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PSYC 304 > language development > Flashcards

language development Flashcards

1
Q

what is the high amplitude sucking procedure? what are its two variations?

A
  • test used on infants from birth to 4 months, relying on their sucking reflex
  • more strong sucks = more interest
  1. discrimination: used to see whether infants can tell the difference between two auditory stimuli; variation of habituation paradigm: habituation phase followed by test phase
  2. preference: used to test infants’ preference for different stimuli; 2 different stimuli are played on alternating minutes, number of strong sucks during each minute is compared; if infants suck more during one stimulus minute than the other, it indicates preference for that stimulus
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2
Q

what are the general findings from high amplitude sucking paradigms? what do they tell us about newborns’ speech perception abilities?

A

suggests that language learning and speech perception starts in utero:
- prefer to listen to speech sounds over artificial sounds
- prefer mother’s voice over another woman’s voice
- prefer to listen to native language vs other languages

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3
Q

what is voice onset time (VOT)?

A
  • length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start to vibrate
  • often distinguishes similar speech sounds; key for categorical perception
  • eg. /p/ has a longer VOT than /b/
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4
Q

what is categorical perception? why is it important

A
  • perception of speech sounds as belonging to distinct categories, even though the differences between speech sounds is gradual
  • often relies on voice onset time to distinguish between sounds
  • it allows listeners to focus on sounds that are linguistically meaningful while ignoring meaningless differences
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5
Q

how does infants’ categorical speech perception ability differ from that of adults? how is this tested?

A
  • it doesn’t—a 1 month old has the same categorical speech perception ability as an adult
  • tested using discrimination high amplitude sucking paradigm
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6
Q

how does infants’ cross-language speech perception ability differ from that of adults? how is this tested? what are the implications of this?

A
  • infants can make more distinctions between speech sounds than adults
  • adults have difficulty perceiving differences between speech sounds that are not important in their native language
  • tested using high discrimination amplitude sucking paradigm in 6 month olds
  • infants are biologically ready to learn any of the world’s languages
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7
Q

when do infants lose the ability to discriminate between non-native speech sounds? what are the benefits of this?

A
  • 10-12 months
  • perceptual narrowing improves perception of speech sounds in native languages
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8
Q

what is word segmentation? when does it develop in infants? how is it learned?

A
  • word segmentation: being able to discern where words begin and end in fluent speech
  • begins around 7 months
  • achieved through statistical learning, when infants pick up on stress patterning and distribution of speech sounds
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9
Q

what is the preferential listening procedure?

A
  • a speaker is placed on either side of the infant’s head. when the infant looks at one of the speakers, a recording of speech plays. this recording is different in each speaker
  • how long an infant spends looking in a particular direction indicates how much they like it
  • familiarity effect: will listen longer to sounds they recognize
  • novelty effect: if first habituated to a sound, they will prefer the new sound
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10
Q

how is word segmentation tested?

A
  • preferential listening procedure is used to test infants’ understanding of the distribution of speech sounds
  • novelty effect: infants listened longer to syllable sequences that rarely occurred together, compared to sequences that always co-occurred
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11
Q

what is the general timeline of speech perception in children?

A
  • birth: adult-like categorical perception; able to distinguish between sounds not found in native language
  • 10-12 months: lose ability to distinguish between non-native sounds
  • 7 months: begin to perceive speech segmentation
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12
Q

what is the general timeline for speech production in children?

A
  • 2 months: cooing and gurgling
  • 7 months: babbling
  • 12 months: first words
  • 18 months: knows 50 words
  • 2 yrs: first (telegraphic) sentences, know 150-300 words
  • 5 yrs: identifying letters, creating longer sentences, mastered basics of grammar, begin to engage in sustained conversations
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13
Q

what is cooing? when does it emerge? what is its function?

A
  • drawn out vowel sounds
  • starts around 2 months
  • helps infants gain motor control over their vocalizations
  • elicits reactions from caregivers
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14
Q

what is babbling? when does it emerge? what is its function?

A
  • repetitive consonant-vowel syllables, not necessarily from native language
  • starts around 7 months (6-10)
  • social function: practicing turn-taking in a dialogue
  • learning function: signal that the infant is listening and ready to learn - infants learn more when an adult labels a new object just after they babble vs learning the word in the absence of babbling
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15
Q

at what age to infants understand high-frequency words? how is this studied? what are the implications of this?

