Language Acquisition 1

Question 1

To Master Language

Answer 1

Language is complicated and a huge thing for kids to learn due to many things needing to be mastered, including:

• Recognise your own language
• Recognise words (segment speech)
• Understand and remember word meanings
• Extend word meanings to new items
• Speak words
• Combine words (sentences)
• Understand/use syntax

Question 2

Language: learning and memory
What skills does learning language involve?

Answer 2

• Association (sounds with words, words with meanings)
• Generalisation/Extension (to new items, different speakers, etc)- synonym- people saying words differently
• Recognition (wounds, words, learned meanings)
• Retrieval (recalling sounds, words and meanings)

We will see these skills used in learning multiple aspects of language (e.g., vocabulary, grammar)

Question 3

What does language acquisition use?

Answer 3

Domain General skills

Question 4

What is a lot of language acquisition?

Answer 4

Learning patters
– Patterns for which sounds fit together to make a word
– Patterns for which word-types fit together in which order

Question 5

Organise Milestones into the correct order

Answer 5

Birth/ 1-4 months:
- Cooing
- Recognise own language(s)

4-8 months:
Understands highly used words
4-10 months:
Babbling

10-14 months:
First Word
12 months+
Understands hundreds of words

16-20 months:
Possible vocabulary spurt
18-30 months:
First Sentence

30 months+
Longer Sentences
36 months+
Uses Grammar

Question 6

Comprehension and Production

Answer 6

Comprehension precedes Production

Eg a child at 14 months might say 20 words and at that same age they can understand many more words. Throughout childhood, kids can understand many more words than they ca actually say. This can be because speaking is challenging.

Comprehension: understanding what others say (or sign or write)
Production: speaking (or signing or writing) to others

Question 7

Differences in Early Vocabulary Growth

Answer 7

Vocabulary size differs between Socio-Economic Status (SES) groups (Hart & Risley, 1995)

Especially in toddler to pre school age range, kids from Higher SES are learning vocabulary at a higher rate than kids from Middle SES and Low SES.

Question 8

Word Gap

Answer 8

• Middle and high SES parents are more talkative
• Children with more talkative caregivers learn new words faster
• At 18 months, children from low SES backgrounds produce fewer words
• Children from low SES backgrounds produce less complex sentences
• By 24 months there is a 6mo language gap between SES groups

Question 9

The Matthew Effect:
What is the main idea?

Answer 9

“The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer”

(The point is that theres difference between groups)

Question 10

The Matthew Effect

Answer 10

• The term was popularised in developmental/educational psychology by Stanovich (1986).
• Gaps between groups will widen over time.
• Several studies document the effect, particularly in children’s learning to read.
• Some studies show gaps that do not widen

Question 11

Recognising Language

Answer 11

• Foetuses can hear from 15-18 weeks. Already at this period they can learn about language.
• Sounds are muffled in the womb
• Later, infants initially prefer muffled sounds
• Infants prefer their mother’s voice
• parents over strangers
• own language(s) over another language(s)

(Papers show kids prefer familiar things early on and then once they’ve learnt this they switch and prefer novelty- then see if theres a difference)

Question 12

What is cadence?

Answer 12

The rhythm of language/ speech

Question 13

Recognising Cadence

Answer 13

• Mothers recited stories twice/day in the last 6 weeks of pregnancy (3.5 hrs total exposure)
• At 55 hours of age, infants “worked” to produce the story they had heard over a different story (control group did not)
  Study- If they sucked at a particular rate they could hear the familiar story or different. They found that babies worked to familiar story so they had learned the story during birth.
• Foetus and infants can learn and recall cadence (and learn contingencies)

DeCasper & Spence (1987)

Question 14

Adding order to the Chaos
spaces and breaks

Answer 14

• There are no spaces between spoken words
• How do you know where the breaks are in opportunityisnowhere?
  opportunity is now here
  opportunity is nowhere

Question 15

How Do Infants Know Where the Breaks Are?

Answer 15

1) Pitch
2) Pauses
3) Statistics, Correlations

1- we typically elevate our pitch which gives them some idea of where the pauses are
2- tend to speak slower so they’ll know where the breaks are

Question 16

Transitional Probability (patterns)

Answer 16

Sounds that occur together often are more likely to be from the same word.

Overtime you can see patterns and know what words go together.

Question 17

Infants Can Segment Speech

Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996)

Answer 17

• 8-month-old infants listened to a language of 3 multi-syllable
  pseudowords bidakupadotigolabubidaku…. for 2 minutes
• There were no pauses or pitch cues: only thing they used were statistics!
• The transitional probability within words was 1.0 (100%)
• The transitional probability between words was 0.33 (1/3)
• At test infants listened to the individual words or part-words

Question 18

Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996)
words and part-words

Answer 18

words: bidaku, padoti, golabu
part-words: dakupa, bubidaku, dotigo

Question 19

Infants Can Segment Speech
Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996)

Results

Answer 19

• Infants preferred the part-words
• Infants could distinguish between words and part-words – even though both had been heard before!
• Infants can use statistical regularities/patterns to learn language.

Question 20

Statistical Learning is Domain General: examples

Answer 20

Witteloostuijn et al. (2019):
You can get the same effect if you show pictures of 3 monsters always occurring together. This can be like a word and children can learn about what goes together.

Jones et al. (2018):
Study looking at farm animals. The order in which animals occur and patterns can be learned by babies.

