language acquisition 2

Question 1

learning words is difficult

Answer 1

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

Question 2

fast mapping - Carey, 1978

Answer 2

• Ability to quickly link (map) a novel name to a novel object, typically by applying known information
  
  • 13 out of 14 children brought the olive green tray
    One week later… 9 out 0f 13 children chose green or olive green (the original study does not specify which)

Question 3

word learning as a dynamic system

Answer 3

· 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 4

examples of word learning - now

Answer 4

· 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 (Perry and Saffran, 2017)
· Its easier to choose the correct object if nothing else was named (Axelsson and Horst, 2013)

Question 5

examples of word learning - recent past

Answer 5

· Its harder to learn words from books with more illustrations (Flack and Horst, 2018)
· Its easier to remember object names if you were exposed to several examples from the category (Twomey, Ranson, and Horst, 2014)
· Its harder to do well if the experimenter changes (Goldernberg and Sandhofer, 2013)

Question 6

closer look - example of past imapcting word learning

Answer 6

· Do children learn words better from:
- – 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 7

method

Answer 7

• created 9 childrens books - each book depicted 2 novel objects 4x
• story order counterbalanced across children
• all children tested on immediate recall
• and on retention for words from days 1 and 2

Question 8

recall and retention

Answer 8

· 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!

Question 9

why does repetition help?

Answer 9

• know what to expect - focus on finer details on repeated readings

Question 10

closer look - example of post impacting word learning

Answer 10

· Do children learn words better from naptime stories?
· Read 3.5 year children storybooks 3x in 1 week
· Tested immediate recall for novel words
· Tested retention for novel words

Question 11

recall and retention

Answer 11

• both story repetition and sleep facilitated word learning

Question 12

babbling and starting to speak

Answer 12

· Canonical babbling is a string of adult-like consonant-vowel sequences (Oller, 2000)
· Onset of canonical babbling predicts onset of first words e.g., (McGilllion, et al., 2017)
· Children who begin babbling later have smaller productive vocabularies relative to their peers (Keren-Portnoy, et al., 2009)

Question 13

vocabulary explosion

Answer 13

· At first glance it appears that children have a vocabulary
· explosion between 18-20mo.
· During this word spurt, children may say about 20 new words/week (see Mitchell & McMurray, 2009 for a review).
· However, the “sudden increase” is really due to learning multiple words at the same time and
· some words are more difficult than others and take longer to learn (McMurray, 2007).

Question 14

combining words

Answer 14

· Children start speaking their first sentences at around 24mo
· Children begin showing signs of syntax with “telegraphic speech”
- Simple sentences
- Usually two words (noun + noun or noun + verb)
- No function words

Question 15

late talkers

Answer 15

· Not all children experience such rapid productive vocabulary growth (see Rescorla, 2007)
· Late talkers learn 3-5 words/week (Rescorla, 2000; cf. 20words/week, Mitchell & McMurray, 2009)
· Late talkers are children in the bottom 15 th percentile for language
· At 24mo they say fewer than 50 words and/or do not combine words (see e.g., Capone Singleton, 2018)
· Some late talkers are “late bloomers” who nearly catch up to their peers before they start school (Capone Singleton, 2018).
· Other late talkers go on to be diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder.
· 2 children per reception class have clinically significant language delays – often undiagnosed (Norbury et al., 2016)
· Weaker language skills put children at risk of poor social abilities (Longobardi et al., 2016); self regulation (Aro et al., 2014); victimisation (Conti-Ramsden & Botting, 2004); poor self-esteem (Jerome et al., 2004) …

Question 16

what if you dont know the right word?

Answer 16

· Overextension: extend a known word to something beyond current vocabulary (Clark, 1978).
· Typically occurs between 12-30mo (Clark, 1973).

Question 17

overextensions

Answer 17

• children make three types of over-extensions
• categorical relation (taxonomy)
• analogical relation (perception)
• predicate based relation (co-occurrence)

Question 18

grammar - syntax and morphology

Answer 18

· Children also must learn syntax – how do words go together in sentences?
· And morphology – how to change words to change meanings (e.g., panda to pandas)
· Grammar usage requires children represent something abstract about words:
- What nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs are
- What the rules are about putting them together

Question 19

english past tense verbs

Answer 19

· 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 U-shaped tend in past-tense morphology

Question 20

overgeneralisation of english past tense

Answer 20

· Three phases:
1. Correct irregular usage (few irregulars) - “gave”
2. Overgeneralisation - “gived” or “hurted”
Correct usage - “gave”

Question 21

overgeneralisation of past tense

Answer 21

• Maslen et al., (2004)
  
  • Brian overgenerlised about 14% of irregular verbs, overall.
  • Most overgenerlised verb was “go,” but he had heard “went” correctly > 1000 times before making error.
    · Many connectionist, neural networks show the same pattern of behaviour as children
    · Regularisation occurs because it is the most common/abstract pattern

Question 22

language summary

Answer 22

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