Language Flashcards
Is Language associated with any other measure of general intelligence?
Language learning is ubiquitous and is not associated with IQ or any other measure of general intelligence
The ability to speak and understand a spoken language is part of human nature
Does language always happen?
Every known culture and every known group of humans has a spoken language.- language today is sophisticated
If young children are raised without a native language but raised in community with other children, they will invent a native language, and the language they invent will be every bit as complex and human as any other human languag
What would Piaget say about language acquisition?
1- no specialized psychological processes dedicated to language acquisition.
2- Psychological imperative to perceiving patterns and make sense of the world were sufficient to develop language
- Language like the development of math and pretend play are universal - symbolic
- Constructivist, believing that via his or her curiosity and cognitive capacity, a child actively constructs language - similar to development of other symbolic systems
What would associationists say about language acquisition?
B. F. Skinner - language acquisition, like any other developing behavior, was acquired via a few GENERAL LEARNING MECHANISMS, primarily operant conditioning
a baby has NO SPECIALIZED PSYCHOLOGY that facilitates language learning but is reinforced for language behavior: The baby makes a sound, and if the sound happens to sound like a speech sound, the parent reinforces the behavior, perhaps with a smile
IMITATION is part of the language acquisition process: Children acquire a complex grammatical sentence because that very sentence has been modeled for them by an adult
Problems with associationist perspective on language acquisition
PROBLEM - cannot explain the FAST AND EFFICIENCY of language learning,
language can be acquired from IMPERFECT INPUT
the GENERATIVE nature of language production
-Children put together idiosyncratic utterances that they have never heard before and generate novel sentence
- ERRORS NEVER MODELLED - cant be imitation alone
What would systems theorists say about language acquisition?
Language is part of the environment that a developing child reliably has access to, and it would have been available to the developing child in the EEA - developmental resource
Specialized mechanisms for speech and language
-orient, perceive, analyze speech and learn language
Designed to interface with adult language - learn with little explicit guidance
What would Evolutionary Psychologists say about Language Acquisition?
- Language is a human universal
- Not more complex in more complex societies
- Not an artifact or innovation
———–Bats echolocation is part of being a bat -
speaking is part of being human - Part of human psychology
Language development illustrates what has been called the INSTINCT TO LEARN
illustrates that asking whether something is learned versus evolved is nonsensical: Language is clearly learned, and it is clearly learned using an intricate, complexly designed, evolved learning mechanism
—-Without a well-designed language acquisition device, one would never learn a language
Is language the result of experience? - evolutionary perspective
Clearly, since Japanese babies grow up to speak Japanese - experience plays a big part in the spoken language of adults.
Only the developing human mind can respond to environmental inputs by learning language.
Psychological mechanisms that are designed for language learning - can learn their native language by listening only: No tutoring is required.
The human mind is designed for language acquisition - child interacts with the environment by design
Noam Chomsky
Father of Modern Linguistics
First to argue that general-purpose learning was inadequate for the acquisition of language
1-Human language relies on using complex, abstract rules governing word formation, word order and sentence formation
2 -Children learn language at an astonishingly fast pace - during a time when other cognitive capacities are immature
How does language illustrate instinct blindness?
Most of us are unaware of the rules that we use to form spoken language, another example of instinct blindness.
adults do not teach children these complex grammatical rules, children learn them
implicitly
Language Acquisition Device - Chomsky
The learning mechanisms that young children have that allow them to analyze the language they hear and to acquire and produce their own native language
Why doesn’t imitation work? LAD and Noam
1-the adult language that is modeled for children is very imperfect, full of stammering, hesitating, incomplete sentences, and various errors.
2-children generate novel sentences that they have never heard before, a phenomenon that defies the definition of imitation.
Deep Structure - Noam
Chomsky’s term for the wordless structure that is common to utterances with the same meaning that must be mapped onto the actual surface structure in order for children to understand and learn language.
For example, the sentences “The dog chased the cat” and “The cat was chased by the dog,” have the same deep structure, and so do sentences in other languages expressing the same idea.
Children have to learn the rules that connect the deep structure to the surface structure in order to decipher what people actually mean and to produce language of their own.
Universal Grammar - Noam
The set of principles and adjustable
parameters that are common to all
human languages.
Part of our human psychology.
Allows them to get started in understanding and acquiring language.
