Exam 2 Flashcards
Major language development milestones
Infant speech perception
Awareness of Actions and Intentions
Category Formation
Early Vocalizations
Other Milestones
Prosodic regularities
frequency
duration
intensity
stress
intonation
phonetic regularities
combinations of phonemes
differences between sounds
phonotactic regularities
permissible combinations of phonemes one’s native language
infants ability to differentiate between permissible and impermissible sequences of sounds in their native language is present by about
9 months
we are able to distinguish between sounds in ___ without special training, we are not able to distinguish between variations of sounds within the ___ without special training
different categories (P and B)
same category (the first and last p sounds in pup)
voice onset time
interval between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of vocal cord vibrations
infants can distinguish between purposeful and accidental actions by
4 months
infants ability to form categories between ____ is predictive of their general cognitive abilities and language abilities at ___
3 and 9 months
2 years
hierarchy of category formation
superordinate
subordinate
basic
superordinate category
uppermost level
most general concepts
among later words children acquire
food, clothing, animals, toys, vehicles
subordinate category
lowermost level
specific concepts
green apple, tank top, nigthstand
basic category
middle of category of hierarchy
general concepts in a category
apple, shirt, chair
perceptual categories
based on similar appearing features
conceptual categories
based on what object do
stage model
describes infants’ vocalizations to follow an observable and sequential pattern
Stark Assessment of Early Vocal Development 5 Stages
reflexive
control of phonation
expansion
basic canonical syllables
advanced forms
Reflexive
0-2 months
very first sounds produced
sounds of discomfort or distress
vegetative sounds
no control over the reflexive sounds produced
adults respond as if they were true communicative attempts
Control of phonation
1-4 months
Cooing and gooing sounds
Vowel sounds and some nasalized sounds
Infants typically produce consonant sounds far back in the oral cavity such as gooo
Expansion
3-8 months
Gain more control over the articulators
Produce a series of vowel sounds as well as vowel glides
Experiment with the loudness and pitch of their voices
Yell, growl, squeal, and make raspberries and trills
Marginal babbling
Marginal babbling
short strings of consonant-like and vowel-like sounds
Basic Canonical Syllables
5-10 months
True babbling appears: CV sequences appear
Reduplicated: repeating consonant and vowel pairs (mamamama)
Non-reduplicated or variegated: non-repeating consonant and vowel combinations (da, ma, goo, ga)
Infants prefer nasal sounds and stop sounds in their variegated babbling (mmm, pa, ta, da)
Deaf babies babble with their hands
Reduplicated
repeating consonant and vowel pairs (mamamamam)
Non-reduplicated or variegated
non-repeating consonant and vowel combinations (da, ma, goo, ga)
Advanced forms
9-18 months
diphthongs
more complex combinations of consonants and vowels
jargon
diphthongs
combinations of two vowel sounds within the same syllable
jargon
special type of babble that contains the melodic patterns of an infant’s native language but isn’t true words
Infant-directed speech (IDS)
motherese, baby talk
aids in communicating emotion and speakers’ intent
important in language development
Vygotsky theory
language development is a dynamic process that occurs within children’s ZPD as they engage with more advanced peers and adults
3 Major developmental phases with respect to joint reference
attendance to social partners
emergence and coordination of joint attention
Transition to language
attendance to social partners
0-6 months
interested in looking at people’s faces
caregiver responsiveness is an important feature
emergence and coordination of joint attention
6-12 months
increasing interest in looking at and manipulating the objects around them
navigate attention between an object of interest and another person
Joint attention
simultaneous engagement of two or more individuals mental focus on a single external object of focus
joint attention helps babies develop
line of regard (following a person’s gaze)
gestures
voice direction
body posture
supported joint engagement
techniques such as speaking with an animated voice or showing an infant novel objects to encourage joint attention
intersubjective awareness
the recognition of when one shares a mental focus on some external object or action with another person
- this spurs intentional communication
indicators of intentionality
alternates eye gaze
uses ritualized gestures such as pointing
persists towards goals if original communicative attempts fail
imperative pointing
requests to adults to retrieve objects
10 months
declarative pointing
social process
call adult’s attention to objects and to comment on objects
develops later than imperative pointing
transition to language
1 year and beyond
begin to incorporate language into their communicative interactions with others
routines of infancy
provide a sense of comfort and predictability and provide many opportunities for language learning
even more important than an infants own behaviors in language acquisition
caregiver responsiveness
Weitzman and Greenberg’s Key indicators of caregiver responsiveness
waiting and listening
following the child’s lead
joining in and playing
being face to face
using a variety of questions and labels
encouraging turn taking
expanding and extending
Language form development
-Infants start to produce sounds as soon as they are born (crying)
- Primitive vowel sounds (2-8 months)
- Vowel-like sounds that approximate adult vowels (3-8 months)
- Primitive consonant-vowel combinations
Canonical syllables (mature consonant vowel combinations) (5-10 months)
primitive vowel sounds
2-8 months
