Development Of Language

Question 1

The Components of Language

Answer 1

Phonological development
Semantic development
Syntactic development
Pragmatic development
metalinguistic knowledge

Question 2

Phonological development

Answer 2

the acquisition of knowledge about phonemes, the elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning

Question 3

Syntactic development

Answer 3

learning the syntax or rules for combining words

Question 4

Semantic development

Answer 4

learning the system for expressing meaning in a language, beginning with morphemes, the smallest unit of meaning in a language

Question 5

Pragmatic development

Answer 5

acquiring knowledge of how language is used, which includes understanding a variety of conversational conventions

Question 6

metalinguistic knowledge

Answer 6

knowing that a language is composed of words, words form sentences, and only certain word combinations are acceptable and meaningful as sentences.

Question 7

What is Required for Language Acquisition?

Answer 7

A Human Brain (1)

A Human Environment (2)

Question 8

A Human Brain (1) - required for language acquisition

Answer 8

Species-specific and species-universal; Language is species-specific, only humans acquire such a complex communication system. Language is also species-universal, virtually all humans communicate with a language. Although some nonhuman primates have been trained to use signs or other symbols after concentrated training, they never appeared to be able to learn syntax.

Brain-language; Language processing involves a substantial degree of functional localization in the brain. Brain damage within the left hemisphere could lead to aphasia

Critical period; (Lenneberg, 1967): it is most proficient to learn a language before puberty. After this period, language acquisition becomes more difficult and less successful.

Question 9

aphasia

Answer 9

impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing understanding).

Question 10

Critical Period Hypothesis

Answer 10

Erick Lenneberg - theory of language development that states language must be learned by a certain age, otherwise, we will experience continual difficulty learning language

• Difficulties of children with early deprivation in acquiring language. (e.g., Genie, Wild child)
• Effects of brain damage at different ages on language. Adults are more likely to suffer from permanent language impairment from brain damage (brain plasticity); at early age, other parts of brain at early age are able to take over language functions.
  Language capabilities of bilingual adults who acquired their second language at different ages.
• Knowledge of the fine points of English grammar, for example, was related to the age at which individuals started to be exposed to English, but not to the total length of their exposure. Example (graph): Adults who learned a second language at 1 to 3 years of age show the normal pattern of greater left-hemisphere activity in a test of grammatical knowledge (darker colors indicate greater activation). Those who learned the language later show increased right-hemisphere activity.

Question 11

The Nativist perspective

Answer 11

Unlike other animals, humans are “prewired”to acquire language. A very strong version is the modularity hypothesis(human brain contains an innate language-learning module).

Question 12

The Nativist perspective - Noam Chomsky’s LAD(Language Acquisition device)

Answer 12

an inborn linguistic processor that contains a universal grammar common to all languages, allowing children to infer rules from others’ speech and use them to produce language.

Question 13

The Nativist perspective - Dan Slobin’sLMC(Language-making capacity

Answer 13

a set of cognitive and perceptual abilities that enable children to learn language. Criticisms: LAD/LMC concepts vague; Descriptive rather than explanatory; Ignores contribution of environment

Question 14

​​A Human Environment (2) - required for language acquisition

Answer 14

Infant-directed talk (IDT)

Question 15

Infant-directed talk (IDT)

Answer 15

the distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies and very young children
Its characteristics include an emotional tone(warm and affectionate tone); and exaggeration (e.g., high pitch, extreme intonation, and slower speech accompanied by exaggerated facial expressions).

Question 16

Two Challenges for Children

Answer 16

Solve word-segmentation problems

Figure out the meanings of words

Question 17

Language Acquisition

Answer 17

Speech Perception (1)
- Categorical Perception
- Word-segmentation
Stages of Language Development (2)
- Production and comprehensi

Question 18

Categorical Perception

Answer 18

Piercing speech sounds as belong to discrete phonemic categories (e.g. /p/ and /b/)
Infants > Adults (infants make much more distinctions than adults do).

Question 19

Word-Segmentation

Answer 19

ability to discover when words begin and end.
How quickly could you pick out a word from a stream of speech?
It takes 8-month-old infants only 2 minutes.

Question 20

Stages of Early Language Development (2)

Answer 20

Prelinguistic Period
Holophrastic Period
Telegraphic Period
By 5 years of age, children have mastered the basic structure of their native language, whether spoken or manually signed. Receptive language (comprehension) proceeds productive language (expression)

Question 21

Prelinguistic Period

Answer 21

(the first 10-13 months)
Prelinguistic vocalization:
Cooing (2 ms, 6-8 weeks):vowel-like sounds that young infants repeat over and over. “ooooooohs” “aaaaaahs”.
Babbling (6-10ms):vowel-consonant combinations (i.e., a consonant followed by a vowel, such as “mamama”“papapapa”) that sound like words but convey no meaning; A key component of the development of babbling is receiving feedback about the sounds one is producing.
Vocables(10-12 ms): unique patterns of sound are consistently used to represent objects, actions or event. e.g., “mmmm” means making a request. “aaaaah” means manipulating object

Question 22

Holophrastic Period

Answer 22

(12-24 months)
Single word period, One-word utterances that express a “whole phrase” or “entire sentence”; e.g., “Drink”, “up”;
Naming explosion (vocabulary spurt): dramatic increase in new words, mostly object names, in their vocabulary (18-24 ms). 10-20 new words/week.