Conway and Christianses (2005):
Adults can do the same task when putting sensors on someones fingers and they have to tap differently. They can also learn transitional probabilities.

Saffran et al. (1999):
Music- patterns and patterns of behaviour

Question 21

Infant Directed Speech (IDS) has characteristics that help children isolate words. List some of these.

Answer 21

• Higher pitch
• Wider range of pitch
• Exaggerated intonation (more rare for an adult to say stop it to an adult)
• Simple structure
• Highly grammatical
• Slower speed
• Lots of repetition

Question 22

What does IDS exaggerate?

Answer 22

• IDS exaggerates differences between vowels, which helps children learn words

The solid line shows the different between volume categories in infant directed speech.

The dashed line shows the difference between volume categories in adult directed speech.

The triangle is bigger in infant directed speech, the volumes are more spread out and its more exaggerated.

Question 23

IDS: what can the vowel exaggeration be observed across?

Answer 23

Observed across languages

Question 24

Is infant-directed speech higher pitched than adult-directed speech across languages?

what else is found between languages?

Answer 24

Yes- IDS is higher pitched.

Theres a difference between men and women- Infant directed is higher pitched when women speak

In some languages there’s a greater difference in the mean eg. American English is more extreme compare to German

Question 25

What does IDS aid?

Answer 25

Segmentation

When presented with identical speech streams, 7 month infants learned the ‘words’ significantly better if IDS was used.

Thiessen, Hill & Saffran (2005)

Question 26

Child Directed Speech finding

Answer 26

Older children learn words better with child directed speech too!

Question 27

Child Directed Speech

Answer 27

• Children who hear more CDS have larger vocabularies
• Parents adjust their speech based on words they think their children do not know
• 5yrs understand sentences better in CDS
• CDS even helps adults learn words in a new language

Question 28

Recognising words:
- By 4.5 months…
- By 6 months…
- By 6-9 months…

Answer 28

• By 4.5 months infants recognise their own names
• By 6 months infants understand the words “mommy” and “daddy”
• By 6-9 months infants show understanding of some words for familiar objects, e.g., food and body parts

Question 29

Recognising Words study (Miller et al. 2017)
Procedure

Answer 29

1- “Orient to name” tasks given to infant siblings of children with ASD
and without ASD
2- Tested and retested at 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 and 24mo
3- At 36mo children were classified into 3 groups
4- Then their earlier responses were examined with this new insight….

Question 30

Recognising Words study (Miller et al. 2017)
Results

Answer 30

1. The rate at which kids failing to turn their heads when their names were said was higher when children went on to be diagnosed with Autism condition
2. By 9 months theres a striking difference for how the children behaved. There were more failures to turn their head in kids who became diagnosed with ASD.
3. From 9 mo ASD group behaved differently from other groups
4. Children with more repeated failures were diagnosed with ASD earlier than other children with ASD
5. Name recognition at 9 months could be useful for ASD prescreening

Question 31

Success in Speech-Processing Tasks
- which children develop similarly
- what does macrostructure show?
- what does microstructure show?

Answer 31

• Overall, monolingual and bilingual children develop similarly (even though we think bilingual are delayed)
• Macrostructure shows flexibility and robustness of language acquisition
• Microstructure may give insights into how children learn language

Question 32

Language Influences Categorisation

Answer 32

Continuum of dragons:
Only seen at test-
4 is the prototype of the “little wings”
16 is the prototype of the “big wings”
10 is the prototype of all dragons
+1 “completely novel” dragon (novel- if kids don’t look at stimuli you know they look at something)

Question 33

Language Influences Categorisation:
- if one category…
- if two categories…

Answer 33

• if one category 10 will be considered familiar (boring)
• if two categories 4 and 16 will be considered familiar (boring)
• 10 month infants presented with either one or two words… (geepee and boota)

Question 34

Language Influences Categorization:
Results

Answer 34

The visual stimulus for all kids were the same, the difference was what they heard. Therefore what they heard influenced their choices.

• In silence condition infants formed 1 category (all prototypes ‘familiar’)
• In 1-word condition, infants formed 1 category
• In 2-word condition, infants formed 2 categories
• Language influenced categorization!

Question 35

What influences language?

Answer 35

Categorisation
* Most of the input children hear is for categories (nouns)
* Most of children’s early vocabularies are words for solid, shape-based categories with count noun syntax (Samuelson and Smith, 1999)

Question 36

Shape bias through vocabulary training (Samuelson, 2002)

Answer 36

If the shape bias is learned by learning words, we should be able to teach a shape bias through vocabulary training (Samuelson, 2002)

• 17mo children learned 12 real nouns for 9 weeks + 1-mo follow-up
• Names for categories usually learned much later (after 26 mos.)
  – Shape Training: bucket, pear, ladder, boot…
  – Material Training: lotion, chalk…

Question 37

Shape bias through vocabulary training (Samuelson, 2002)
Results

Answer 37

• children trained on shape categories developed a precocious shape bias
• children trained on shape categories even over-generalised the shape bias to non-solid substances
• children trained on material categories did not develop any bias

Question 38

Data on children’s’ vocabularies

Answer 38

• Teach shape nouns -> develop precocious shape bias
• Teach material nouns -> no material bias
• Shape-bias is a product of word learning
• Shape condition: looks way better 1 month later therefore teaching them early helps them really learn their vocabulary
• Main finding: Training kids under shape bias helps them have a large vocabulary early