language acquisition 1 and 2

Question 1

skills involved with learning languages

Answer 1

association - sounds with words, words with meaning

generalisation/extension - to new items, different speakers

recognition - wounds, words, learning meanings

retrieval - recalling sounds, words and meaning

Question 2

elements need to master a language

Answer 2

recognise your own language

recognise individual words - segment speech
understand and remember word meaning

extend word meaning to new items

speak words

combine words

understand/ use syntax

Question 3

language acquisition

Answer 3

uses domain gene general skills
as a lot of it is just learning patterns
such as patterns for which sounds fit together to make a word

Question 4

when do children learn language (milestones)

Answer 4

recognise own language - birth
cooing - 1 to 4 months
understand highly used words 4 to 8 months
babbling 4 to 10 months
understands 100’s of words 12 months +
first word 10 to 14 months
first sentences 16 to 30 months
sentence and grammar use 30 months + up to 3 or 4

Question 5

comprehension precedes production - caselli et al 2012

Answer 5

comprehension precedes production meaning that at certain ages a child may only be able to say a small amount of words but they will be able to understand and know the meaning of a lot more words

e.g. at 14 months may only be able to say 20 words but can comprehend 125

Question 6

differences in early vocabulary growth rates - hart and risley 1995

Answer 6

vocabulary size differs between socio-economic status groups

with those from a high SES having a biggest vocabulary size and those from a low SES having the smallest

Question 7

comprehension definition

Answer 7

understanding what others say or sign or write

Question 8

production definition

Answer 8

the ability to speak or sign or write to others

Question 9

word gap

Answer 9

is used to describe the gap between high SES and low SES children’s vocabulary

between 18 to 24 months there is a word gap between the groups

Question 10

courses of the word Gap

Answer 10

middle and high SES parents are more talkative - Hart and Risley 1995

children with more talkative caregivers learn words faster - huttenlocher 1991

at 18mo children from low SES backgrounds produce fewer words

children from low SES backgrounds produce less complex sentences

by 24mo there is a 6mo language gap between SES groups

Question 11

the matthew effect

Answer 11

the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer
(referring to the word gap)

the term was populasied by stanovich

gaps between groups will widen over time

several studies document the effect particularly in children’s learning to read

Question 12

recognising language

Answer 12

at 15 to 18 weeks foetuses can hear

sounds are muffled in the womb
infants prefer muffled sounds due to this

infants prefer their mothers voice
- parents over strangers
- own language over another language

Question 13

recognising Cadence

Answer 13

candence is the rhythm of language or speech

decasper and spence 1987
-mothers recited a stories twice a day in the last 6 weeks of pregnancy
- at 55hrs of age the infants worked to produce the story they had heared over a different story - control group did not
- sucked quicker

foetus and infants can learn and recall candence and learn contingencies (positive effects)

Question 14

what is cadence

Answer 14

is the rhythm of language and/or speech

Question 15

speech perception - learning when there are breaks in language

Answer 15

is speech streams there isn’t stops always after a word there we have to learn then the breaks are

can be done through ..
-pitch
- pauses
- statistics and correlations e.g. patterns

Question 16

what is transitional probability

Answer 16

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

e.g. ba by el e phant

Question 17

saffran aslin and newport 1996 - segment speech methods

Answer 17

8mo old infants listened to a language of 3 multi-syllable pseudo-words for 2 mins
(no pauses or changes in pitch)
so could only use patterns in this fake language

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

Question 18

saffran aslin and newport 1996 - segment speech results

Answer 18

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 or patterns to learn language

Question 19

what is infant directed speech

Answer 19

IDS - is the way adults talk to babies

has characteristics that help children isolate words

Question 20

characteristics of infant direct speech that befit infants

Answer 20

higher pitch
wider range of pitch
exaggerated intonation
simple structure
highly grammatical
slower speed
lots of repetition

Question 21

liu, kuhi and tsao 2003 - infant direct speech

Answer 21

IDS exaggerates differences between vowels, which helps children learn words

not just in English this also happens in different languages

Question 22

fernald 1995 - infant directed speech

Answer 22

IDS is higher pitched than adult directed speech across languages

so not just English
is universal

Question 23

infant directed speech aids segments

Answer 23

when presented with identical speech streams, 7mo infants learn the words significantly better if IDS was used

thiessen hill and saffran 2005

Question 24

child directed speech

Answer 24

older children who hear more CDS have larger vocabularies - schwab and lew-williams 2016

parents adjust their speech based on words they think their children do not know - leung, tunkei and yurovsky 2021

5yrs understand sentence better in CDS - foursha-stevenson et al 2017

Question 25

recognising words

Answer 25

by 4.5 mo infants recognise their own words

by 6mo infants understand the word mommy and daddy

by 6 to 9 mo infants show understanding of some words for familiar objects- food and body parts

Question 26

miller et al 2017 - recognising words - methods

Answer 26

orient to name tasks given to infant siblings of children with ASD and without ASD (autism)

tested and retested at 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 and 24 mo

at 36 mo children were classified into 3 groups
1. group with ASD
2. low risk group
3. high risk groups -siblings

then their earlier responses were examined with this new insight

Question 27

miller et al 2017 - recognising words - findings

Answer 27

from 9mo 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 28

success in speech processing task -werker et al

Answer 28

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 29

language influences categorisation - althaus and westernmann 2016

Answer 29

continuum of dragons used
4 is the prototype of the little wings and 16 is the prototype of the big wings and 10 is prototype of all of them
- only saw them at test

show one novel one

if one category 10 will be considered familiar and therefore boring
however if 2 categories were shown for 4 and 16 then they were boring/familiar instead making 10 interesting

