Language development

Question 1

Stages in productive language development

Answer 1

• communicative crying
• babbling
• reduplication
• one word stage
• two word stage
• multi-word stage
• narratives

Question 2

what develops in the prelinguistic period?

Answer 2

The ability to understand and produce language you have not encountered before.

Question 3

Language can be broken down into chunks of varying sizes

Answer 3

• messages
• sentences
• words
• speech sounds
• phenology

Question 4

Learning in the womb

Answer 4

• maternal voice preference at birth
• familiar story preference at birth
• maternal language preference at birth

Question 5

High-amplitude sucking

Answer 5

• babies suck more to hear what they want to hear
• to show a preference
• to show dishabituation

Question 6

DeCasper and Fifer 1980

Answer 6

High amplitude sucking: preference in neonates

• ten day olds
• heard either their own or another mother’s voice
• half had to slow down sucking to hear, the other half had to speed up
• sucking rates reliably changed in favour of own mother

Question 7

Development during the first year

Answer 7

• very young infants show categorical perception of native language contrasts and must logically have the capacity to do the same for non-native language contrasts

Question 8

Conditioned head turn procedure

Answer 8

• Werker et al 1981
• infants hear the same sound once per second
• the sound changes, if the infant turns their head, they are rewarded by an illuminated moving toy
• the infant becomes conditioned to turn their head whenever the sound changes

Question 9

the vocabulary spurt

Answer 9

• word production starts at around 12 months
• early development is slow
• non-linear growth in productive vocabulary

Question 10

explanations of the vocab spurt

Answer 10

• sound: e.g., segmentation of speech
• concept: e.g., categorisation of objects
• mapping: e.g., naming insight

Question 11

Plunkett (1993)

Answer 11

observational longitudinal study of two Danish children’s vocabularies between 12 and 24 months

Question 12

Gopnik and Meltzoff 1987

Answer 12

found a relationship between the age at which a productive naming spurt was seen and the emergence of advanced object sorting skills

Question 13

Mcshane 1979

Answer 13

argued that the vocabulary spurt reflects the child’s discovery of how language works

Question 14

The associative learning approach

Answer 14

Infants use general learning mechanisms (e.g., attention and memory) and their natural statistical co-variation of words and their referents to discover words’ meanings