Language Acquisition

Question 1

Speech processing before birth and infants’ perception of phonemes:

Question 2

Changes in heart rate in response to sound

Answer 2

When you introduce a sound to the baby in the womb,
0ms sound introduced showed:

35 weeks (last weeks of pregnancy)= foetal heart rate change

Question 3

De Casper & Spence (1986) showed that babies are actively processing speech before birth. They can recognise a story that they have heard while still in the womb.

What is this term known as?

Answer 3

Transnatal Learning

Babies code information in womb before birth
then show recognition outside the womb - post natal period

Question 4

De Casper & Spence (1986)

12 pregnant women read a passage from The Cat in the Hat 2x per day for last 6 weeks of pregnancy
Story chosen because it has a very regular rhyme:

“But our fish said, “No no!
Make that cat go away!
Tell that Cat in a Hat
You do NOT want to play!”

2/3 days after birth babies were tested for recognition using a sucking response (presure sensitive dummy measures how strong the sucking response is)

Answer 4

Sucking played either a recording of The Cat in the Hat or another (unfamiliar) passage

Babies altered sucking pattern to hear the familiar passage but not the unfamiliar one

Change in sucking occurred irrespective of whether mother or unfamiliar person read The Cat in the Hat (its about what they have heard)

So babies were recognising the story rather than the mother’s voice

Found, increased amount of sucking when hearing familiar book passage, were particularly motivated to suck more

Cannot hear details but can hear base notes of music, rhythem, pitch of voices/sound (rather than actual words) Porosity

Question 4

when does this change occur where babies can distinguish p from other languages but adults can?

Werker & Tees (1984)
How does language experience shape the infant’s speech perception?
Compared babies from language communities where the phonemes (speech sounds) differed
English
Hindi

E.g. Can English babies discriminate between Hindi /Da/ vs. /da/?

Answer 4

Conditioned headturn paradigm

Whenever there is a change in the auditory stimulus, an electric toy is lit up and activated.
Infants are thus trained to look at the toy whenever they hear a change. (begin to get conditioned)
Then the target items are played, and an observed (who cannot hear the sounds) judges whether the infant heard a stimulus change based on the infant’s actions.

Question 4

Telling languages apart:

Christophe and Morton (1998)

Presented 2-month-old English babies with two different language comparisons
English vs Japanese (different rhythmical - or prosodic - pattern)
English vs Dutch (more similar in prosody)

What were the findings?

Answer 4

Babies could tell the difference between English and Japanese but not English and Dutch

Babies can use prosody to distinguish languages
Languages with similar prosody are harder to understand

The ability to distinguish languages is particularly useful for infants growing up in multilingual environments as languages have different rules, may mix up and not sort the gramatical rules per language, makes it more coherent/ structured implicitly in the womb

Question 4

Can infants tell apart different phonemes?
Eimas et al (1971) pioneered the High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) paradigm to test infants’ discrimination of speech sounds
infant is shown same sound stimui again and again gets bored, then show new sound stimuli, then measure response to see if they are interested - by testing sucking rate (evidence they have discriminated between old and new sound between p and b sound

Phase 1: babies aged from 1 to 4 months presented with the single sound /ba/
Babies increased their rate of sucking then their sucking rate settled back to the baseline.
Phase 2: Once the babies had habituated to /b/ a new but similar sound was played.
Half the babies heard a different phoneme /p/
Half heard a variant of /b/

Answer 4

did sucking rate revive?

Babies who heard /p/ increased sucking rate
Babies who heard /b/ did not increase sucking rate

inbuild mechanism for distinguishing language aqusition

Question 4

What are Phonems?

Answer 4

The smallest sound unit that carry distinctions between one meaning and another e.g. /b/ and /p/

It’s crucial to be able to tell apart different phonemes (e.g. /b/and /p/)

Question 4

Perceptual narrowing in speech perception:

babies differences in ability to tell appart Phonems in their native language compared to other languages

Newborn babies have the potential to make any phonetic discrimination

Adults do not have this same ability

They are often unable to hear phonetic distinctions that occur in other languages but not their own cannot hear phonetic distinctions in other languages for adults

Question 4

Babies’ ability to tell the difference between similar phonemes in different languages:

Found?

Answer 4

Ability to differentiate language occurs in the first year of life

babies - 1 are universal babies

Question 4

What are Phoneme boundaries?