10mo infants presented with either one or two words

in silence condition infants formed 1 category
in 1 word condition infants formed 1 category
in 2 word condition infants formed 2 categories

Question 30

samuelson and smith - categorisation influences language

Answer 30

most of the input children hear is for categories (noun)

the first 300 words children learn tend to be nouns

most of children’s early vocabularies are words for solid, shaped-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

Question 31

samuelson 2002 - categorisation through shape

Answer 31

17 mo children learned 12 real nouns for 9 weeks + 1 mo follow up

names for categories usually learned much later ( 26 mo after)
- shape training - bucket, pear, ladder, boot

heard the word 20 times in 2 min with the item in front of them.

Question 32

samuelson 2002 findings - categorisation through shape

Answer 32

children trained on shaped 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

at the beginning of the experiment all the children were matched in ability but at the end of the experiment the shape group had a significantly bigger vocab than the material and control groups
not just the list but how vocab benefited
only typically developing kids

Question 33

fast mapping (carey 1978)

Answer 33

ability to quickly link a novel name to a novel object, typically by applying known information

all children at stage of learning colors
a blue tray and a green tray - told kids to bring them not the blue one but the chromium one
this provides context and contrast for the kid to use

Question 34

fast mapping (carey 1978) findings

Answer 34

13 out of 14 children brought the olive green tray
one week later when playing with color chips the children were asked which one was the chromium one
9 our of 13 children chose green or olive green chips

Question 35

word learning as a dynamic system

Answer 35

word learning is the product of ( nested timescales)
- what the child is seeing/doing now
- what the child just did
- and the child’s developmental history

Question 36

examples of word learning; now

Answer 36

its easier to point to something than to say a new word - gordon and Mcgregor 2014

its harder to choose a known object in an unfamiliar colour - pink cow and cow looking pig - perry and saffran 2017

its easier to choose the correct object if nothing else was named - axelsson and horst 2013
remember the thing that is different

Question 37

Horst, parsons and Bryan 2011 - method

Answer 37

showed children a 9 children books
each book depicted 2 novel objects
in total they will have seen and heard the names of these objects 12 times by the end of the experiment

2 conditions - one had the same story 3 times on each day for the 3 days and the other had 3 different stories a day over the 3 days
- counterbalanced across children

all children tested on immediate recall and on retention for words from days 1 and 2
done by pointing at the objects

Question 38

Horst, parsons and Bryan 2011 - findings

Answer 38

children who heard the same stories learned words significantly better than children in the different stories condition

children who heard the same stories also retained words significantly better

recall and retention was better for same story plus less guessing

Question 39

why repeation helps

Answer 39

focus on finer details second time like words they don’t know due to already knowing who characters are or the plot

Question 40

study on past impacting word learning - williams and horst

Answer 40

do children learn words better from naptime stories
read 3.5yr children storybook 3x in 1 week
tested immediate recall for novel words
tested retention for novel words (nap in the middle then test next 24 test and the 7 days test)
half children naped half didn’t

results - both story repetition and sleep facilitated word learning
different story and no sleep never caught up with the other groups performance

Question 41

babbling and starting to speak

Answer 41

begins at 6 mo

caonical babbling is a string of adult like consonant vowel sequence

onset of canonical babbling predicts onset of first words

children who begin babbling later have smaller productive vocabularies relative to their peers

Question 42

vocabulary explosion or spurt

Answer 42

at first glance at graphs it appears that children have a vocab explosion between 18 to 20 months

during this word spurt, children may say about 20 new words a week

however the sudden increase is really due to learning multiple words at the same time and some words are more difficult than other so take longer to learn

Question 43

combining words

Answer 43

children start speaking their first sentences at around 24mo

children begin showing signs of syntax with telegraphic speech
- simple sentences
- usually 2 words - noun + noun or noun and verb
- no function words

Question 44

late talkers

Answer 44

late talkers learn 3 to 5 words/week

late talkers are children in the bottom 15th percentile for language

at 24 mo they say fewer than 50 words and or do not combine words

could be late bloomer or have developmental language disorders
2 children per reception class have clinically significant language delays - often undiagnosed

weaker language skills put children at risk of poor social abilities, self-regulation, victimisation or/and poor self esteem

Question 45

overextension

Answer 45

extend a known word to something beyond current vocabulary

typically occurs between 12 to 30 mo

clark

Question 46

3 types of over extension

Answer 46

categorical relation - put two different items in the same category dog and cat

analogical relation - perception - apple and red dot put together

predicate based relation - put words together that are related for example key and door

Question 47

grammar: syntax and morphology

Answer 47

grammar usage requires children represent something abstract about words
- what nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs are
- what the rules are about putting them together

Question 48

what is syntax

Answer 48

how do words go together in sentences

Question 49

what is morphology

Answer 49

how to change words to change meaning

Question 50

over- generalisation of English past tense

Answer 50

1. correct irregular usage - few irregulars
2. overgeneralisation
3. correct usage

Question 51

masken et al 2004 - overgeneralisation of past tense

Answer 51

brain overgenerlised about 14% of irregular verbs, overall.

most overgenerlised verb was go but he had heard went correctly > 1000 times before making error