Language acquisition 1

Question 1

to master language

Answer 1

• 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

Answer 2

• Learning language involves several skills:
  
  • Association - sounds with words, words with meanings
  • Generalisation/extension - to new items, different speakers, etc
  • 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

its all patterns

Answer 3

· Language acquisition uses domain general skills
· A lot of language acquisition is learning patterns:
- Patterns for which sounds fit together to make a word
- Patterns for which word-types fit together in which order

Question 4

milestones

Answer 4

• birth = recognising own languages
• 1-4 months = cooing
• 4-8 months = understands highly used words
• 4-10 months = babling
• 12 months+ = understands hundreds of words
• 10-14 months = first word
• 16-20 months = possible vocabulary spurt
• 18-30 months = first sentence
• 36 months + = uses grammar
• 30 months+ = longer sentences

Question 5

comprehension precedes production

Answer 5

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

Question 6

differences in early vocabulary growth

Answer 6

· Vocabulary size differs between socio-economic status (SES) groups (Hart and Risley, 1995).

Question 7

word gap

Answer 7

· 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 6 month language gap between SES groups.

Question 8

the Matthew effect

Answer 8

· “The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer”
· 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 9

recognising language

Answer 9

· Foetuses can hear from 15-18 weeks
· Sounds are muffled in the womb
· Later, infants initially prefer muffled sounds
· Infants prefer their mother’s voice/parents over strangers/own language over another language

Question 10

recognising cadence

Answer 10

· Cadence is the rhythm of language/speech
· Mothers recited stories twice/day in the last 6 weeks of pregnancy (3.5 hours of exposure)
· At 55 hours of age, infants “worked” to produce the story they had heard over a different story (control group did not)
· Foetus and infants can learn and recall cadence (and learn contingencies)
· DeCasper and Spence, 1987

Question 11

adding order to chaos

Answer 11

• there are no spaces between spoken words

Question 12

transitional probability (patterns)

Answer 12

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

Question 13

infants can segment speech

Answer 13

· 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 statistics!
· The transitional probability within words was 1.0
· The transitional probability between words was 0.33
· At test infants listened to the individual words or part-words
· Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996)
· 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 14

infant directed speech

Answer 14

· Infant directed speech (IDS) has characteristics that help children isolate words:
- Higher pitch
- Wider range of pitch
- Exaggerated intonation
- Simple structure
- Highly grammatical
- Slower speed
- Lots of repetition
· IDS exaggerated differences between vowels, which helps children learn words
· This vowel exaggeration is observed across languages
· IDS is higher pitched than adult-directed speech across languages

Question 15

infant directed speech aids segmentation

Answer 15

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

Question 16

child direct speech

Answer 16

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

Question 17

recognising words

Answer 17

· 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.
· Orient to name” tasks given to infant siblings of children with ASD and without ASD
· Tested and retested at 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 and 24mo
· At 36mo children were classified into 3 group: group with ASD, low risk group, high risk group
· Then their earlier responses were examined with this new insight:
- From 9 mo ASD group behaved differently from other groups
- Children with more repeated failures were diagnosed with ASD earlier than other children with ASD
- Name recognition at 9mo could be useful for ASD prescreening

Question 18

success in speech-processing tasks

Answer 18

· Overall, monolingual and bilingual children develop similarly
· Macrostructure shows flexibility and robustness of language acquisition
- Microstructure may give insights into how children learn language

Question 19

categorisation influences language

Answer 19

· 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
· 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…
· Children trained on material categories (right) did not develop any bias
· Children trained on shape categories (left) developed a precocious shape bias
· Children trained on shape categories even over-generalised the shape bias to non-solid substances
· Teach shape nouns -> develop precocious shape bias
· Teach material nouns -> no material bias
· Shape-bias is a product of word learning