Answer 4

Where a physical parameter, such as voice onset time, changes perception from one phoneme /b/ to another /p/

It’s crucial to perceive different variants of the same phoneme as the same (i.e. to perceive all instances of /p/ sounds as /p should be filtered out by the baby)

Question 4

Perceptual narrowing of speech in infancy:

Answer 4

Infants are initially universal language perceivers
Language-specific experience provides infants with continuing exposure to native contrasts and no exposure to non-native ones
System becomes fine-tuned to relevant contrasts
Become specialists in the phonology (sounds) , semantics and grammar of their native tongue.
meanings are interpreted better

Question 4

Why do infants stop perceiving phonetic differences in other languages?

(i.e. why is this beneficial?)

Answer 4

Makes child’s processing ability to make sense of the world more efficient

system becomes intunned to pick up on the most important lingiustic imput
tune out on irrelivant sound info

makes system more efficient

to just focuse on the most important sounds

Question 4

“Perceptual narrowing” in infancy:
Face processing

Answer 4

6 month old babies can distinguish from monkey faces

Adults: find it easier to distinguish faces from our own race, babies can distinguish faces from own and other races

• ESSAY making system efficient is to do with processing inn general not just language according to the community thy grow up in

Question 4

Experience of a foreign language can reverse the decline in non-native speech perception (Kuhl et al., 2003)

Chinese Speech Discrimination:
Found?

Answer 4

American infants exposed to Chinese did aswell as Chinese infants:

12 sessions of being exposed to Chinese
naturalistic social interactions only= reversal, decline of improvement

Question 4

What is the Preferential listening paradigm?

Answer 4

Infants sit on their caregiver’s lap in a test booth.

On each trial, one of the side lights flash, and when the infant orients to the light, sounds come from that speaker.

The experimenter records how long the infants looks at the “source” of the sound (the flashing light) as a measure of the infant’s preference.

Question 4

How infants identify word boundaries:

Speech segmentation
no pauses between words

Jusczyk & Aslin (1995)
Familiarised 7.5 month infants to repetitions of sentences.
Contains two target words.

Test trials:
Then, tested on target and novel individual words using the preferential listening (head turn preference) paradigm, they test whether they showed discrimination between target and novel words.

Found:

Answer 4

Found: at 7.5 months Familiarised 7.5 month infants to repetitions of sentences
Containing two target words
Then, tested on target and novel individual words
Show difference in response to words that had been embedded in the familiarisation sentences (listened for longer when heard the target words)

By 7.5 months, infants have at least some rudimentary ability to detect words when they occur in fluent speech contexts. BUT how are they doing this??

Question 4

Name 2 Implicit discovery cues in the language input:

Answer 4

1- They use prosodic cues (e.g. syllable stress)
2- Attend to transitional probabilities

Question 4

In English 90% words have the stress on the first syllable:
strong-weak stress pattern (apple, match) (not guiTar)

Babies could use presence of stressed syllable as a guide to the beginning of a word (would be correct most of the time).

Answer 4

They use prosodic cues (e.g. syllable stress)

implicitly pick up on the strong sylable at the beginning statistical information babies use for identifying new words
-Jusczyk, Cutler & Redanz (1993)

Question 4

What is the Preferential listening paradigm used to measure?

Answer 4

infants looking preference

What do babies prefer to listen to? new words or target words that had previously been imbedded into the sentences

Question 4

When adults talk in a higher pitch with more exaggerated intonation contours, shorter utterances, longer pauses and
simplified sentence structures, this is known as?

Answer 4

Infant directed speech (ID)

Question 4

Statistical learning:

What are Transitional probabilities?

Answer 4

syllable y follows syllable s

certain syllables occur more than others

TP = probability of one syllable following another
Certain sequences of syllables will occur more often than others
More commonly occurring sequences are likely to be words
pretty baby: Saffran et al. (1996); Johnson and Jusczyk (2001)

pre + ty
ty + ba
ba + by speech stream no pause between prettybaby

Transitional probability that ty will be followed by ba is lower than either of the two word-internal transitional probabilities
(i.e. pre followed by ty or ba followed by by)

Question 4

Syllable stress?

Are infants sensitive to the predominant English stress patterns?