A
  • 6 months
  • studied using eye-tracking: infants are shown pictures of common items, and then are monitored where they look when one of the pictures is named -> 6 month olds look to the correct picture more often than chance
  • shows that infants understand more words than they can produce, and understand more than their caregivers may realize
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16
Q

at what age are first words produced? what types of words are often produced first?

A
  • 12 months (10-15)
  • first words are usually ones that refer to family members, pets, or important objects (this is true across cultures)
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17
Q

what are the patterns of mispronunciation that tend to occur in early spoken words?

A
  • often omit difficult parts of words (banana -> nana)
  • often substitute difficult sounds for easier sounds (rabbit -> wabbit)
  • often re-order sounds to put the easiest ones first (spaghetti -> pisketti)
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18
Q

what are the two main problems that infants usually face in terms of communicating, when speaking their first words?

A
  1. overextension: using a word in a broader context than is appropriate (eg. “cat” refers to any 4 legged animal)
  2. underextension: using a word in a more limited context than appropriate (eg. “cat” refers only to the family’s pet cat)
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19
Q

at what age does a huge vocabulary spurt occur?

A

18 months: rate of word learning accelerated dramatically

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20
Q

how do children learn words?

A
  • assumptions about language
  • social context (caregivers, peers)
21
Q

list the assumptions about language that children have when learning a new word.

A
  1. mutual exclusivity
  2. whole-object assumption
  3. pragmatic clues
  4. adult’s intentionality
  5. grammatical form
  6. shape bias
  7. cross-situational word learning
22
Q

what is the mutual exclusivity assumption?

A
  • an assumption that children have about language that helps them to learn new words
  • assumption that a given object has only one name
  • note: bilingual children follow this rule less
23
Q

what is the whole object assumption?

A
  • an assumption that children have about language that helps them to learn new words
  • assumption that a word will refer to a whole object rather than to a part or action of the object
24
Q

what are pragmatic cues?

A
  • an assumption that children have about language that helps them to learn new words
  • involves using social context to infer the meaning of a word
  • adult gaze: when an adult says a new word, the child assumes it refers to the object the adult is looking at
25
Q

what is the assumption of adult’s intentionality?

A
  • an assumption that children have about language that helps them to learn new words
  • if an adult uses a word that conflicts with a child’s word for that object, they will learn the new word if it is said with confidence
26
Q

what is the assumption of grammatical form?

A
  • an assumption that children have about language that helps them to learn new words
  • the grammatical form of a word influences whether it’s interpreted as a noun, verb, or adjective
27
Q

what is the shape bias assumption?

A
  • an assumption that children have about language that helps them to learn new words
  • children will apply a noun to a new object of the same shape, even if that object is very different in size, colour, or texture
28
Q

what is the cross-situational word learning assumption?

A
  • an assumption that children have about language that helps them to learn new words
  • involves determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels and meanings across contexts
29
Q

what caregivers’ speech factors influence word learning?

A
  • infant-directed speech
  • quantity of speech
  • quality of speech
30
Q

what is infant-directed speech? what is its purpose?

A
  • distinctive mode of speech when talking to babies and toddlers
  • common in a majority of cultures around the world
  • includes greater pitch variability, slower speech, shorter utterances, clearer pronunciation of vowels, more word repetitions, more questions, accompanied by exaggerated facial expressions
  • infants prefer IDS to regular adult speech, so IDS draws infants’ attention to speech, facilitating their language learning
31
Q

what is quantity of speech? what does it have to do with language learning? what factor(s) -influence this?

A
  • the number of words children hear used around them predicts their vocabulary size, especially when the speech is directed to the child
  • children that hear more words have larger vocabularies
  • children from higher SES families have larger vocabularies, showing that differences in language exposure contribute to an achievement gap between higher and lower SES children
32
Q

what is quality of speech? what does this have to do with language learning?

A
  • richness of adult communication with their children predicts children’s language ability
  • “richness” is characterized by joint engagement, fluency, stressing and repeating new words, playing naming games, and naming an object when a toddler is already looking at it
33
Q

what was the intervention used to close the word gap between high SES children and low SES children?

