Developmental wk 1-4 Flashcards
phonology
language is compromised of small units that are combined
Study of language composition
semantics
language conveys meaning
what does it mean by language is generative
there is a finite of units we can use in speech but we can organise and swap to make infinite unique meanings
phonemes
perceptually distinct units of sound in a language that distinguish one word from another
languages differ in the sounds they use as phonemes
syntax
rules about how words go together to form sentances
what is prosody of language
the underlying musicality . pattern of stress and intonation. infants are sensitive to this
the foetal auditory system is _____functioning during the last trimester.
fully
newborns : (true or false)
1* prefer their own mothers voice
2* prefer their native language compared to a foreign language
3* discriminate languages with similar prosody
4* cry with an accent
1) T
2) T
3) False. they discriminate only languages with different prosody
4) T
what is interesting about a children’s “babbling” in development - in terms of phonemes
initially a wide range of sounds (phonemes).
In first year, move towards producing only sounds of target language
Finding words.
infants can segment words from their language at approx which age.
which age can they not
approx 7.5 months, but not 6 months
Between which two months do infants ability to distinguish sounds from non target language systematically decrease and ability to distinguish target language sounds increase.
between 7 and 11 months
How do infants segment words syllables
what age has this been found to happen
Because syllables that co-occur often are likely part of the same word.
e.g. happy baby
ha is often followed by pee
pee is not often followed by bay
8 months
properties of infant directed speech (IDS)
- Higher Pitched
- slower speaking rate
- Important words generally at the end and are exaggerated more
- The boundaries between phrases are enhanced, making it easier to segment speech.
- Infants prefer to listen to IDS and interact with people who use IDS
- More attentive around IDS
how does IDS impact infants speech segmentation
better segmentation with IDS
What factors aid an infants word segmentation
- prosody, IDS
- statistics, co-occurring syllables
- Frequency
How does frequency aid with word segmentation in infants
highly frequent salient words (e.g. mummy, childs name)
- highly frequent linguistic words e.g. the, he/she
These words act as an anchor
identifying a words speech stream = identify a boundary
research support for frequency aiding word segmentation
Highly familiar words help 6 months segment words,
e.g. baby Hannah recognised words next to hannah in a sentence.
This word segmentation is usually not present in 6 mnth olds.
how do the order of function and articles in their language impact word organisation
in english, function words tend to go before (articles, pronouns, prepositions)
e.g. An apple
But not in all languages.
in Japanese, this is the opposite.
So, japanese infants would tend to organise word segments as having the common sound (representing the function words such as articles that are common in language) at the end of a made up segment.
Whereas English would organise it before
Primary intersubjectivity
During first months, babies pay a lot of attention to faces, eye contact,
produce vocalisations, imitate sounds and facial gestures. One at a time interactions.
(babies probs not trying to communicate)
secondary intersubjectivity
Older infants (around 9 months): more sophisticated, pointing, turn taking, shared attention.
(probably babies trying to communicate)
during primary intersubjectivity, how do caregivers and infants share experiences
in face to face interactions.
but these interactions are dyadic. (baby and caregiver, baby and object)
- no assumption of perspective of others.
- These interactions are not intentional
in early socialisation, do 6mnth old babies interpret gazing as information?
what are the conditions necessary
yes. Only follow the gaze if preceded by mutual eye gaze
Secondary intersubjectivity
how do caregiver and infant share experiences
interactions start to become triadic (the infant and caregiver interacting together with a toy; social referencing)
Interactions become intentional, and infants start to assume that others have their own perspective
what are some research evidence that infants cooridnate emotional response with another person
secondary intersubjectivity
Still face experiment
- parent freezes, stops responding
- interaction breaks down
- child attempts to repair the interaction (social engagement cues)
Visual cliff example.
- to test depth perception. baby placed on glass that goes over acliff edge.
- infants will look at the parent for an emotional cue on how to respond
beginnings of intentional communication from the infant is signalled by
i.e these are the signs we know they are beggining to intentionally communicate
- use of eye contact/pointing to direct others attention
- Consistent use of vocalisation to indicate specific goal.
- evidence of child waiting for a response
- persistence if understood
at what age can children control turn taking in language
what are the problems with studying this
3rd year
in the early stages, the caregiver ensures a smooth interaction between speakers
Difficult to establish exactly when mutually intentional e.g. difficult to know childs intentions
Turn taking (speaking) in early development
young infants (from around 3 mnths) alternate vocalisations with their caregivers.
