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Developmental Psychology > Language Acquisition > Flashcards

Language Acquisition Flashcards

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1
Q

What 3 limitations are there to acquiring language?

A

Highly abnormal environmental conditions

Relative cognitive impairments

Critical period.

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2
Q

What is language specific to?

A

Humans

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3
Q

What 2 concepts does using language involve?

A
  1. Language comprehension

2. Language production

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4
Q

What are the 4 competencies needed to learn language?

A
  1. Phonological development.
  2. Semantic development.
  3. Syntactic development.
  4. Pragmatic development.
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5
Q

What is phonological development?

A

The acquisition of the sound system of the language the child is eposxed to.

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6
Q
  1. What are phonemes?
  2. What do sounds distinguish?
  3. how many phonemes does English use?
  4. Is there a difference in phonemes across languages?
A
  1. The individual elements of sound that make up words.
  2. Meaning e.g., difference between pot and cot is the initial phoneme.
  3. 40
  4. Yes, Japanese do not distinguish between I and R be cause these phonemes do not carry different meanings.
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7
Q

What is prosody?

A

The particular rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody and intonation pattern used when speaking a language.

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8
Q

What is semantic development?

A

The acquisition of meaning in a language, including lexical development (word learning).

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9
Q

What is a morpheme?

Give an example.

A

Words are composed of 1 or more morphemes, which is the smaller part of a word with meaning.

E.g., Chair is one morpheme but Chairs is 2 morphemes.

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10
Q

What are morphological rules?

A

A set of rules that specifies how morphemes combine to form words.

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11
Q

What is syntactic development?

A

The acquisition of the grammar of a language, which includes word order; subject-verb agreement etc.

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12
Q

What is syntax?

In what language is word order freee?

A

A set of rules that specifies how words can be combines to form sentences.

German.

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13
Q

What is pragmatic development?

What is type of language e.g., sarcasm, forms parts of the pragmatic of a language.

A

The acquisition of how a language is used in a particular society. E.g., can you open the window? can be interpreted as a request or as a question of someones ability to open a window.

Sarcasms, irony, commands, voice change form part of the pragmatic of a language.

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14
Q

What are the developmental milestones in acquiring language?

3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 2years, 3 years, 4 years & 5years

A

. 3 months - cooing & gurgling
. 6 months - babbling
. 12 months - first words.
. 18 months - knows 5 - 40 words.
. 2 years - 150 - 300 words, 2-3 sentences
. 3 years - 900-1K words, asks short questions.
. 4 years - 2K words, 5+ sentences.
. 5 years - identifies letters, creates longer sentences.

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15
Q

What are babies able to do re language at 0 months and 1 - 5 months?

A

0m - cry

1-5 - discriminate between sounds, more than adults can. e.g., still head experiments (using the 2 different ‘da’ sounds used in hindi).

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16
Q

Could babies speak language as soon as they are born? Why?

A

No, The velum it is much longer in infants than in adults, it goes lower in infants.
The epiglottis is nearly touching the velum in the infants but not in adults (large gap).
The infants larynx is higher up in infants and descends as you grow up.
They cannot speak as they have different physiology to adults to produce sounds of language.
Can start producing sounds of language at about 3 months.

Because the velum and epiglottis is so close together Abbies cannot choke while drinking milk.

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17
Q

What language sounds can babies produce at 5 - 8 months?

A

Early sounds i.e., babbling.

da, ta

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18
Q

How many words can 10 month old babies understand?

What types of words?

A

About 30 words.

Words that are related to them and concrete e.g., milk, mum, dad, bath, night-night.

However, they can understand the abstract word ‘no’.

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19
Q

What stage happens at 14 - 16 months?

What is this stage?

How many words in their vocabulary?

A

One word stage

Child starts producing words e..g, milk, dog etc.

around 50.

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20
Q

What stage happens at 18 - 24 months?

What is this stage?

How many words in Childs spoken vocabulary at 24 months?

How many words at 30 months?

A

Two word stage.

The child starts producing two word sentences e.g., mummy milk.

320.

600.

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21
Q

What happens to children language development from 36 months onwards.

A

Grammar explosion.

At about age 3, kids start rapidly adding inflections to many words.

Start using function words to make more complex sentences.

