L3 - Language Acquisition Flashcards
When does the acquisition of language begin?
Language acquisition begins before birth
-> new borns can discriminate between forward and
backwards speech; their mother’s voice.
-> possible that the language prosody is filtered by
womb?
How do investigators attempt to find out what infants know/are thinking?
- Novelty habituation procedures:
-> infants become used to familiar stimuli
-> can use fixation time to assess similarity/memory to
other stimuli. - Contingent reinforcement procedures:
-> teach child to make response (sucking) to a stimulus, then use response to measure interest.
Describe the general course of language acquisition:
0-6 months:
- discriminate speech from non-language voice.
- multi-lingual phonemic “categorical perception”.
- communication (crying, smile, gurgles).
6-12 months:
- “categorical perception” narrows to own language.
- reduplicative babbling.
12 months:
- first word production (holophrases).
18 months:
- beginning of naming explosion.
- two word utterances.
2 yr +:
- ≥3 word utterances (consistent even if incorrect).
- gradual syntax development.
- negation, question intonation.
What is some evidence against an innate phoneme system?
When matched non-speech stimuli are presented, adults and babies still show categorical perception.
This shows that there may not be an innate “phoneme system” but rather a perceptual system with certain inbuilt sensitivities.
What is language-specific reorganisation?
- the shaping of categorical perception by the
environment. - between the ages of 6-12 months, sensitivities to non-
native languages are lost. - Perceptual attunement: relevant phonemic contrasts
enhanced, irrelevant reduced (requires social
interaction, not TV).
How are words found in speech?
Statistical learning: transitional probabilities and familiarity.
Infants extract statistical regularities within language and use them to identify words.