By 12 month, very few overlaps between ‘speakers’
proto conversation - similarities between turn taking in early vocalisations and later conversation.
types of joint attention
sharing
following
directing attention
what age do children look to adults in unfamilliar or threatening situations to gauge emotional response
9 months
why is joint attention useful for language dev
Topic comment
caregiver talks ab object of joint attention
sharing attention.
is it usually just by chance that caregiver and child share attention of the same object
No. during first year, mothers constantly monitor the child’s line of regard.
when childs attention shifts , mother attempts to regain attention
mothers sensitivity to childs focus of attention is linked to
child’s vocabulary development
Joint attention - Following points.
at which ages to children respond in which way to pointing
9 months : can follow points in front of another person
12 months: begin to check back with pointer
14 months: follows a point across the line of sight
at what age do infants turn to follow an adults gaze and share a point of attention
9 months
what is the main question of gaze following in infants
Do infants understand that when someone alters their gaze, it is because they see smth interesting
Infants aren’t
tracking the
GAZE
specifically until
around which age?
(Corkum
& Moore,
1995; Moore &
Corkum, 1998).
18
months
they follow the head turn
12-month-olds
will follow a head
turn….________
* 14-month-olds
will only follow
when the eyes
are _____
(Brooks and
Meltzoff, 2002)
even if the
person is
blindfolded!
visible
But, 12-motholds will gaze
follow if the
partner has their
eyes _____, but
not if the eyes
are ____!
open
closed
Infants follow
gaze …. (Moll &
Tomasello,
2004)
behind
barriers
do infants understanding communicative intentions study
what was it
what was the intetresting finding
Behne studied whether14, 18 and 24 month olds will follow a helpers point.
do they understand there is a shared goal of finding the toy?
infants follow both point and gaze
special condition where experimenter looked to the side while pointing. babies don’t look there. (non-communicative point)
Imperative vs declarative pointing
by 9 months a child does what. by 18 a child does what
imperative - to get adult to do smth
declarative- direct adult’s attention to something
9 - points, then checks mothers line of regard
18 - checks mothers line of regarrd before pointing
Criticisms of joint attention : directing attention
types of points
intention may not be to communicate.
e.g. imperative : children learn that if she points, she gets what she wants
Declarative: infant learns she gets more attention by pointing at things
BUT
12 mnth olds indicate when adult retrieves wrong object. respond negatively
Word learning is hard
why is it not just pointing and naming
Point and name is not common (and not universal)
- Usually only nouns
The mapping problem
under and over extension
under-extension. when a child uses a word too narrowly. e.g. dog is the name for family dog only.
over extension: too broadly. e.g. dog refers to horses, lions etc.
The mapping problem
How do children know what a word refers to when there are many stimuli. Also what other situations do these words apply to
infants appear to comprehend nouns as early as..
they start to comprehend verbs when
6 months
~10 months
Comprehension precedes production
e.g.
2 yr olds comprehend 2-3x more words than they can produce
common first word categories
what is there a lack of
Nouns
verbs
social routines ( bye, hello, please)
Adjectives
Lack of things like Articles (the, a)
what age do infants usually speak their first words
when do they produce around 500 words
Around 12 months
by 24-30 months know 500 words
HOWEVER
loads of variability
is infants first word production predictive of later language ability?
not necessarily.
Language comprehension is more indicative
early noun bias. Socially mediated word learning
learning occours in situations where it is easiest to read adults intentions, regardless of word class.
This happens often with nouns.
Not all are nouns, not all are discrete objects.
Early noun bias
what is it
what cross linguistic evidence supports this bias
what hypothesis explains this bias
Cross-linguistically, predominance of nouns in early vocabularies (e.g. 40% of english-speaking children’s first 50 words - Nelson, 1973)
-more nouns even in verb-friendly languages.
Natural partitions hypothesis explains this bias.
Early nouns denote concrete objects easily individuated from surroundings.
Actions, states etc. tend to entities labelled by nouns, less clearly defined in space and time.
words are often used in a variety of situations include
- names for people and objects (stay same across diff contexts)
- Names for actions - e.g. open jar, open door
- Names for properties - gone, more dirty
generally, children make over extension errors until what age
2.5 years.
Some possible mechanisms for word learning
- Innate constraints
- Structural cues in language
- The social pragmatic approach
innate constraints on early word learning
2 types of constraints
Constraints as in reducing hte number of hypotheses a word could be refering to
- Object constraint
- words refer to objects
- Explains early noun bias - Whole object constraint.
- refer to whole objects rather than parts
- Gavagai = whole animal, not tail, ears, legs
innate constraints on early word learning
2 additional constraints
Constraints as in, narrowing down hypotheses of word learning
.3. Principle of Contrast
- no two words have exactly the same meaning
- explains how overcomes over extension
4. Mutual exclusivity
- No object has more than one name.
- helps child overcome whole object constraint and learn words for parts of objects.
problem with constraint theories
- unanswered questions:
- do constraints explain lang learning or just describe it?
