Language Acquisition Flashcards
De Casper and Spence (1986) investigated transnatal learning. What is this?
Transnatal learning is learning that occurs first in the womb and is carried with the baby after they are born.
What did De Casper and Spence (1986) use to investigate transnatal learning?
They had pregnant women about to give birth read the Cat in the Hat to their baby.
Whether or not the baby recognised the story was identified by changes in sucking response. Baseline sucking response measured.
What did De Casper and Spence (1986) find when the Cat in the Hat or another unfamiliar passage was played to the babies in response to their sucking?
Babies altered sucking pattern to hear the familiar message.
Changes in sucking occurred irrespective of whether the mother or an unfamiliar person read The Cat in the Hat. This shows that babies were recognising the story rather than the mother’s voice.
De Casper did a follow up study into speech recognition. What did he do different compared to the 1986 study?
What was found?
The study was in utero.
Counterbalanced for the possibility of the familiar story just being intrinsically more interesting by having one baby more familiar with the opposite story to the other babies.
Foetal HR decreased significantly to familiar rhymes only.
Infants are sensitive to which two things in speech from a very young age?
Prosody and rhythm
Infants can discriminate speech sounds and they show categorical perception.
What is categorical perception in relation to phonemes?
The ability to perceive a difference in phonemes across a category. E.g Infants can perceive a difference between Ba and Pa.
In Eimas 1971 study using High Amplitude Sucking, the babies were habituated to “pa”. what happened in phase 2?
Phase 2- half of the babies either heard a different phoneme “ba” or a variant of “pa”.
Eimas found that babies who heard “ba” increased sucking rate whereas babies who heard “pa” didnt increase sucking rate.
What can be concluded about speech perception in infants?
Infants as young as 1-4 months show categorical perception( pa and ba) but like adults find it difficult to discriminate between within category phonemes.
Babies have the ability to tell the difference between similar phonemes in different languages. But what occurs as they get older?
Perceptual narrowing.
Werker & Tees (1984):
From 6-8 months babies are equally good at discriminating between contrasts in Hindi and English.
At 10-12 months babies were at adult level with responding to contrasts in both Hindi and English.
Werker and Tees (1984) used the conditioned headturn paradigm when investigating whether infants can discriminate between phonemes in different languages.
Describe this paradigm.
Conditioned headturn paradigm:
Werker and Tees (1984) used the conditioned headturn paradigm when investigating whether infants can discriminate between phonemes in different languages.
Describe this paradigm.
Conditioned headturn paradigm:
- Whenever there was a change in the stimulus heard, a toy would light up.
- Infants were trained to look at the toy whenever they heard a change.
- Target stimulus presented and an observer who can’t hear the stimulus judges whether the infant heard a stimulus change by their actions.
Which researcher has contributed greatly to understanding facilitation for native discrimination and the decline in non-native discrimination of phonemes?
Kuhl et al 2006
Kuhl proposed a neural commitment model. How does this model explain language acquisition?
It states that when babies are exposed very early to a particular language their neurons become committed to the acoustic properties of that language and this commitment interferes with foreign language processing, making it less efficient.
Effects of age and language experience (Kuhl et al., 2006).
Briefly outline the study.
Phonemes from the american language ra and la were used.
American and Japanese babies were tested at 6-8 months and then at 10-12 months.
At 6-8 months the babies performed at the same level but at 10-12 months, a decline was seen in the Japanese babies and an increase in the American babies.
How did Kuhl provide evidence for sensitivity to native sound patterns being experience dependent?
She conducted a study with American infants who were exposed to Chinese and those exposed to English.
Comparing this to the previous study with the Chinese and English infants.
American infants exposed to Chinese performed at the same level as the Chinese infants when discriminating Mandarin.