vowel-like sounds that approximate adult vowels
3-8 months
canonical syllables (mature consonant, vowel combinations)
5-10 months
Language content development
Produce first true word at 12 months on average
3 criteria for a true word
clear intention and purpose
recognizable pronunciation
used consistently and generalized beyond the original context to all appropriate exemplars
Pre-verbal language functions (use development)
○ Attention seeing to self
○ Requesting info
○ Greeting
○ Transferring
○ Protesting/rejecting
○ Informing
late talkers
children who aren’t able to produce 50 words by age 2, many recover to normal language levels by age 3 or 4
early talkers
between 11 and 21 months of age and are in the top 10% for vocab production for their age
Lexical entries
series of symbols that comprise the word
- sound of the word
- meaning of the word
- words part of speech
3 criteria for a true word
produce the word with clear intention and purpose
recognizable pronunciation
used consistently and extends beyond the original context
Phonetically consistent forms
word-like productions that children use consistently and meaningfully, but do not approximate adult forms
“aaaa” or water
Referential gestures
precise referent and stable meaning across different contexts - share some properties of first true words
Transition from 1-word to 2-word stage
Gesture-word combinations
Two-gesture combinations
Once children begin to use two-word utterances, cease to use two gesture combinations
Customary age of production
50% of children are able to produce a given sound in an adult-like way in multiple positions
Age of mastery
majority of children produce a sound in an adult-like manner
Phonological processes
systematic and rule-governed speech patterns that characterize toddlers’ speech
examples of phonological processes
Syllable structure change
assimilation
place of articulation change
manner of articulation change
syllable structure change
repeat the syllable stress in the word (water -> wawa)
removing a portion of the cluster of a consonant (tree -> tee)
assimilation
Change one sound in a syllable so that it takes on the features of another sound in that same syllable
dog -> gog
swim -> mim
place of articulation changes
- Replace a sound that is produced at one location in the mouth with a sound that is produced at a different location in the mouth
- Fronting -> replace sounds produced in the back of the mouth with sounds produced in the front of the mouth
- Backing -> opposite of fronting.
Example: goat would become toat
Manner of articulation changes
produced in a different manner
- replace a stop with a fricative for example
Grammatical morphemes
inflections added to words to indicate aspects of grammar
Appear in speech between 18 and 24 months of age or after first 50 words acquired
Typically the first to appear is the “ing” around age 28 months
Two word stage
combining words to make utterances, marks beginning of syntax
functions of two word combos
commenting, negating, requesting, questioning
Brown’s Stages of Language Development
stages for utterances of varying syntactic complexity
General standard
calculate MLU using a language sample of 50 utterances or more
Telegraphic quality
omit key grammatical markers
Quinean Conundrum
uncertainty surrounding mapping words to their referents in the face of seemingly limitless interpretations
Thematic rules toddlers acquire
○ Agent = entity that performs the action
○ Theme = entity undergoing an action or movement
○ Source= starting point for movement
○ Goal = ending point for movement
○ Location = place where action occurs
Toddlers 2.5 years of age attend to the overall structure of sentences when interpreting new words
Vocab spurt, word spurt, naming explosion
between 18 and 24 months, or around the time they are able to produce 50 words
- children learn an average of 9 new words a day
overextension
overgeneralization
Categorical overextension
extend to a known word to other words in the same category (use the word cat to describe dogs and goats)
Analogical overextension
extends a known word to other words that are perceptually similar (use the word ball to describe the moon)
Relational overextension
extends a known word to other words that are semantically or thematically related (tub to describe soap or washcloth)
Underextension
-use words to refer to only a subset of possible referents
-More common than overextensions
-Only refer to their baby bottle as bottle and not to other glass or plastic bottles in their house as bottle
Overlap
overextend in some circumstances and underextend in some circumstances
Reasons for overextension, under extension, and overlap
Category membership -> milk and juice are both beverages so they use milk to describe both
Pragmatic error -> know things are different but don’t know the word yet so use one word to refer to both
Retrieval error -> know the word, but can’t retrieve it so they use a different word
Instrumental functions
satisfy needs
request
regulatory functions
control others’ behaviors
come here
personal interactional functions
share info about themselves and their feelings
i love you mom
heuristic functions
requesting info from others
where is that
imaginative functions
telling stories to make believe and pretend
i am a princess
informative functions
give info to others
my name is kate
Toddler conversational skills
-Initiate a conversational topic, sustain that topic for several turns, and then appropriately take leave of the conversation
-Difficulty keeping their audience’s needs in mind
-Not yet proficient at realizing when they are not following along in a conversation; unlikely to seek clarification
Decontextualized Language
relies heavily upon language itself in construction of meaning
contextualized language
grounded in our immediate context - the here and now
emergent literacy
earliest period of learning about reading and writing
metalinguistic ability
ability to view language as an object of attention