A
  • grocery store intervention; focuses on increasing the amount of time parents spend talking to their child
  • signs placed in grocery stores in low SES neighbourhoods encouraging parents to talk to their children about the foods in the store
  • designed to increase quality and quantity of caregiver speech
34
Q

what influence does peers’ language have on an individual’s language development?

A
  • placing preschool children with similarly poor language ability in the same classroom negatively impacts their language growth
  • better chance of “catching up” if they are placed with children with higher language ability, and if teachers use rich communication with students
35
Q

at what age do children produce their first sentences? what do these sentences usually look like?

A
  • 2 yrs
  • telegraphic speech: 2-3 word phrases that leave out non-essential words (common in many languages)
36
Q

at what age do children understand the basics of grammar? what does this entail?

A
  • age 5
  • allows children to express and understand more complex ideas
  • we know they understand the basics of grammar when they can apply grammatical rules to a new word/context (eg. adding “S” to make a word plural) - often results in overregulation errors
37
Q

what are overregulation errors?

A
  • speech errors that children make, that indicate that they have learned grammatical rules but not the exceptions to the rules
  • eg. “foots” instead of “feet”
  • eg. “goed” instead of “went”
38
Q

how is grammar learned?

A
  • parents and caregivers generally model grammatically correct speech, but don’t usually correct children’s grammatical errors
  • statistical learning
39
Q

what is private speech? when does it occur?

A
  • infants’ speech is often directed to themselves as a way of organizing their actions
  • 1-4 years old, when kids are still struggling to engage in mutual conversation
40
Q

what type of speech occurs between 1-4 years old, when children have trouble engaging in mutual conversations?

A
  • private speech
  • egocentric discussion between children
41
Q

at what age can children successfully engage in sustained conversations?

A

5+ years old, at which age they can stick to the same conversation topic as their partner

42
Q

what is the sensitive period for language acquisition?

A
  • from birth to before puberty
  • this is the period of time in which an individual can acquire a first language if exposed to adequate linguistic stimuli
  • after this period, languages are learned with great difficulty and native-like competence is rare
43
Q

who was genie? what does her case tell us?

A
  • girl deprived of linguistic input from 18 months to 13 years
  • her language ability never fully developed despite intensive training after age 13
  • provides evidence of a sensitive period of language acquisition from birth until pre-puberty (but consider it could be due to inhumane treatment rather than linguistic deprivation)
44
Q

what did research on deaf individuals tell us about the sensitive period in language learning?

A
  • in groups that began learning ASL between ages 9 and 15, those with exposure to spoken language in infancy performed better on language tasks
  • in groups that began learning ASL in early childhood, performance on language tasks was also high
  • shows that exposure to language, regardless of the type of language (spoken or signed) in infancy is critical for full language development
45
Q

in what ways is language development governed by nature vs nurture?

A
  • nature: sensitive period
  • nurture: language exposure is critical during this period
46
Q

what is the monolingual brain hypothesis?

A
  • belief that infants’ brains are programmed to be monolingual, and they treat the input from 2 languages as if it were one language
  • bilingualism stretches the limited process of infants
  • theory that if kids are bilingual from birth, they will confuse their languages in a way that results in developmental delays
  • proven to be false
47
Q

when does bilingual learning begin? how is this tested? how does this disprove the monolingual brain hypothesis?

A
  • bilingual learning begins in utero
  • preferential sucking procedure: while monolingual infants show a preference for english, bilinguals show no preference for either language
  • discrimination sucking procedure: both bilingual babies and monolingual babies can tell the difference between two languages, despite bilingual babies showing a similar preference for both languages
  • suggests that bilingual infants are developing 2 separate language systems rather than confusing the two, going against the monolingual brain hypothesis
48
Q

list the evidence in favour of there being 2 separate linguistic systems (against monolingual brain hypothesis).

A
  1. language development in bilingual vs monolingual children is very similar
  2. children select the language they use based on their conversational partner
  3. language mixing is not a sign of confusion, but is normal among adults too
49
Q

list the advantages of bilingualism.

A
  1. seems to delay onset of Alzheimers
  2. quickly switching between languages improves executive functioning skills and cognitive flexibility; perform better on executive functioning tests than monolinguals

PSYC 304 (12 decks)

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