Infant Language Acquisition

Question 1

Prenatal Learning

Answer 1

• Some form of innate linguistic knowledge exists because (A) children learn language quickly with little instruction and (B) children learn language from experience but the structures are innate
• Fetuses respond to environmental sounds –> mostly mother’s voice, but low frequencies pass through (cannot hear phonemes because those are high frequency)

Question 2

Methods of infant learning

Answer 2

• Passive looking and listening shows interest
• High amplitude sucking –> varies with attention, more interest (e.g. change in phoneme) = more sucking
• Infants perceive sounds categorically, but they also perceive non-speech sounds
• Naturally selected to pay attention to speech –> infants prefer speech to non-speech sounds

Question 3

Innate broad categories in infants

Answer 3

• Babies discriminate between phonemes
• Lose non-native language contrasts at about 6-8 months (phoneme discrimination)
• Help make language learnable for infants by letting them eventually figure out which phonological contrasts are important

Question 4

Segmentation (breaks between words)

Answer 4

• Babies start understanding segmentation at 6-7.5 months –> not innate
• Metrical segmentation strategy: learnt through experience and exposure, sensitivity to stress emerges over time

Question 5

Cues for word segmentation

Answer 5

• Transitional probabilities (relationship between syllables)
• Prosodic structure (word stress)
• Phonological structure (words that start with a consonant are easier to identify)
• Utterance position (words at beginning and end of sentence are easier to identify)
• Word class: nouns are easier to understand than verbs

Question 6

Infant-Directed Speech

Answer 6

• Exaggerated articulation and prosody (higher and more variable pitch)
• Infants prefer infant-directed speech and results in better discrimination abilities

Question 7

Statistical learning

Answer 7

• Alternative route to segmentation
• Infant analyzes language input to find predictable patterns
• Transitional Probability: relationship between adjacent syllables –> between-word transitions have lower probability than within-word transitions

Question 8

Poverty of the Stimulus Problem

Answer 8

• Words do not contain enough information to specify meaning
• Gavagai: point and say, labeling objects, but meaning depends on perspective of speaker

Question 9

Solutions to POS

Answer 9

• Innate categories of verbs and nouns
• Biases towards natural world: over- and under-extension errors
• Referential/intentionality assumption: understanding the speaker’s intentions
• Theory of Mind/social cognitive influence: understanding references to things the speaker cannot see
• Syntactic bootstrapping: children use context to infer possible meanings of new words