L16 - Early Communication and Language Development

Question 1

When are infants exposed to language?

Answer 1

• Before birth and are interested in what they hear
• Mothers read 3 stories to their babies in the womb twice daily for 6 weeks
• Two days after birth, showed preference for previously exposed stories

Question 2

Do infants like speech sounds?

Answer 2

• Prefer vocalisations to artificial sounds
• Newborn infants were played synthetic voice sounds/human nonsense speech sounds
• Infants preferred human sounds
• Newborn infants have no preference between human and Rhesus monkeys vocations
• Played human nonsense speech sounds or monkey vocalisations; infants prefer human vocalisations by 3 months

Question 3

Are infants are primed to communicate? (Exp)

Answer 3

• Investigated infant phoneme recognition using pa & ba sounds
• Measured sucking frequencies - habituated to one sound then changed VOT to another
• Infants discriminated in the same way as adults, 1&4 mo

Question 4

How does speech specialise with age?

Answer 4

• Differentiating phonemes from different language
• 1-2mo infants can respond to phonemes from all languages
• As they get older = specialise to their native language

Question 5

EXP showing infant specialisation with age?

Answer 5

• Phoneme distinction for different Hindi and Canadian first nation language
• At 6-8mo still good discrimination
• At 12mo significantly less able to discriminate
• Ability to specialise is related to later language development: distinguishing between language @ 7 mo and vocab in 2nd year of life

Question 6

Why is specialisation be associated with later vocabulary?

Answer 6

• Early specialisers are more intelligent and have a broader vocabulary
• Less likely to be from bilingual families = slower language development
• Specialising early means infants are better at sound distinctions in their native language, supporting later learning of language patterns/words
• Families are interested in research = encourage language development

Question 7

What is word segmentation?

Answer 7

• Identifying words in a pattern of speech is hard
• 7 mo infants show preference for words previously heard in a sentence string to a novel word
• Discrimination between previously heard syllable sequences and novel sequences @ 8 mo suggests recognition of types of syllables used in a specific language
• Discrimination of frequently used words - babies can recognise their own name by 4.5 mo

Question 8

Stages of early vocalisation:

Answer 8

• Birth - 1mo: cry/cough/sneeze = reflex actions, physical control not present
• 2-3mo: cooing, turn taking
• 4-6mo: canonical babbling: consonant followed by a vowel, repeated
• 8-12mo: variated babbling: diff consonants/vowel combos strung together
• 12-18mo: first word development: first words emerge
  36-48mo: complex sentences and increasing awareness of pragmatics

Question 9

Is babbling universal?

Answer 9

• Infants from different cultures babble some of the same consonant-vowel combinations
• Can be identified as from a specific language by 8-10mo
• Evidence that deaf infants can babble verbally - later and less complex than hearing infants
• Deaf babies babble with nonsense sign language

Question 10

Does babbling predict later language development?

Answer 10

• Timing of peak neutral vocalisations was correlated with later cognitive development
• Followed kids at high-risk for language delay & late canonical babbling predicted later developmental delay
• Infants with cochlear implants = complexity of babbling predicted language skills inc vocab @ years of age

Question 11

Study looking at first type of words?

Answer 11

• Children aged 8-16mo speaking 1-10 words from USA, HK, Beijing
• Parents completed questionnaires listing common words and asked to identify which their child used - found children across cultures identified common nouns more than other categories of words

Question 12

What is joint attention?

Answer 12

• Relevant to language development and making sense of what is being communicated

Question 13

What is fast mapping?

Answer 13

Known & new object = new object must relate to new word

Question 14

What were pragmatic clues?

Answer 14

• Social contexts to identify word use: adult attention or emotional response

Question 15

What were linguistic contexts?

Answer 15

By using known grammatical cues, influences what a child understands by a certain word

Question 16

What are common early errors in speech?

Answer 16

• Overextension: using the same word for many things
• Underextension: using words in a restricted and individualistic way
• Comprehension outstrips production

Question 17

What happens when children learn grammatical rules:

Answer 17

• Children learn past tense and plural as well as irregular plurals e.g me
• Rule is acquired and overregularisation occurs

Question 18

How does exposure to speech help make sense of the world?

Answer 18

• We speak to infants from their first day of life
• Comments on infant behaviour
• Verbalisations of caregiving activities
• Grammatically well informed
• Instructions on how to behave
• But not all cultures speak directly to infants

Question 19

What is infant directed speech like?

Answer 19

• Less complex, more exaggerated and at higher pitches
• Exaggerated facial expressions
• Stress on specific syllables
• Longer/more frequent pauses
• Babies seem to prefer this type of speech at 4 weeks

Question 20

How might IDS support language development

Answer 20

• Language spoken in IDS uses easier words
• IDS exaggerates elements of prosody, supporting word identification
• IDS is used by adults the infant trusts and so learns more
• Exaggerated facial expressions help understand links between language and emotions

Question 21

What are parental influences in speech?

Answer 21

• Intersubjectivity and turn-taking
• Labelling objects that have child’s attention
• Use of infant directed speech to emphasise support word learning
• Parental scaffolding: repeating and building on child’s words = evidence aids language development
• Playing word games

Question 22

Adult responsivity in speech interaction: (w/exp)

Answer 22

• Indication that there are individual differences in adult’s responsiveness to infant language
• Observed 30 children and their mothers at 13/20 mo
• Looked at mother/child vocab and maternal responsiveness
• Maternal responsiveness predicted child vocabulary at 20 mo and child vocab increases also predicted maternal responsiveness at 20 mo

Question 23

What were studies in differences in children’s exposure to language?

Answer 23

• Recorded speech of 42 parents with their children from infancy to age 3
• Children with parents on welfare heard 616 words per hour and those with low social class 1251 words per hour
• Children of middle-class parents 2153 words per hour
• Evidence to link social class and word hearing to child vocabulary = children from poor backgrounds hear 30 million fewer words by age 5

Question 24

Critiques of previous study?

Answer 24

• Looking at direct mother-child speech
• Exposure to different types of language/speech e.g other adults
• Considering other cultures where direct speech is less valued
• Study was replicated and included other definitions of speech
• Found that variability within and across groups is important
• Diff types of exposure can be beneficial

Question 25

What did Golinkoff find?

Answer 25

• Vocab learning from overheard speech may be possible but not optimal
• Quality of speech, rather than quantity is most important
• Benefits of joint attention, social referencing and child directed speech
• SES is a proxy, not a mechanism