Question 23

Overextension and Underextension

Answer 23

tendency to use relatively specific words to refer to a broader set of objects/actions/events. E.g., call all vehicles “car”.

tendency to use general words to refer to a smaller set of objects/actions/events. E.g., using “cookie” only for chocolate chip cookies.

Question 24

Direct Teaching vs. incidental exposures

Answer 24

The rate of vocabulary development is influenced by the amount of talk that they hear.
Research also suggests that children of highly-educated parents tends to have a differentially larger vocabulary.
Research showed that young children can rapidly learn a new word simply through brief exposure or incidental learning rather than direct teaching.
This process is termed fast mapping.

Question 25

Fast mapping

Answer 25

the process of rapidly learning a new word simply from the contrastive use of a familiar and unfamiliar word.
Under favourable conditions, babies as young as 13 months can fast map new words.

Question 26

Fast Mapping: Incidental Exposure

Answer 26

In a classic study, Carey and Bartlett (1978) examined whether 3-year-olds could learn a single new word –“chromium,” the color olive green through fast mapping. 3-year-olds were involved in some random activities.
The experimenter direct a child’s attention to one of two trays: one red (familiar/common color) the other olive green (uncommon color, children would not know the name), they asked children to get “the chromium tray, not the red one”. Most children selected the olive green one.
So children learned this new word on the basis of an incidental exposure, without any explicit act of direct teaching, using a simple contrast (the one I know is red, it must the one I do not know must be chromium).
After a single exposure, about half the children were able to remember this a week later(picking the olive green as chromium from an array of paint chips).

Question 27

Figure Out the Meanings of New Words - Gavgai problem (Williard V.O. Quine, 1960)

Answer 27

To illustrate this problem, we now introduce a famous rabbit named Gavagai.
Gavagaiis an invention of philosopher Willard Quine. In his classic discussion, Quine raised the problem of indeterminacy of translation (1960):
Imagine that you are a visitor in a foreign land and you are determined to learn the local language. A rabbit runs by and you hear a native says, “Gavagai”. What do you think this word mean? how confident? Why we are likely infer that Gavagai refers to the rabbit rather than to the grass, and it refers to the whole rabbit rather than to the ears or the tail? The link between a new word and its meaning is hypothetically indeterminable.

Question 28

Figure Out the Meanings of New Words

Answer 28

Fundamental Assumptions
Grammatical Cues
Social-pragmatic Cues

Question 29

Fundamental Assumptions

Answer 29

The whole-object assumption leads children to expect a novel word to refer to a whole object rather than a part of it. (Markman, 1989).
The mutual exclusivity assumption (also called the novel name-nameless category principle) leads children to expect that a given entity will have only one name.

Question 30

Grammatical Cues

Answer 30

How a word is used in syntax could also help understanding the meaning of the word
“The sound is loud” - as a noun
“Please sound the horn” - as a verb
“One must be of a sound mind.” as an adj.

Question 31

Syntactic Bootstrapping (Naigles, 1990)

Answer 31

the Preferential looking paradigm and found that 2-year-olds(23 -29 months) can interpret a novel verb depending on the structure of the sentence.
When children heard an adult describe this scene as “The duck is kradding the rabbit,” they used the syntactic structure of the sentence to infer that kradding is what the duck was doing to the rabbit

Question 32

Synaptic Bootstrapping

Answer 32

a strategy in which children use the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning.

Question 33

Social-pragmatic cues

Answer 33

children use pragmatic cues, cues that indicate other people’s mental states(e.g., attention, intention, knowledge state, etc.), to figure out the meaning of words.
These cues are aspects of the social context, including the adult’s focus of attention and intentionality

Question 34

Speaker’s Focus of Attention

Answer 34

Children also use the linguistic context in which novel words appear to help infer their meaning.
Speaker’s focus of attention. Eye gaze or focus of attention is a good cue to what a person is referring to when saying a word.
Research by (Baldwin, 1991, 1993) suggests that 18-month-olds can use the speaker’s focus of attention to determine the meaning of a novel word

Question 35

Speakers Intentions

Answer 35

Naming is goal-directed. Having announced her intention to find a “gazzer,” this adult appears displeased when looking in one bucket, but happy when looking in another.
The child will infer that the object that elicited the smile is a “gazzer.”

Question 36

Telegraphic Period: Simple Sentences

Answer 36

Simple early sentences that contain only critical content words. Children begin to combine words into simple ‘sentences”.
Children’s first sentences are two-word utterances that have been described as telegraphic speech because nonessential elements are missing.
Word order is preserved in early sentences, indicating children’s understanding of syntax.
- e.g., more juice, hurt knee, eat cookie, “daddy eat” “doggie go” “mommy see”.
Once children are capable of producing four-word sentences, generally at around 2½ years of age, they begin to produce sentences.
- e.g., “More milk” “Where ball” “Mama dress”