Age 5-6, vocab of about 15000 words, i.e., kids learn 10 new words a day from age 3.

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22
Q

Who uses infant-directed speech?

A

Adults and children when speaking to babies.

23
Q

What are the characteristics of infant-directed speech?

What about in sign language?

A
  • emotional tone: warm and affectionate.
  • exaggeration.
  • higher voice
  • extreme changes in intonation.
  • slow talk and longer pauses.
  • exaggerate facial expressions.

In sign language, exaggerate facial expressions and slow signing.

24
Q

Why is infant directed speech important?

A

It helps emphasise word and phrase boundaries making it easier for the baby to segment words from the continuous speech.

25
Q

What are the advantages of infant directed speech?

A

Helps babies build their own language abilities.

Helps establish a social bond with their parents, provides comfort.

Stimulates babies brains, preparing brains for learning.

26
Q

Why do babies pay attention to baby talk?

A

Like the baby talk, positive emotions.

Easier to understand.

27
Q

Give an example of a study regarding babies preference of infant directed speech?

Participants?

Method?

Results?

A

Werker (1994).

  • Chinese and American infants 4.5 - 9m.
  • both listened to Cantonese-speaking Chinese when talking to either a baby or to an adult friend.
  • Babies prefer to listen to a mother talking to her baby than the same mother talking to a friend (even in a different language).
28
Q

What did Thiessen et al., (2005) find regarding infants understanding to infant directed speech?

A

Infants exposed to the IDS were able to segment the speech while the control group could not do so.

(50 infants aged 7.5 - 8.5m)
(4 non word sentences )

29
Q

What did Masapollo et al., (2016) find regarding babies preference in speech?

A

Babies aged 4 - 6months prefer to listen to infants voice when producing sounds of language than an adults.

The babies smiled and paid more attention to infants voice.

The infant speech was higher pitch and format frequencies than adult voice, like in IDS.

30
Q

Babbling: What type of babbling sounds can infants vocalise from:

0-2 months?

2-3m?

4-6m?

6-10m?

A

comfort sounds (aaaa)

‘gooing’ sounds (gaagaaa)

Marginal babbling (Squalls, growls, whispers)

Consonant-vowel sounds (mama mama).

31
Q

What speech rhythms does babbling follow?

A

The ambient language - adults can recognise if a baby babble is French, cantonese or arabic.

32
Q

What is crucial for the development of babbling?

A

Imitation, deaf babies do not babble, but if they are exposed to sign language, they babble signs.

33
Q

What is silent babbling?

A

babies who are exposed to sign language of their deaf parents engage in ‘silent babbling’.

A subset of their hand movements differ from those of infants exposed to spoken language in that their rhythm corresponds to the rhythmic patterning of adult sign.

34
Q

What type of development is lexical development linked to?

A

Conceptual development

35
Q

What is fast mapping?

A

The process of rapidly learning a new word simply from the constrastive use of a familiar and unfamiliar word.

36
Q

What are the assumptions that guide children’s acquisition of word meanings?

A
  • the whole object assumption leads children to expect a novel word to refer to a whole object, not a part.
  • The mutual exclusivity assumption leads children to expect that a given entity will only have 1 name.
37
Q

What is overextension in early language?

When does this occur?

A

Using a single label for many things e.g., calling all animals dogs, or every man ‘daddy’

Before 2.6years of age.

38
Q

What did Fremgen 1980, study about overextension in early language find?

participants?

Task?

A

Words overextended in naming were not confused when choosing e.g., child asked for dog did not pick lion i.e., not semantically confused.

children aged between 1;2 and 2;2 years.

Name and choose the picture.

39
Q

What did Chomsky/Pinker believe re language?

Nativist

A

Language is too complex to be learnt only from experience, it must be prewired in babies brain.

The input kids receive was believed to be too impoverished to extract grammar.

40
Q

What was Chomsky/Pinkers response to poverty of input in language?

A

Infants are born with a special ‘language acquisition device’ - special neural architecture.

It is highly abstract, unconscious rules that are innate and common to all languages. Universal grammar.

41
Q

What evidence did Berki (1958) find for the production of grammatical rules/nativist approach?