Deduce the meaning of sentences they have never encountered before, and it is the tool children need to infer the grammatical rules of their own native language
Home Signs experiment - Universal Grammar
” generated by deaf children has uncovered evidence of this universal grammar in development
Manual signs used for communication
developed by deaf children of hearing parents- not regularly exposed to an adult sign language.
home signs being specific to an individual, rather than shared by a group, the signs are distinct from the manual gestures that hearing children and adults use to accompany spoken language: they are linguistic, not gestural
Goldin-Meadow - studied and compared the home signs of Chinese and American deaf children of hearing parents
not being taught sign language and did not have access to their parents’ spoken languages, and so they generated idiosyncratic home signs
Despite the different grammatical structure of their parents’ spoken languages (Mandarin and English), the home signs generated by these children had remarkable similarities.
For example, they included subjects, actions, and objects and tended to keep them in that order, regardless of the order their parents used
Order of speech interpretation
perception > comprehension > production, infants are prepared to perceive speech sounds.
What are newborns most sensitive to?
What do they prefer to listen to?
Newborns are most sensitive to (i.e., best able to hear) sounds that fall within the frequency range of the human speaking voice.
Newborn infants can hear a variety of sounds but prefer to listen to human speech over pure tones
Prenatal language learning is evidenced by the fact that…
at birth, a newborn has some knowledge of his native language
at birth, a newborn has some knowledge of his native language. Even a 4-day-old baby will suck faster when hearing his mother’s language than when hearing a foreign language.
prefer their native language if - sounds are not distinguishable and only the inflection or melody is audible.
Backwards - no preference and no preference between two different foreign languages
Language and Perceptual Narrowing
Auditory Habituation
infants are already prepared to discriminate between human speech sounds prior to any language experience, and this ability declines with age as a function of exposure to their own native language, an example of perceptual narrowing
Auditory habituation - pacifier fitted with an electrode - researcher could record the frequency of the infant’s sucking - new sound dishabituate
Infants discriminate between a huge number of speech sounds - discriminate btw sounds that adults in their language community cannot
Instinct Blindness - not capable of comparing the physical difference of two ba sounds with the physical difference btw ba and pa
instinct blindness and habituation
As human experimenters, we are not capable of comparing the physical difference of two /ba/ sounds with the physical difference between a /ba/ and a /pa/ sound.
We need to use specialized sound equipment to tell us what these physical differences are because our perception of the auditory stream is automatically run through our language processing device, which
collapses the /ba/ sounds into a category.
Werker and Tees - Conditioned Head Turn Procedure
An experimental procedure in which
infants’ head turns are rewarded with a visual display only on trials in which a novel sound category is presented. Once conditioned, the experimenter can then test new stimuli to see whether the infant perceives it as novel - Operant
examine the decline of the infant’s ability to discriminate between non-native speech sounds
Continuous stream of speech sounds is presented via a loudspeaker located off to the side
A nearby cabinet full of toys invisible bc of a smoked plexiglass cover - if the infant turns their head towards the loudspeaker when he hears the speech sound change - rewarded by toys shown and moving. If move with no change - no reward
3 successful head turns in a row - ready for test phase
All native adult speakers of the Salish language could distinguish between Salish speech sounds.
Only 30% of English-speaking adults could hear the difference.
Critically, 80% of the 7-month-old infants could discriminate between the two speech sounds despite having no experience listening to the Salish language
When does perceptual narrowing happen?
decline happened during the first year of life. They compared three groups of infants: The first group was aged 6 to 8 months, the second aged 8 to 10 months, and the third 10 to 12 months.
third group performed significantly worse on the speech sound discrimination task
the perceptual narrowing of consonant sounds takes place at around 10 months of age.
wanted to know whether the ability to discriminate non-native language speech sounds declined gradually or suddenly
looked at the performance of just those infants who were able to make the discrimination in order to see if they needed more trials to make the discrimination as they got older
.
if the ability disappeared gradually with age, infants who succeeded may need more trials to succeed as they got older
age did not affect the number of trials it took to succeed in the task.
IS THE TIMING DUE TO EXPERIENCE OR BRAIN MATURATION
If amount of experience was the
key to the closing of this critical period in speech perception, then the age of consolidation (when you can no longer measure consonant discrimination) would be best predicted by the date of their birth.