! - are constraints innate or learned ? (little research on infants)
! - Are constraints specific to language?
e.g. more about figuring out the intentions and what they are trying to communicate.
study =
cildren shown object “this is the one my uncle gave me”.
put down in array of objects.
ASk “find tthe one my dog likes to play with”. ]
children chose a new toy. constraint of intntions, and not one of words.
structural cues to word learning
what is it.
what
evidence is available
where the word is placed in a sentence suggests it’s meaning.
e.g. asked 3-5 yr olds
do you know what a sib is
do you know what it means to sib?
have you seen any sib?
Task = pick out pictures of action, substance, containers
child accuratly chose
sibbing = picture of kneading
a sib = picture of a bowl
sib = pic of substance
what evidence is there that structural cues to word learning are learned
- children are good at using structural cues to apply nonsense words to Nouns , but are not good at applying to adjectives (at 14 months)
*
e.g. Blickit (novel noun/category) vs Blickish (novel adjective/property).
didn’t assign the noun blicket to a property (colour) but could to a category (animal)
couldn’t assign Blickish to any condition (gave randomly) so they knew it wasn’t a noun but didn’t know exactly how it worked
issues with structural cues to word learning
- Do experimental studies reveal smth ab long term learning or immediate problem solving? e.g. applying tamming as a word isn’t really learning
- structural info can’t solve all problems
The man is tamming over the bridge. Does tamming mean walking, strolling etc - children sensitive to some aspects of sentence structure. Not sure what and when.
- Chicken and egg problem. need to understand words to understand structure to understand words..
The social pragmatic approach
this is made easier for the infant through
Children are learning words and word meaning based from the pragmatic cues in the environment (e.g. what they think the adult is trying to mean/convey).
figure out these intentions easily through
- social world is structured
- routines, games, patterned social interactions. - Social-cognitive skills the infant has.
- Joint attention, intention reading
Social revolution begins at around what age
9 months. childs become really good at intention reading , interpreting communicative contexts
evidence for the social-pragmatic approach
children use things like eye-gaze and joint attention to identify referents from adults:
- 18-20mnth olds learn names for objects better when the speaker and infant are jointly attending to the object. (evidence for jA).
Gaze-following at 10 months predicts language skills at 18 months
Intention reading e.g.
what age do they show this
child already knows the name of the familiar object on the table and knows the adult knows them too.
- so can assume (using intention reading) that that the adult intends to ask about the novel object when adult asks her to “show the modi”.
2 years
Evidence that children are using intention reading :
the social-pragmatic approach
- if child already knows one referent and knows mother knows it. When asked: show the modi, they will get new object.
- 2 yr olds understand that when adult rejects 3 objects (make hmm noise) and accept one ( ooooh noise), and adult asked “show modi” (novel object) , adult is not referring to rejected objects
problems with the social-pragmatic approach
- what kinds of inferential skills does the child bring to the task of language acquisition?
- can this process of learning account for the acquisition of complex syntax.
Acquisition of verbs The social-pragmatic approach: intention reading
children are capable of mapping the verb onto the action by intention reading.
children able to interpret adults anticipation of what will happen and learn verbs which relate to forthcoming action
Children can differentiate between intended and accidental actions.
e.g. swinging, acidentally let go.
Can you meek the string.
they will swing it, not throw it.
when do children start to put words together to create multi word utterances/multi word speech
18 mnths - 2 years
what is syntax
The ways in which a language allows words to be
combined: Enables understanding between speakers, e.g. ‘who did
what to whom’ Allows productivity – with a finite set of words we can
produce an infinite number of possible sentences. (and allows understanding of these new sentences)
Language is speiceis _____
and species ______
meaning
Species-specific: other primates can’t acquire syntax level language
Species-universal: virtually all children have acquired the majority of the grammar of their language by 5 years
what are early word combinations like
mainly content words e.g. got daddy shirt
- refer to here and now, easily understood in context
- Creative e.g. more sing
- Observes adult word order e.g. truck gone vs gone truck.
what are Lexical (word based) Rules of multi words
Rules are item specific. based on indiv words or schemas.
Get + X
where’s the + X
allows Limited variety of utterances until children are able to generalise between schemas
syntactic (grammatical) rules
Rules abstract - based on grammatical categories.
verb THEN object
subject + verb
(should be able to produce large range of utterances)
some beleive children start off with these
What is the constructivist approach?
grammer
cognitive mechanisms
- grammar is used for communication
- Infants are motivated to learn to communicate
- Grammar can be learned using general cognitive learning mechanisms
general cognitive learning mechanisms of the constructivist approach to language learning
- communicative intention-reading
- Drawing analogies. similarities between (like category learning)
- Distributional learning (pattern finding in language and sounds)
The role of routines (in constructivist approach)
allow children to predict what happens next :. what the lang they’re hearing might refer to (and so can map words to meaning)
Repetitive chunks of language can then be learned in context where the relation between linguistic form and meaning is more transparent
what kind of evidence would support a constructivist/ usage based approach?
