Language Acquisition Flashcards
central questions of language acquisition
- can language be learnt through experience?
2. what needs to be hard-wired?
nativist view
Language unlearnable
Innate language mechanism = knowledge of universal properties of language i.e. GRAMMAR
role of environment to
- “tune parameters” to specific language
- provide input necessary to acquire lexical forms
cognitivist view
Language acquired through general learning mechanisms -aided by dispositions /constraints
acquire basic cognitive concepts eg object permanence; agent/patient; action/ causation
➔ extract linguistic terms for objects, concepts
➔extract systematic properties of how these forms can be used
Preverbal development
Language acquisition begins before birth
• children who are only a few days old can discriminate forward from backward speech; their language/mother’s voice
➔ language/speaker properties of prosody “filtered” by the womb
major problems for infants to solve
segmentation
invariance/variability
- > need to be solved to extract language units and rules
- > no top-down knowledge to resolve them
major problems for investigators to solve
How can you find out what a preverbal infant knows, thinks etc?
Novelty/Habituation procedures
• infants become habituated to familiar vs unfamiliar objects etc
• can use fixation time to assess similarity/memory to other stimuli
Contingent reinforcement procedures
• teach child to make response for a stimulus eg sucking, head turn
• Use infant behaviour to measure “interest”, novelty, habituation
Course of language acquisition
0-6 MONTHS
• discriminate speech from non-speech, own language, mother’s soon after birth
• “categorical perception” of phonemes from a variety of languages
• communication by cries, gurgles, smiles
6-12 MONTHS
• categorical perception narrows to own language
e.g. 6-8 mo US and Jap infants no difference in r/l but 10-12 mo showed difference
e.g. american kids listening to mandarin for 10 months as sensitive as taiwanese kids
BUT MUST be face-to-face
• “reduplicative babbling” eg bababa and “sign babbling” in deaf children
12 MONTHS
• first word productions from 10-11 months (comprehension earlier) usually labels
(eg car, water, Teddy) actions (eg give, up, open) descriptors (eg big, more) or “social” (eg bye, hi, no); some “holophrases” (eg up; more)
18 MONTHS
• beginning of “naming explosion”
• two-word utterances (eg more cookie, up me)
• “telegraphic speech”: short, omit function words (eg sit chair, lettuce all gone)
2+ YEARS
• 3+ word utterances; consistent (if not correct) word order
• gradual development of syntax, morphology eg Daddy coming, Daddy went
• negation; question intonation; complex sentences eg watch me draw circle
development of phonemic categories
babies < 6 months are sensitive to both native and non-native contrasts eg pre-voiced in English; voicing in Kikuyu; r/l in Japanese
➔ young infants can discriminate phonetic contrasts from both their own language and languages they have not been exposed to
➔consistent with an innate ability for language-relevant distinctions?
Is this ability species specific?
• NO: chinchillas (who have a similar auditory system) show categorical perception of the voicing distinction (Kuhl & Miller, 1978)
Is babies’ sensitivity speech- specific?
• NO: matched non-speech stimuli show categorical perception in both adults and children (Jusczyk et al., 1980)
➔ not an innate “phoneme system” but a “perceptual system built with certain regions of sensitivity and …insensitivity”: perceptual biases that facilitate the extraction of phonemes specific to their languages, at least some of which are shared with other species
language-specifc reorganisation
Categorical perception is shaped by the environment
• between 6 and 12 months babies lose sensitivity to nonnative contrasts and refine their category boundaries for native contrasts
• Older infants and adults only show categorical perception for native phonemic contrasts
➔Perceptual attunement: relevant contrasts enhanced; irrelevant contrasts reduced
➔Correlated with visual categorisation : domain general?
➔Requires social interaction: non-native contrasts not learned through TV
By 9-10 months, babies begin to learn about word forms and about cues to segment words eg transitional probabilities
perceptual attunement theory
biological biases refined by environment
partially developed prenatal, facilitation, maintenance and loss post natal
infant’s categorisation of speech sounds is perceptually tuned to the phonemes of the languages they’re exposed to during social interaction
How do babies segment words in speech?
statistical learning
Babies learn the statistics of their language
• Which phonetic distinctions are phonemic
AND which can be ignored
➔the distribution of sounds in the language
Knowledge about the distribution of phonemes in their language is used to
• Extract regular patterns (ie words) from continuous speech
➔Induce rules that generalise to new words (Aslin & Newport, 2012)
➔ Infants extract statistical regularities of their language and use them to identify words, and how they are combined
werker et al (2012) doll study
hindi: discrimination in dal
english: no discrimination in doll
hindi children: bimodal, consistent pairings
english children: unimodel, inconsistent pairings
Saffran, Aslin & Newport(1996) pabiku study
• 8 month old babies
•2 minute continuous stream of 4 randomly ordered 3-syllable ‘words’- no pauses, stress, pitch, duration cues to segment words
➔Only cue to words is transitional probability: between syllables within words=1.0; at word boundaries=0.33
• At test, babies discriminated between ‘words’ and ‘partwords’➔’discovered’ words in continous auditory stream
➔ Infants extract statistical regularities of their language and use them to identify words, extract rules
marcus et al (1999) aab study
7-month olds learn AAB (or ABB) repetition rule though exposure to stimuli
children learnt to expect AAB or ABB
Gerken (2006): what infants learn depends on the sample of stimuli they are exposed to
what infants learn depends on the context e.g. if the words always end with di they learnt this rather than AAB
Testing infants’ knowledge about words
switch task: sequential presentation of one word-object pair at a time
habituation vs test phase
preferential looking task
Manipulate properties of test ordistractor stimuli to assess what infants are sensitive to, and how this changes with age