If, however, brain maturation was the key to this timing, then the consolidation could be best predicted by gestational age or time since conception-TRUE
the timeline can be artificially accelerated. If mothers took a serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) as a therapy for depression during pregnancy, the timing of both the beginning and the ending of speech sound perception was accelerated. By 6 months of age, these infants had already ceased to discriminate foreign speech sounds.
Things involved in speeding up or delay perceptual narrowing
Speed up - serotonin - SRI
Slow down - absence of essential fatty acids
Perceptual narrowing and sign language
Four-month-old hearing and deaf infants were able to discriminate a complete set of linguistically meaningful hand shapes, tested using an eye-tracking paradigm.
Fourteen-month old infants who were acquiring ASL as a first language were also able to make all such discriminations but hearing 14-month-olds were not. Perceptual narrowing seems to occur unless an infant is exposed to sign language
Werker - more direct evidence of a relationship between speech production and speech perception
tested 6-month-old infants’ discrimination of foreign speech sounds, using the conditioned head turn procedure, but now using a teething toy to restrain mouth movement
The teething toy interfered with infants’ discrimination of foreign speech sounds, but only if it prevented infants from making the specific mouth configuration that was associated with the production of that specific speech sound
Infant’s Categorical Perception of Speech Sounds
Very young infants perceive human speech sounds categorically.
Eimas - 1m old infants can tell the difference btw ba and pa - categorical perception - produced vocally similarly
Categorical perception- at one point hearing ba and some point it changes and hear pa - no in between
Voice Onset Time
The duration of the interval between
when a stop-consonant is released and when the vocal folds begin to vibrate and thus voicing begins.
When you say “ba,” the VOT is about 15 milliseconds. When you say “pa,” the
VOT is about 100 milliseconds. Since this difference is just quantitative, you could use a voice synthesizer to create a continuum of
artificial speech sounds all the way from a good /ba/ to a good / pa/ and then test what people hear
Adults perceive these speech sounds categorically: The sounds with a VOT of less than about 25 milliseconds are heard unambiguously as “ba,” and those sounds with a VOT of more than 25 milliseconds are heard unambiguously as “pa
Eimas et al. study, 1- to 4-month-old infants
one group heard ba and one group heard pa - both groups heard sounds that were equally dissimilar to the one they had habituated to and equally physically different - null hypothesis - each group should have habituated equally
1-month-old babies were unresponsive to physical changes within the /ba/ category or within the /pa/ category but dishabituated when physically different sounds that crossed the category boundary were presented
Evidence of categorical perception in infants as young as 1m
Proto-Babbling and Babbling
Babies preparing for language production early on
Babies require feedback about the sounds being produced when babbling
As soon as they make a noise they keep giving themselves feedback and slowly gain words
Congenitally deaf babies - not exposed to SL - babbling occurs late and is very limited
Babbling stages
2m - make cooing noises that sound like vowels
6m - start to babble adding consonant sounds to their cooing
—Babbling characterized by repeated consonant-vowel combinations like bababababa
—At first - sounds that are common across languages - over time produce sounds more and more like adult speech
8m - more complex babbling - utterances are not more mixed up and are not just repetitions of the same-consonant vowel pair
—Produce real adult speech sounds - consonant-vowel patterns and the intonation patterns of their own language
—-At this point, hearing is a necessary part of the language development process. The production of speechlike sounds is delayed in hearing-impaired babies and absent in deaf babies
manual babbling
Infants whose parents are deaf will still babble, but they do so with their hands, producing the identical linguistic structures observed in spoken language babbling - manual babbling
First word?
How many words a day? When?
How many words by 6?
First word from 8 to 18m
Children learn 6 words a day on average between 2-6yrs
By 6yr, average child has a 10k vocabulary - mostly grammatical sentences
instinct blindness makes word learning…
appear easy, but to learn the correct concept for a newly acquired label takes specialized psychological processes, designed for just this purpose
Quine - problem of reference
Get attention of young child and point to a furry brown rabbit and say bunny - what will the child learn? - how do they know what youre referring to
Infinite number of possible referents - colour brown, fur, furiness, that particular bunny, all bunnies, mammals, different parts of the bunny
There is no logical reason that you could not be referring to a conjunctive category like bunnies or lions or even bunnies or the month of December.
word-learning assumptions that the baby does, which helps support our instinct blindness with respect to word learning.
