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Yr2 Developmental > Language acquisition and development > Flashcards

Language acquisition and development Flashcards

1
Q

Is language specific to humans?

A

Yes.

  • animals can communicate with their own species, but don’t have a language.
  • years of training from humans can allow chimps or gorillas to understand some of the human language/communicate with humans
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2
Q

What is involved in the use of language?

A 
Language comprehension 
Language production 
Phonological development 
Semantic development 
Syntactic development 
Pragmatic development
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3
Q

What is language comprehension?

A
  • refers to the understanding of what others are saying/signing/writing
  • can understand others better than they can produce language
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4
Q

What is language production?

A

It refers to producing language to effectively communicate with others

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5
Q

What is phonological development?

A

The learning/understanding of the sound system of the language a child is exposed to

  • phonemes (individual elements of sound that make up words e.g.p/b/v)
  • prosody (particular rhythm, tempo, melody & intonation pattern used when speaking a language)
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6
Q

What is semantic development?

A

The learning/understanding of meaning in a language, including lexical development (word learning).
Morpheme: words are composed of 1 or more morphemes - (the smaller part of a word with meaning)
Morphological rules: a set of rules that specify how morphemes combine to form words

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7
Q

What is syntactic development?

Define syntax

A

The learning/understanding of the grammar of a language (includes word order, subject-verb agreement, case marking, etc.)
Syntax: a set of rules that specifies how words can be combined to form sentences

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8
Q

What is pragmatic development?

A

The learning/understanding of how a language is used in a particular society. e.g. ‘can you open the window’ can be interpreted as a request or as a question

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9
Q

What happens at ages 0-5 months in the stages of language acquisition?

A

Baby cries - the first method of communication humans have

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10
Q

What happens at ages 5-8 months in the stages of language acquisition?

A

Early sounds - babbling

Child starts producing sounds of language e.g. da, ta

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11
Q

What happens at the age of 10 months in the stages of language acquisition?

A

Babies understand around 30 words, usually words that relate to them e.g. bath, mil, yes, no, etc.

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12
Q

What happens at ages 14-16 months in the stages of language acquisition?

A

One word stage

  • children start producing simple words
  • spoken vocab. is usually around 50 words
  • cannot carry out a conversation, but know enough sounds to mimic a conversation
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13
Q

What happens at ages 18-24 months in the stages of language acquisition?

A

Child starts producing two-word sentences e.g. ‘mummy milk’

At 24 months spoken vocab. is usually around 320 words

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14
Q

What happens at the age of 30 months in the stages of language acquisition?

A

Children have spoken vocab. of roughly 600 words

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15
Q

What happens at the age of 36 months in the stages of language acquisition?

A

Grammar explosion

  • children rapidly add inflections to many words
  • also start using function words to create more complex sentences
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16
Q

How big is a child’s vocab. art 5-6 years old?

A

Around 15,000 words

- children learn roughly 10 words a day from the age of 3 onwards

17
Q

What is Infant-directed Talk/Speech?

A

Used by both adults and children when speaking to babies, isn’t used in all countries.
Can be seen in sign language when people are communicating with deaf infants

18
Q

What are the characteristics of Infant-directed Talk/Speech?

A 
Emotional tone (warm & affectionate) 
Exaggeration 
Higher tone of voice 
Extreme changes in intonation 
Slow talk & longer pauses 
Exaggerated facial expressions

IN SIGN LANGUAGE:

  • Exaggerated facial expressions
  • Slow signing
19
Q

Why is it important to use Infant-directed Talk/Speech?

A

It helps to emphasise word and phrase boundaries, making it easier for the baby to segment words from the continuous speech

20
Q

What did Werker, Pegg & McLeod (1994) find regarding Infant-directed Talk/Speech?

A

Infants prefer IDT/IDS to other types of speech

- used Chinese & American infants (aged 4.5&9 months)

21
Q

What did Golinkoff, Alioto & Hirsh-Pasek (1996) find in regards toInfant-directed Talk/Speech?

A

Infants learn more new words in a foreign language when they are presented in IDT/IDS than in normal adult speech

22
Q

What did Thiessen, Hill & Saffran (2005) find regarding Infant-directed Talk/Speech?

A

IDT/IDS speech leads to children being able to segment speech (split words up)

23
Q

What did Masapollo, Polka & Menard (2016) find in regards toInfant-directed Talk/Speech?

A

When infants talk, other infants listen: pre-babbling infants prefer listening to speech with infant vocal properties (babies smiled and payed more attention)
- IDT/IDS holds properties of infant talk

24
Q

What is ‘Babbling’?