Hints:
1. regularisation

  1. what do children extract from what?
  2. Do parents teach?
A
  • Regularisation applied to new words. Children could not have learned these words from the input.
  • This is clear evidence that children language acquisition is NOT based on imitation.
    Children extract rules from the language they are exposed to.
  • Parents do not teach grammar or correct for grammatical errors. When they do kids do not understand.
42
Q

What other evidence is there for the nativist view on language acquisition?

A

Typically developing children all over the world that are exposed to language acquire it.

Deaf children not exposed to sign language were able to create their own sign language.

43
Q

What criticism are there for the Language Acquisition Device and universal grammar concept?

A

LAD - Where is LAD in the brain? Suggested to be in Brocas area. But main evidence for this link is from brain damaged adults. Kids with brain damage do not always support LAD.

Universal Grammar - what is universal language? it has been very difficult to specify what this universal grammar looks like.

44
Q

Give an example of a study conducted re abstract rules; past tense, plurals.

What was analysed?

What were the results?

A

11,521 irregular past-tense utterances produced by 83 children in spontaneous speech.

Results:
Over regularisations were extremely rare.
Children tended not to make errors with frequent words but did with infrequent words.
Period of correct usage before errors appeared, but this would fit imitation of heard form, followed by faulty memory for verbs taking an irregular form when making analogies.

45
Q

What evidence did the Wug test provide?

A

High evidence of phonological influences on analogy. Also supporting Chomsky

46
Q

What did the initial Nicaragua Sign Language show?

What did deaf children exposed to a pidgin sign language show evidence of?

A

Patterns but not grammatical rules.

Some grammatical rules. But the sign language was created by a community and not an individual.

47
Q

What is crucial for learning language?

A

Experience of spoken language.

The frequency you hear the sounds and sound combinations that make words, phrases and grammatically correct utterances in your language is the basis from which you learn.

48
Q

What did Cameron-Faulker et al., (2003) find regarding mother-infant interactions?

A

Sample of middle class 12 English speaking mother-child dyads.

Found that:
Babies hear an average of 5K-7K utterances a day,
1/3 of utterances are questions.
More than half of utterance began with on of 52 highly frequent constructions e..g, ‘look at’

49
Q

what did Hart 7 Risley (1995) find in their study re socioeconomic background?

A

That socioeconomic background provided different experience to the babies, at least in the USA.

High SES families: 487 utterances an hour
Low SES families: 178 utterance per hour.

50
Q

What do Lieven et al., 1997 believe re Chomskys prewired theory?

A

They reject this neural architecture with innate knowledge of grammar.

They agree that children are innately born with the predisposition to learn language.
BUT
they reject the concept of an innate grammatical model.
They argue that children learn grammar as they learn everything else - thanks to vert general cognitive and perceptual skills.

51
Q

What did Lieven et al., (1997) and Tomasello (1998) say about the development of language?

A
  1. Children memorise words and phrases.
  2. Children use memorised phrases in very specific situations.
  3. At this stage kids do not know anything about grammar rules.

4, Child progressively builds a set of similar phrases.

  1. From all these similar phrases, the child then derives the frame/template. This gives the child a lot of productivity power.
  2. Children use analogies to produce brand new constructions.
  3. This abstraction is not related to language but is related to the general cognitive abilities of the child to be able to abstract patterns.
52
Q

What are the characteristics of the rote-memory proposal (Lieven (1997) & Tomasello (1998))?

A
  • Early speech is formed around verb forms learned by rote (verb-island hypothesis) e.g., drinking, daddy drinking.

This allows the child to gradually form longer and more complex sentences.

Adults language may also be constructed from these basic building blocks.

53
Q

According to the rote-memory proposal how might regularisation of new words be explained?

What is learning done through?

What do children use analogies to produce?

A

Not as rules of grammar but the general cognitive tendency to generalise across a collection of similar examples.

The same pattern finding mechanisms of statistical probability, categorisation and inductive learning.

Brand new constructions.

54
Q

What are the strengths of Lieven et al., and Tomasello’s proposal?

A
  • Seems to be a better account of actual Childs language.
  • it integrates the development of language with the general cognitive processes.
  • Social and communicative aspects of language are very important.
  • It provides an account of how a child can develop language without the need for an innate mechanisms.

Developmental Psychology (9 decks)

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