Jusczyk, Cutler & Redanz (1993) found
Compared strong-weak with weak-strong words

Answer 4

At 6 months showed no preference but by 9 months spent longer listening to strong-weak lists

at 6-9 months infants become more sensitive to syllable stress so it is important to talk to your baby (however only english babies)

Question 4

Saffran et al. (1996); Johnson and Jusczyk (2001)
Investigated the use of transitional probabilities in the detection of word boundaries by 8-month-old infants

Invented ‘words’ by taking 12 syllables and combining them into four sequences to make:
pa/ki/bu
ti/bo/du
go/la/tu
da/ro/pi

Repeated these words in a random order for babies, (no pauses)

Answer 4

They expected that the t b for the words would be higher for the words than the tb that occur not for the same words

Phase 1 (familiarization phase )
8 month old infants heard the ‘words’ repeated over and over in random order with no pauses between them
pa/ki/ bu, ti/bo/du, go/ la/tu and da/ro/pi

In all, they listened to the syllables for 2 minutes
In this way, transitional probabilities could be used to distinguish ‘words’ from other syllable sequences

found: tibodu/ golatu- original word list following syllables they identified more

Phase 2 (test phase )
Infants were presented with the 4 ‘words’
They also heard part-words where syllables from two words were recombined e,g, tudaro, was formed golatu + daropi
Could the babies distinguish words from part-words?
Attention to words and part-words was measured by orientation to loud speaker

Found: showing novelty response

Question 4

Which of these syllable sequences has a higher Transitional Probability?

tibodu or kibugo
pipaki or golatu

Answer 4

tibodu/ golatu- original word list following syllables

babiea are able to make use of tb likely hood sylable follow despite not being able to speak

Question 4

Early word comprehension:

What is a word In comprehension?

Answer 4

Consistent and specific response to the use of a word
Must be response to word itself rather than nonverbal cues

-remembering sounds
-linking with consistent sounds

Question 4

Saffran et al. (1996); Johnson and Jusczyk (2001)

Answer 4

Mean orientation time to words and part-words

Question 4

What is a word in production?

Answer 4

Consistent use of a sound sequence in a consistent and specific context

producing words requires additional cognitive demands
-repeat sounds
-say it in appropriate contexts

Question 5

Parental reports - Communicative Development Inventory (CDI)
Home observations/video recordings

ESSAY;

parents are given this
this body of evidence- gelogically valid way of finding out what babies know
_ reliability bias over report what child knows (not says)
social desiarability bias (may present their child in a good light)
lack of control out side of lab so lacks validity

Answer 5

In lab, ask infants to choose named object from an array (e.g. Golnikoff et al., 1987) or use preferential looking paradigm

Question 6

Early word comprehension for socially salient words:

6-month old infants
Hear recordings of a voice saying ‘mummy’ or ‘daddy’ while viewing two monitors, one showing video of their mother, one of their father
Infants looked more at the video matching the word heard

Answer 6

essay.

Early word comprehension:
By 6-9 months infants know the meaning of many common nouns such as food and body parts
Demonstrate greater looking toward object in picture that matches the word in the phrase: “Look at the X”

Question 6

Name 3 ways of measuring babies comprehension:

Answer 6

Parental reports - Communicative Development Inventory (CDI)

Home observations/video recordings

In lab, ask infants to choose named object from an array (e.g. Golnikoff et al., 1987) or use preferential looking paradigm

Question 6

Research shows Children understand their first words at 6-9 months
Understanding of words increases slowly at first then accelerates for most children: this is known as?

Answer 6

“Fast mapping”

The ability to form quick and rough (but usually) accurate hypotheses about the meaning of new words from how it’s used in a sentence
At 16 months range is 70 – 270 words for typically developing children

Question 7

caregiving has strong links to infant talking
plus quality of the environment they are bought up in

Answer 7

Infants are sensitive to prosody and rhythm in speech even before birth.
Infants can discriminate speech sounds from a very young age.
Experience-dependency: Infants acquire knowledge of native sound patterns very quickly, and sensitivity to non-native contrasts declines rapidly.
General perceptual narrowing mechanism – not language specific
Infants have a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical regularities in the language input.
From 6 months infants begin to comprehend the meaning of words.
Large individual differences in vocabulary knowledge is related to the quality of the linguistic input provided by caregivers.