A

Vocalisation that begins at birth, and is well-established by 6-10 months.
- 0-2 months, infants produce “comfort sounds”
- 2-3 months infants produce “gooing”
- 4-6 months, produce squalls, growls, whispers, etc. (marginal babbling)
Deaf babies babble signs; referred to as ‘silent babble’ - is a subset of slow hand movements that corresponds to rhythmic pattern of adult sign

25
Q

What did Kuhl, Tsao & Liu (2003) do in their study regarding babies learning language?

A

9 month American infants played with a Native Mandarin Chinese adult playmate, split into 3 groups.
Group 1: during play sessions babies experienced 5 hours of Mandarin Chinese.
Group 2: babies shown videos of group 1 play sessions & received identical exposure to Mandarin Chinese
Group 3: babies exposed to only audio information

26
Q

What are the advantages of social interaction for babies?

A
  • Joint attention - (speaker’s gaze tends to focus on objects they’re talking about & baby gaze follows) - this provides referential information.
  • Adults provide cues to attract attention and motivate learning
  • Social interaction has the purpose of communication
27
Q

What is Fast Mapping (in terms of word learning)?

A

The process of rapidly learning a new word simply from the contrastive use of a familiar & unfamiliar word

28
Q

What are the assumptions/constraints/biases that guide children’s’ learning & understanding of word meanings?

A
  • The whole-object assumption, leads to children to expect a novel word to refer to a while object not a part
  • The mutual exclusivity assumption, leads children to expect that a given entity will have only one name
29
Q

What does overextension means, in terms of early language in children?

A

Most children go through a phase of using a single label for many similar things e.g. calling every man ‘daddy’
Usually happens before 2.6 years old
Fremgen & Fray (1980) found that words overextended in naming were not confsed when choosing e.g. child asked for dog, didn’t then pick lion

30
Q

What did Chomsky say the starting premises of the Nativist approach are?

A
  • Language is too complex to be learnt purely from experience, so must be pre-wired in babies’ brains
  • Language children hear is too impoverished (weak) for them to extract grammar
31
Q

What is a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD)?

Nativist approach

A

Special neural architecture that infants are born with, has highly abstract, unconscious rules that are innate & common to all languages - helps children learn language & accounts for mistakes made whilst learning

32
Q

What did Berko (1958) find in regards to the production of grammatical rules?
(Nativist approach)

A

Gave children a made up word & asked them to find the past tense or plural of this word.
Known as ‘the wug test’.
Found children’s language acquisition is not based on imitation, but they extract rules from the teaching they’re exposed to

33
Q

What are some criticisms of the language acquisition device and universal grammar?
(Nativist approach)

A
  • Pinker (1994) suggested the LAD is located in Broca’s area, but main evidence for Broca’s area link to language comes from adults with brain damage.
  • It has been very difficult to specify what universal grammar looks like
34
Q

Give some criticisms of the abstract rules of language (past tense, plurals).
(Nativist approach)

A
  • Marcus et al., (1992) found children tended to not make errors with frequently heard words like ‘go’ but did with less frequent words like ‘build’
  • There is often a period of correct use of a word before errors occur, suggests children imitate language before having faulty memories of words.
35
Q

What happened to Professor Deb Roy’s child when they were learning the word ‘water’?
(Language acquisition)

A

Child started saying ‘water’ around 12 months, then started pronouncing it as ‘gaaa’, took him around 6 months to start saying ‘water’ again.

36
Q

What did Hart & Risley (1995) find in regards to the impact socioeconomic background has on language acquisition?
(individual differences in language acquisition)

A

High SES families - 487 utterances per hour (44 million by age 4)
Low SES families - 178 utterances per hour (12 million by age 4)
- shows SES has an impact on how much language babies are exposed to, does this impact their language acquisition?

37
Q

What did Lieven et al., (1997) and Tomasello (1998) say in regards to usage-based theory of language acquisition?

A
  • Reject Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device
  • But did agree children are born with predisposition to learn language & capacity to do so
  • Rejected concept of innate ‘grammatical model’, argued children learn grammar as they learn everything else - through use of general cognitive&perceptual skills
38
Q

Describe the Rote-memory Proposal (Lieven et al. 1997 and Tomasello 1998).
(usage-based theory of language acquisition)

A

Early speech is constructed around verb forms learned by rote (verb-island hypothesis) e.g. ‘drinking’, ‘daddy drinking’
- this allows child to gradually form longer&more complex sentences
Regularisation of news words might be explained no as rules of grammar but general cognitive tendency to generalise across collection of similar examples

39
Q

What are the strengths of Lieven et al., 1997 and Tomasello’s 1998 theory: usage-based theory of language acquisition?

A
  • Seems to be better account of actual child’s language (compared to Chomsky)
  • Integrates development of language with general cognitive processes
  • Social&communicative aspects of language are very important
  • Provides account of how children develop language without need for innate mechanisms

Yr2 Developmental (10 decks)

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