Language and Thought L2 Flashcards
What are newborns capable of in terms of language?
- Can perceive many basic phoneme contrasts (hear difference between sounds)
- They are not restricted to the sounds of the language they are growing up in
- Can recognize human language compared to synthesized/animal sounds
What is the high amplitude sucking technique/what is it used for?
- Used to determine if an infant can hear the difference in two sounds (detect a phonemic change)
- When they suck on the device hard it produces a sound.
- Overtime they suck less as habituation occurs/ they get used to the sound and so no longer want to hear it again.
- However, when you then change the sound they hear the difference and resume sucking as interest regained: shows they can distinguish (If it the same sound they will remain uninterested)
What is categorical speech perception? When does it occur?
- At around 8 to 9 months perception of consonant sounds become categorical.
- They are distinguished based on a difference in voice onset time (VOT) e.g ba and pa have a 25ms difference in VOT
What is VOT?
time interval between release of consonant and onset of voicing (the delay)
What is it called when you a generate a sound purely from the release of the consonant not the voicing?
Negative voicing
What is the detection of categories in speech modified by?
Experience, happens at around 9 months as this when children have gained enough experience of the language they are a growing up in.
What is found when English speaking babies listen to Hindi and Salish phonemes?
Before 8-10 months where they start to categorize the sounds they can distinguish the difference but past this stage they put the similar sounds not used in English in the same category.
Once categories have been created is it then possible
to distinguish the specific phonemes in other languages?
Yes it is, its just harder. This is what people do when they learn languages- however, this partly why leaning languages when young is better.
Why does it take bilingual babies longer to reach the stage of categorical language?
Cause they have two inputs of language which makes it a bit harder
When learning language does the modality matter?
No it can be speech or sign language (hand movements) the child will pick up the patterns in the same way.
What are the three stages of producing speech sounds for infants?
- cooing
- reduplicated babbling
- variegated babbling
What is reduplicated babbling?
The infant is playing around with sounds, practicing movements.
What is variegated babbling?
Occurs at around 11-12 months. Syllables with constants +vowels become more similar to what is being heard in the environment growing up in (spoken adult language).
Why might infants make a limited set of sounds?
- The shape of the infant vocal tract is different
- The motor cortex needs to develop
What’s the difference between the shape of the vocal tract for infants and adults?
- For the infant the tongue is forward explaining why a lot of the first sounds are made at the front of the mouth
- In the adult mouth there are a lot more spaces for the tongue to move (more mobile)
What is a protoword and how do you get from there to words?
- A protoword is a combination of syllables that stand in for a word
- Growing up in a social context the infant refines sounds based on what they are hearing into actual words
What comes first comprehension or production?
- Comprehension proceeds word production by an average of four months
- Initial acquisition rate for comprehension is twice that of production
- Same goes for phonemes (production lags behind comprehension)
What is the vocabulary burst?
There is a major increase in productive vocabulary acquisition after the first 50 words are learnt.
Why are some reasons that the vocabulary burst may occur?
- The infant understands the symbolic nature of language (that it is used to represent something)
- Control over articulation as motor control increases
- Easier retrieval (better memory)
What is under extension?
e. g. use ‘dog’ only for the family dog but not other dogs
- they have not expanded out the conceptual idea to realize that the word stands for more than just the family dog.
What is over extension?
e. g. dog refers to dogs and cats
- common for this to occur, where they think that word represents a larger category such as animals or fruit
- Usually its an easy producing word to start with
What happens to rate of overextension as vocab increases?
Decreases as there is no longer a need
How do infants often communicate with each other, what can be seen?
- Use protowords
- They understand the purpose of language is to communicate (it is social) and they use the non-verbal functions of language such as turn taking and pitch to convey different emotions/ intentions.
What is a holophrase?
- child uses a single word to stand for an entire statement (lacks syntax to form proper sentence)
- The interpretation of the holophrase depends on the context as can often mean a number of things.
When do children start to form early sentences?
- At around 2 children start to combine words
- generally they have specific semantic relationships they convey (procession, meaning, attributes, action) and a pivot word that is swapped out e.g. my toy, that ball etc.
What happens at 4 years old?
Syntax begins to resemble adult language as they add function words to link content words expressing ideas more clearly
