Language Acquisition Flashcards

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1
Q

When does hearing begin?

A
  • weeks 23-28 in pregnancy = no response in fetal HR to an external sound meaning they can’t hear it
  • around 29 weeks in pregnancy there is an obvious response
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2
Q

Speech processing before birth, De Casper & Spence (1986)

A
  • showed that babies are actively processing speech before birth.
  • this is called “transnatal learning”
  • 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
  • 2/3 days after birth babies were tested for recognition using a sucking response
  • 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
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3
Q

Telling languages apart, Christophe and Morton (1998)

A
  • 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)
  • Babies could tell the difference between English and Japanese but not English and Dutch
  • Babies can use prosody to distinguish languages
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4
Q

what is a phoneme?

A

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

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5
Q

what are phoneme boundaries?

A

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

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6
Q

what is it crucial to tell different phonemes apart?

A

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/)

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7
Q

Infants’ early discrimination of speech sounds, Eimas et al (1971)

A
  • pioneered the High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) paradigm to test infants’ discrimination of speech sounds
  • 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/

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

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8
Q

who can make better phonetic discriminations, adults or babies?

A

Babies. This is because a baby can be born into any country speaking any language

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9
Q

Perceptual narrowing of speech in infancy

A
  • 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, semantics and grammar of their native tongue.
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10
Q

Developmental changes in language acquisition, Werker & Tees (1984)

A
  • Compared babies from language communities where the phonemes differed
  • English and Hindi
  • Wanted to look at whether babies can discriminate between Hindi /Da/ vs. /da/?
  • Infants are trained to look at a toy when there is a change in sound
  • 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.
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11
Q

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

A
  • a group of english speaking babies and Chinese speaking babies
  • Chinese speaking babies are better at distinguishing between Chinese sounds than English babies who have only been exposed to English
  • Found that English babies who have been exposed to Chinese sounds performed just as well as Chinese babies
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12
Q

Diversity and representation in studies of infant perceptual narrowing of speech, Singh et al. (2022)

A
  • Darker shading represents greater relative density of study populations sampled in that region.
  • Language background of monolingual participants.
    -This depicts the proportion of monolingual infants’ language background in prior studies on perceptual narrowing.
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13
Q

Infants’ ability to extract words from fluent speech, Jusczyk & Aslin (1995)

A
  • Familiarised 7.5 month infants to repetitions of sentences.
  • Containing two target words.
  • Then, tested on target and novel individual words using the preferential listening (head turn preference) paradigm.
  • By 7.5 months, infants have at least some rudimentary ability to detect words when they occur in fluent speech contexts
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14
Q

what is the preferential listening paradigm?

A
  • 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.
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15
Q

How can babies tell where one word ends and the next begins?

A
  1. They are helped by Infant directed speech (ID)
  2. Implicit discovery in the language input: using prosodic cures, attend to transitional probabilities
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16
Q

How can syllable stress affect how babies tell when words begin and end?

A
  • In English 90% words have the stress on the first syllable:
    strong-weak stress pattern
  • babies could use presence of stressed syllable as a guide to the beginning of a word
17
Q

Infants’ sensitivity to syllable stress, Jusczyk, Cutler & Redanz (1993)

A
  • Compared strong-weak with weak-strong words
  • 6- and 9-month English infants
  • At 6 months showed no preference but by 9 months spent longer listening to strong-weak lists
18
Q

Statistical learning: Transitional probabilities (TP)

A
  • 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

e.g. pretty baby: Saffran et al. (1996); Johnson and Jusczyk (2001)
- can be spilt into pre + ty,
ty + ba , ba + by
- 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)

19
Q

Statistical learning: Transitional probabilities cont. Saffran et al. (1996); Johnson and Jusczyk (2001)

A
  • 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
    Phase 1 (familiarization phase )
  • 8 month old infants heard the ‘words’ repeated over and over in random order with no pauses between them
  • 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
    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
  • Attention to words and part-words was measured by orientation to loud speaker
  • they have a novelty preference

implications
- At 8 months, infants were able to segment a continuous stream of speech based on statistical cues alone
- Suggests infants have a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical regularities in the language input
- Bias to selectively attend to certain properties in the acoustic signal

20
Q

What is a word?

A

In comprehension
- Consistent and specific response to the use of a word
- Must be response to word itself rather than nonverbal cues
In production
- Consistent use of a sound sequence in a consistent and specific context

21
Q

what are the 3 ways to measure comprehension?

A
  1. Parental reports - Communicative Development Inventory (CDI)
  2. Home observations/video recordings
  3. In lab, ask infants to choose named object from an array (e.g. Golnikoff et al., 1987) or use preferential looking paradigm
22
Q

Early word comprehension for socially salient words, Tincoff & Jusczyk, (1999)

A
  • 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
23
Q

Early word comprehension, Bergelson & Swingley, 2012; 2015)

A
  • 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”
  • parents underestimated the words their baby would know
24
Q
A