Language and Thought L2

Question 1

What are newborns capable of in terms of language?

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

What is the high amplitude sucking technique/what is it used for?

Answer 2

• 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)

Question 3

What is categorical speech perception? When does it occur?

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

What is VOT?

Answer 4

time interval between release of consonant and onset of voicing (the delay)

Question 5

What is it called when you a generate a sound purely from the release of the consonant not the voicing?

Answer 5

Negative voicing

Question 6

What is the detection of categories in speech modified by?

Answer 6

Experience, happens at around 9 months as this when children have gained enough experience of the language they are a growing up in.

Question 7

What is found when English speaking babies listen to Hindi and Salish phonemes?

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Once categories have been created is it then possible

to distinguish the specific phonemes in other languages?

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

Why does it take bilingual babies longer to reach the stage of categorical language?

Answer 9

Cause they have two inputs of language which makes it a bit harder

Question 10

When learning language does the modality matter?

Answer 10

No it can be speech or sign language (hand movements) the child will pick up the patterns in the same way.

Question 11

What are the three stages of producing speech sounds for infants?

Answer 11

• cooing
• reduplicated babbling
• variegated babbling

Question 12

What is reduplicated babbling?

Answer 12

The infant is playing around with sounds, practicing movements.

Question 13

What is variegated babbling?

Answer 13

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).

Question 14

Why might infants make a limited set of sounds?

Answer 14

• The shape of the infant vocal tract is different

- The motor cortex needs to develop

Question 15

What’s the difference between the shape of the vocal tract for infants and adults?

Answer 15

• 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)

Question 16

What is a protoword and how do you get from there to words?

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

What comes first comprehension or production?

Answer 17

• 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)

Question 18

What is the vocabulary burst?

Answer 18

There is a major increase in productive vocabulary acquisition after the first 50 words are learnt.

Question 19

Why are some reasons that the vocabulary burst may occur?

Answer 19

• 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)

Question 20

What is under extension?

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

What is over extension?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

What happens to rate of overextension as vocab increases?

Answer 22

Decreases as there is no longer a need

Question 23

How do infants often communicate with each other, what can be seen?

Answer 23

• 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.

Question 24

What is a holophrase?

Answer 24

• 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.

Question 25

When do children start to form early sentences?

Answer 25

• 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.

Question 26

What happens at 4 years old?

Answer 26

Syntax begins to resemble adult language as they add function words to link content words expressing ideas more clearly