3 important emergent literacy achievements
alphabet knowledge
print awareness
phonological awareness
Alphabet knowledge theories
own-name advantage
letter-name pronunciation effect
letter-order hypothesis
consonant-order hypothesis
levels of print awareness
print interest
print junctions - print conveys meaning
print conventions - read from top to bottom, left to right
print forms - specific units, words and letters
print part-to-whole relationships
shallow level of phonological awareness
segment sentences into words
segment multi-syllable words into syllables
detect and produce rhymes
combine syllable onsets with the remainder of the syllable to produce a word
detect beginning sound similarities across words
deep level phonological awareness
count the number of phonemes in words
segment words into their constituent phonemes
manipulate phonological segments within words
by the end of preschool, most children have mastered nearly all phonemes in their native language, some kids may still struggle with
ch
sh
voiced and voiceless th
r and l sounds
percentage of intelligibility and age
50% by age 2
75% by age 3
95-100% by age 4
5 year olds may still struggle with
liquid gliding (rain -> wain, little -> wittle)
substituting/stopping (thin - > tin, that -> dat)
grammatical morphemes
units of meaning we add that provide additional grammatical precision (ed, possessive s, etc)
derivational morphology
describes the prefixes and suffices we add to a word to change its meaning and sometimes its part of speech (pre, est, ness, ly)
frequent occurrence in utterance-final position
most sensitive to words and sounds that fall at the end of utterances
syllabicity
children learn morphemes that make up their own syllables before they learn morphemes that make up only a single sound
ing and ed before third person singular s
single relation between morpheme and meaning
learning morphemes with only one meaning before those with multiple meaning
consistency in use
learn the names of morphemes that are used consistenly
allomorphic variation
learn morphemes that have a consistent pronunciation
clear semantic function
first learn morphemes that have a clear meaning
which verb serves as an important marker in times in the preschool development period
be
copula
when the verb “be” or any of its derivatives serve as the main verb in a sentence
- they are happy on vacation
- she is happy
auxiliary
when the verb “be” or its derivatives serve as a helping verb in a sentence
fast mapping
acquire a general representation of a new word with as little as a single exposure
children learn
an average of 2 words per day or about 860 words per year
slow mapping
refine representations over time with multiple exposures to a word in varying contexts (may be refining meanings for 1600 different words at any given time)
Dale’s 4-stage vocab knowledge development
Stage 1: no knowledge of a word
§ Recognize an unfamiliar word
Stage 2: emergent knowledge
§ You’ve heard the word before, but you don’t yet know what it means
Stage 3: contextual knowledge
§ Recognize the word if it’s presented in context
§ General idea of what it means
Stage 4: full knowledge
extended mapping
full and complete understanding of a word’s meaning
principle of novel name-nameless category
select nameless objects as the recipients of novel labels; fast map novel words through this process
Relational terms
terms that allow speakers to express logical relationships
deictic terms, interrogatives (questions), temporal terms, opposites, locational perspectives, and kinship terms
Deictic terms
use and interpretations depend on the location of a speaker and listener with in a particular setting
§ Here and this indicate proximity to the speaker, and there and that indicate proximity to the listener
§ Children must be able to adopt the perspective of the listener
Generally mastered by the time the child enters school
Interrogatives
Concrete = what, where, who, whose, which
Abstract = when, how, why
temporal terms
order of events (before and after), duration of events (since, until), concurrent of events (while, during)
understand order before concurrence
opposites
learn opposites that they can perceive physically before they understand abstract opposites
locational prepositions
describe spatial relations
develops by the end of the preschool years
kinship terms
§ Initially interpret kinship terms such as mommy, daddy, sister, brother to refer to specific individuals
□ Come to understand general meaning of these and other kinship terms including son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, and parent
§ Complexity of each term has the greatest impact upon the order in which children learn them, followed by children’s familiarity with the family member to which each kinship term refers
Difficulty with the reciprocity (the practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit) that some kinship terms possess
Preschoolers’ expanded communicative functions
Interpretive functions = make clear the whole of one’s experience
Logical functions = express logical relations between ideas
Participatory functions = express wishes, feelings, attitudes, and judgments
Organizing functions = manage discourse
Preschooler conversational skills
Most preschoolers are able to maintain a conversation for 2 or more turns, especially when the toddler picked the topic of conversation
Understand that they should respond to questions and that speaker over someone makes for ineffective conversation
Preschoolers’ narrative skills
○ Personal = an individual shares a factual event
○ Fictional = an individual shares an imaginary event
○ Causal sequence = unfolds following a cause-and-effect chain of events or provides a reason or rationale for some series of events
○ Temporal sequence = unfolds over time
○ Most children are not able to construct true narratives with a problem and resolution until around age 4
One of the best predictors of later school outcomes
