First Language Acquisition

Question 1

who led the behaviourist approach to learning language?

Answer 1

skinner

Question 2

who led the nativist approach to language acquisition?

Answer 2

Chomsky

Question 3

what is behaviourism re language acquisition?

Answer 3

language learning is the result of imitation, feedback, practice and habit formation
- language entirely based in experience
- operant conditioning

Question 4

what is the nativist approach to language activism?

Answer 4

observation/imitation/reinforcement do not give a full account
- children know certain things already, must have an innate capacity for learning

Question 5

outline the Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Answer 5

programs childrens brains to analyse the language they hear and to figure out its rules
- but development of technology has shown that learning can take place before birth

Question 6

what do we know about before birth language acquisition?

Answer 6

• fetal auditory systm functional at 20 weeks GA (Smith et al. 2003)
• discriminate sound changes at 28 weeks GA (Draganova et al. 2007)
• sensitive to properties of the language of the parents (Mehler et al. 1988)

Question 7

what is magnetoencephalography (MEG) and why is it important for pregnant women?

Answer 7

a neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity - can be done to investigate the foetus

Question 8

outline Draganova et al. (2007) - MEG study of fetal and newborn auditory discriminative evoked responses

Answer 8

• discriminative brain response to tone frequency change detected at 28 weeks
• ability of foetus to detect changes in sounds is a prerequisite to normal development of cognitive function

Question 9

what did heart monitoring devices find in Kisilevsky et al. (2009) re fetal language abilities and a familiarization/novelty paradigm?

Answer 9

novelty response to the mother’s voice and a novel foreign language

Question 10

what were the conclusions made from Kisilevsky et al. (2009) regarding talking while foetus is still inside the womb?

Answer 10

• evidence of fetal attention, memory and learning of voices and language
• suggests that neural pathways/networks are sensitive to properties of the mother’s voice and native language speech - and they are being formed

Question 11

in what 3 ways do language sounds differ?

Answer 11

place of articulation
manner of articulation
voicing

Question 12

what did Eimas et al. (1971) find regarding speech perception in infants?

Answer 12

young infants can discriminate and categorize speech sounds very much like adults

Question 13

what is voice onset time (VOT)?

Answer 13

the time that passes between the release of a stop consonant adn the vibration of the vocal fold

Question 14

outline sound discrimination in humans

Answer 14

• humans do not discriminate all sounds because the auditory system cannot transmit all the sounds - sound waves arrive to the brain distorted which prevents perception
• categorical perception does not seem to have been selected to give children the advantage in processing speech sounds

Question 15

outline Jusczyk & Bertoncini’s 1988 innately guided learning hypothesis

Answer 15

• instinct to pay attention to specific aspects of the environment; speech sounds in particular
• prewired w/ broad categorical perception that can be developed in different directions
• they have not had the opportunity to learn them via exposure

Question 16

outline the segmentation problem

Answer 16

fluent speech does not provide where words begin and end - places where people perceive boundaries do not correspond to silent parts of the speech signal
- speech does not have the equivalent to white spaces between words
- learning a language includes figuring out which sounds clump together to form basic units and how units can be combined

Question 17

how do babies link to the segmentation problem?

Answer 17

parents rarely speak to their babies in single word utterances (10%) - babies have to figure out where the edges of words are

Question 18

what 5 methods are hypothesised to solve the segmentation problem?

Answer 18

• isolated words hypothesis
• phonotactic constraints
• prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis
• infant directed speech/motherese
• statistical learning

Question 19

outline the isolated words hypothesis

Answer 19

• start w/ very few highly familiar words and generate ‘hypotheses’ about which adjacent clumps of sound correspond to word units
• can break down streams of continuous sounds
• Bortfeld et al (2005) - babies around 6 m/o do this

Question 20

outline phonotactic constraints

Answer 20

• ingrained word templates that have been implicitly learned and vary from language to language
• sensitivity to phonotactic properties between 7-9 months - but what if the infant does not know where the word begins and ends?

Question 21

outline the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis

Answer 21

use of stress patterns to segment speech
- 90% trochaic stress patterns vs 10% iambic (stress at beginning vs end)
- sensitivity to stress patterns emerges over time
- babies can assume stressed syllables are important
- by 7 and a half the babies recognise words with trochaic stress patterns

Question 22

outline infant directed speech/motherese

Answer 22

may help solve segmentation as it exaggerates prosody of speech
- but not all cultures have this
- not necessary but helps - Kaplan (2002) depressed mothers

Question 23

can babies segment streams of sounds from an unfamiliar language?

Answer 23

yes after just two minutes of exposure, and without hearing a single word on its own and without the benefit of stress patterns or phonotactic constraints

Question 24

outline statistical learning / transitional probabilities (Saffran et al. 1996)

Answer 24

• some syllables found to be more predictable than others
• infants use co-occurence of information and then high probability pairs become words and low pr. pairs are treated as separate speech entities

Question 25

what conclusions can be made from the segmentation problem?

Answer 25

babies use all info at different times during first 12 months and put different weight on different methods across the 12 months
- all tricks are useful and the combination of them helps to build up some generalizations

Question 26

what happens once babies solve the segmentation problem?

Answer 26

they start to understand that words have meaning

Question 27

how much understanding do infants have at the end of their first year?

Answer 27

initial associations of sound sequences and meaning

Question 28

what are understanding processes dependent on?

Answer 28

context

Question 29

how many words do infants know at 10 months vs 18?

Answer 29

10 - 40 words
18 - 250 words

Question 30

what is fast mapping?

Answer 30

when infants learn words after hearing them once

Question 31

Markson & Bloom (1997) said understanding words have meaning is important for what?

Answer 31

a general purpose learning skill - children can then pick up and remember better linguistically conveyed info

Question 32

what are the three processes in the acquisition of word meaning?

Answer 32

labelling process
categorization process
network building process

Question 33

are errors that children make important?

Answer 33

yes - they turn out to be a rich source of evidence about how they learn word meanings as a reference to categories of objects/concepts

Question 34

is acquisition of receptive and expressive vocabularies common?

Answer 34

it is extremely subject to individual differences across a number of languages