- Children begin with lexically-based linguistic representations
- High frequency items learned early
- Only gradual generalisation across exemplars to create more abstract syntactic categories and rules. Will take time to sort into categories if child is learning each word seperately.
evidence for lexically based rules: The verb island hypothesis
knowlege of grammar is initially tied to individual verbs until 2.5 - 3 years.
Child initially unable to generalise between verbs with similar meanings or used in similar sentence types.
e.g.
Form: X Kick Y
Meaning: Kicker (verb) Kickee
evidence for verb island hypothesis
- With familiar verbs, 2 yr olds able to describe actions correctly, explaining who is chasing and whom is being chased.
BUT with unfamiliar (novel) verbs (e.g. weefing), before 3 years children struggle to explain who is doing what to whom.
Said to be because they don’t have a verb island for verb weefing .
and if they knew gramatical structure, they woul be able to
evidence for limited (lexical) constructions
(verb island)
Doesn’t only occour for verbs.
any high frequency word group/group of words can form the basis for organisation of the childs linguistic system.
- constructions they learn reflect the frequency of particular patterns in the input.
How do children link up their lexically-based
constructions to form a more adult-like
grammar?
(how do they take these primitive lexical frames and turn them into adult speech? )
- Structure combining
- Semantic analogy
- Distributional learning
Structure combining
(Lieven, et al, 2003)
Basically putting utterances together to make a more “complex” utterance
how was structure combining studied
what types of changes did they find
what was the most common operation (change)
create a diary of a single child’s utterances for 6 weeks (age 2).
Recorded for 5 hours a week and written a diary of all new utterances
- all utterances on last hour -long recording = target
- All previous recordings were searched through to find the closest match = source.
what changes did they make?
- substitution (i got butter vs I got door)
- addition
- drop
mostly substitutions
conclusion of study into structure combining
Many of the child’s apparently complex utterances are
based around repetitions or small changes to what she has said before
mostly simple substitutions.
Suggests: child is operating with an extensive inventory of specific utterances, and fairly limited mechanisms of altering utterences to match demands.
Semantic analogy in language learning
looking at meaning.
begin with lexical based rules. learn a number of verbs before can recognise similarities between them and begin to build more general schemas.
C
X verb Y.
X is always the doer as opposed to x is the kicker and roller.
verb is action
Y is done-to
x verb y as a schema
Evidence for the use of semantic analogy in building adult language
2 & 3 yr olds asked to repeat 4 word sentance.
same first 3 words with diff 4th word.
one condition 4th word was similar across consecutive trials.
other the 4th word was not similar.
found children made fewer errors in the similar condition.
suggests they have an abstract slot (/schema) that holds groups of words from meaning.
distributional learning
Basically, children learn categories of words through learning the similarities between the words sounds.
like verbs often have - ing/ -ed. endings
nouns often have s endings.
this = distributional learning
Thus, distributional learning is about detecting and using these patterns in the “distribution” of words and grammatical markers within sentences to make sense of language structure.
children learn to group nouns and verbs based on the co-occurrence characteristics of the input - (the sound of their endings. walking/walked/walks vs nouns dogs dog’s cat/cat’s. can be identifiers) i.e. words which occur together or in similar contects
e.g. why are the tiger s eating?
vs
why is the dog running?
are and S sound
IS and no S sound
based on probability
Children begin to combine words together at ________ months
18-24
evidence for distributional learning
Noun phrase only condition
e.g. cat is chasing mouse
mixed condition (combo of lexical nouns and pronouns)
e.g. cat is chasing mouse/ he is hugging him.
after hearing verbs they already know, give a new verb e.g. dacking.
are children able to explain it by saying dog is dacking the lion
found that children that heard the pronouns were able to genralise far more easily.
reason. if you’ve heard pronouns. he is chasing him. he is eating him.
Far easier to say he is dacking him.
Created high frequency frame
Constructivist theorists argue that children access meaning and learn to combine words by interpreting…
interpreting the intentions of their interlocutors
– from hearing language used in predictable contexts
Children build up grammar by
starting with more limited
scope rules (e.g. lexical rules) than those used by adults
and using general cognitive mechanisms to generalise
critical evaluation of contructivist expls
- production studies are difficult for children
- do prod studies underestimate how abstract childrens knowlege of sentence strucure really is
- exactly how sentence structures become gradually more abstract over development is not clearly specified
