity
Infants’ categories result from the distribution of phonemes in their environment
- English adults can discriminate Hindi phonemes w/ practice
- Japanese /r/ v. /l/: native speakers can learn to discriminate with (extensive) training
Learning word meanings
Learning words is difficult
The possibilities are (hypothetically endless)
Tiger = cake? Tiger = ribbon? Tiger = teapot? Tiger = tea party? Tiger = wild animal?
Scaffolding
What adults do to help establish the referent: Scaffolding: Point Use voice inflections Use routines Refer to previous experiences Joint focus of attention
Joint attention in word learning? (Baldwin, 1991)
Two novel toys, children play with them
One toy in view, one in bucket
Experimenter waits for child to focus on visible toy and then labels:
• Visible toy (follow-in condition)
• Bucket toy (mis-match condition)
Novel label (toma or peri), repeated 4 times
At test, presented both toys in a neutral location and asked children to “get the toma”
Baldwin (1991) Results
Follow-in => easily learned words
Mis-match => more labeling errors
Children looked at Experimenter more in mis-match condition
Mis-match between child’s focus of attention and direction of Experimenter’s voice
Children are sensitive to Joint Attention
Children as active learners
Things children do to help establish the referent: Follow adult’s direction of gaze Follow adult’s points Pick up objects and ask Point to objects Look at objects
Retention of mutual exclusivity words?
5 min
Illustrations (Flack & Horst, 2017
3.5-year-old children
Shared storybook reading
Children introduced to fewer illustrations learned significantly more words than children introduced to multiple illustrations
Illustrations (Flack & Horst, 2017)
3.5-year-old children
Shared storybook reading
Children introduced to fewer illustrations learned significantly more words than children introduced to multiple illustrations
Pointing to language?
Camaioni et al. (1991)- pointing gestures at 12 months predict speech production at 24 months.
Colonnesi et al. (2010)- IJA and RJA predict current and later language abilities.
Kishimoto et al. (2007)- pointing gestures provoke adults to comment.
Pointing to language?
Camaioni et al. (1991)- pointing gestures at 12 months predict speech production at 24 months.
Colonnesi et al. (2010)- IJA and RJA predict current and later language abilities.
Kishimoto et al. (2007)- pointing gestures provoke adults to comment.
IJA - initiating joint attention
RJA - respsonding to joint attention
