Language Acquisition 2

Question 1

Learning words is ______?

Answer 1

Difficult
There are arguably infinite possible meanings for new words (Quine, 1960)

Question 2

How Do You Know They Know What a Word Means?

Answer 2

context, repetition, feedback, associating words (patterns), non-verbal cues

Question 3

Fast Mapping (Carey, 1978)
What is it?

Answer 3

Ability to quickly link (map) a novel name to a novel object, typically by applying known information.

Question 4

Fast Mapping (Carey, 1978)
Task and results

Answer 4

Task:
Kids in daycare setting
“Bring me the chromium tray, not the blue one, the chromium one.”

Result:
13 out of 14 children brought the olive green tray

Task:
One week later… “which one is the chromium one?”

Result:
9 out of 13 children chose green or olive green (the original study does not specify which)

This suggests, after short exposure, kids can link a word to what it means

Question 5

Word learning as a Dynamic system:
What is word learning a product of (nested timescales)?

Answer 5

• what the child is seeing/doing now
• what the child just did
• and the child’s developmental history

Question 6

Examples of Word Learning: Now

Answer 6

What are children being asked to do on the test?

It’s easier to point to something than to
say a new word (Gordon & McGregor, 2014)

It’s harder to choose a known object in an unfamiliar colour (Perry & Saffran, 2017)

It’s easier to choose the correct object if nothing
else was named (Axelsson & Horst, 2013)

Question 7

Examples of Word Learning: Recent Past

Answer 7

What were children just exposed to?

It’s harder to learn words from books with more illustrations (Flack & Horst, 2018)
(when you’re seeing less at once- it helps you narrow you’re focus)

It’s easier to remember object names if you were
exposed to several examples from the
category (Twomey, Ranson & Horst, 2014)

It’s harder to do well if the experimenter changes
(Goldenberg & Sandhofer (2013)

Question 8

Example of Past Impacting Word Learning

List two options impacting whether children learn better + method

Answer 8

Encountering the same words across different stories
or
Encountering the words in the same story repeatedly?

• Read 3.5yr children storybooks 3x in 1 week
• Tested immediate recall for novel words
• Tested retention for novel words

Question 9

Horst, Parsons & Bryan (2011)
Method

Answer 9

• We created 9 children’s books
• Each book depicted 2 novel objects(unusual), named 4x in each book
• story order counterbalanced across children
• half of the kids were shown 3 different stories on each day
• same stories condition- heard 1 story on the first day, a different on the second and a different on the third
• All children tested on immediate recall
• And on retention for words from Days 1 & 2
• Give kids 4 pictures and ask them to point to the object

Question 10

Horst, Parsons & Bryan (2011)
Recall and retention results

Answer 10

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

dotted line- what kids behaviour would be like if it was random/ they were behaving by chance

Question 11

Why does repetition help? + example

Answer 11

Know what to expect: focus on finer details on repeated readings

Eg.
Meet mum, meet Sophie, meet the tiger, they sit together, they have cake for tea details like yellow table or new words

Question 12

Examples of word learning: Dev. history

Answer 12

Trauma, neglect, socio-economic differences, environment you grow up in

Question 13

Example of Past Impacting Word Learning

Answer 13

• Do children learn words better from Naptime stories?
• Read 3.5yr children storybooks 3x in 1 week
• Tested immediate recall for novel words
• Tested retention for novel words

Question 14

Williams & Horst (2014)
Method

Answer 14

1- read kids either the same stories 3x or different stories 3x
2- tested them immediately
3- in each condition, some kids had a nap and some kids had no nap
4- about 2 and a half hours later, they had a retention test
5- 24 hours later they had another retention test
6- 7 days later they had another retention test

Question 15

Williams & Horst (2014)
Recall and retention results

Answer 15

Both story repetition and sleep facilitated word learning

At the beginning, all kids from the same stories condition were performing better. The kids which napped in this condition did better.

The kids who had the different stories and didn’t nap never caught up to the other kids.

Therefore, we can see Matthew effect- depending on where you’re starting, you’re path will diverge

Question 16

Babbling and starting to speak:
1- what age do infants start babbling?
2- what is canonical babbling?
3- what does onset of babbling predict?
4- what happens to children who begin babbling later?

