L16 - Early Communication and Language Development Flashcards
1
Q
When are infants exposed to language?
A
- 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
2
Q
Do infants like speech sounds?
A
- 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
3
Q
Are infants are primed to communicate? (Exp)
A
- 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
4
Q
How does speech specialise with age?
A
- Differentiating phonemes from different language
- 1-2mo infants can respond to phonemes from all languages
- As they get older = specialise to their native language
5
Q
EXP showing infant specialisation with age?
A
- 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
6
Q
Why is specialisation be associated with later vocabulary?
A
- 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
7
Q
What is word segmentation?
A
- 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
8
Q
Stages of early vocalisation:
A
- 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
9
Q
Is babbling universal?
A
- 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
10
Q
Does babbling predict later language development?
A
- 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
11
Q
Study looking at first type of words?
A
- 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
12
Q
What is joint attention?
A
- Relevant to language development and making sense of what is being communicated
13
Q
What is fast mapping?
A
Known & new object = new object must relate to new word
14
Q
What were pragmatic clues?
A
- Social contexts to identify word use: adult attention or emotional response
15
Q
What were linguistic contexts?
A
By using known grammatical cues, influences what a child understands by a certain word
16
Q
What are common early errors in speech?
A
- Overextension: using the same word for many things
- Underextension: using words in a restricted and individualistic way
- Comprehension outstrips production
17
Q
What happens when children learn grammatical rules:
A
- Children learn past tense and plural as well as irregular plurals e.g me
- Rule is acquired and overregularisation occurs
18
Q
How does exposure to speech help make sense of the world?
A
- 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
19
Q
What is infant directed speech like?
A
- 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
20
Q
How might IDS support language development
A
- 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
21
Q
What are parental influences in speech?
A
- 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
22
Q
Adult responsivity in speech interaction: (w/exp)
A
- 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
23
Q
What were studies in differences in children’s exposure to language?
A
- 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
24
Q
Critiques of previous study?
A
- 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
25
What did Golinkoff find?
- 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