Answer 16

1- Infants begin babbling around 6 months
2- Canonical babbling is a string of adult like consonant-vowel sequences
3- Onset of canonical babbling predicts onset of first words
4- Children who begin babbling later have smaller productive vocabularies relative to their peers (Keren-Portnoy, et al., 2009)

Question 17

Vocabulary Explosion
1- At first glance where does it appear that children have a vocabulary explosion
2- During this word spurt, how many new words do children say?
3- what is this “sudden increase” really due to?

Answer 17

1- between 18-20 months
2- about 20 new words/ week
3- due to learning multiple words at the same time and some words are more difficult than others and take longer to learn

Question 18

Combining words:
1- when do children start speaking their first sentences?
2- What do children start showing signs of + examples?

Answer 18

1- around 24 months
2- Children begin showing signs of syntax with “telegraphic speech”
– Simple sentences
– Usually two words (noun + noun or noun + verb)
– No function words (of, prepositions)

Question 19

Late talkers (not experiencing rapid production vocab growth):
1- how many words do they learn/ week
2- what percentile are they in?
3- at 24 months how many fewer words do they say?

Answer 19

1- 3-5 words/week
2- bottom 15th percentile for language
3- fewer than 50 words and/or they don’t combine words

Question 20

Late talkers:
1- what can be different outcomes for late talkers?
2- diagnosis statistic?
3- implications of weaker language skills?

Answer 20

1- Some late talkers are “late bloomers” who nearly catch up to their peers before they start school where as other late talkers go on to be diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder.

2- 2 children per reception class have clinically significant language delays – often undiagnosed (Norbury et al., 2016)

3- Weaker language skills put children at risk of poor social abilities, self regulation, victimisation, poor self-esteem.

Question 21

What if You Don’t Know the Right Word?
- what is it called?
- when does it occur?

Answer 21

Overextension: extend a known word to something beyond current vocabulary (Clark, 1978).

Typically occurs between 12-30 months

Question 22

Overextensions:
What are the 3 types children make?

Answer 22

1- categorical relation (taxonomy
eg. calling a squirrel a dog

2- analogical relation (perception)
eg. two objects looking similar - call an apple a ball

3- predicate-based relation (co-occurrence)
eg. refer to lock as key due to being closely related

(Useful for thinking about what are the patters children are learning)

Question 23

What else do children need to learn?

Answer 23

• Syntax (how do words go together in sentences)
• Morphology (how to change words to change meanings e.g., panda to pandas)

Question 24

What does grammar usage require children to do?

Answer 24

Grammar usage requires children represent something abstract about words:
– What nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs are
– What the rules are about putting them together eg. little red house instead of red little house

Question 25

English Past Tense Verbs:
- list common verbs children use?
- what are these verbs?
- what does this tend to show?

Answer 25

• Verbs children learn early include come/came; do/did; get/got; give/gave; go/went; is/was; take/took.
• These verbs are irregular (they do not follow –ed rule)
• English-learning children show a Ushaped tend in past-tense morphology

Question 26

Overgeneralisation of English Past Tense

Three phases

Answer 26

1. Correct irregular usage (few irregulars) – “gave”
2. Overgeneralisation – “gived” or “hurted”
3. Correct usage – “gave”

Question 27

Overgeneralisation of Past Tense
Case study of child

Answer 27

Brian overgeneralised about 14% of irregular verbs, overall.

Most overgeneralised verb was “go,” but he had heard “went” correctly > 1000 times before making error.

Question 28

Overgeneralisation of Past Tense
- what show the same pattern of behaviour as children?
- what occurs?

Answer 28

• Many connectionist, neural networks show the same pattern of behaviour as children
• Regularisation occurs because it is the most common/abstract pattern

Its all patterns

Question 29

Language questions
1- what is language?
2- when do children begin learning language, what is there?
3- what can toddlers do?
4- what supports this learning?
5- what is the product of nested timescales?

Answer 29

1- Language is a system of rules with patterns
2- Children begin learning language very early in development but there is a lot of variability
3- Toddlers can guess, remember (retain) and extend meanings (e.g., shape bias), but there is still a lot to learn
4- Children’s domain general learning processes support this learning
5- Language proficiency is the product of nested timescales