Language Development Flashcards
1
Q
What is the high amplitude sucking procedure?
A
- used to test infants from birth to 4 months
- capitalizes on infants sucking reflex
- infants hear a sound stimulus and sucking behaviour is recorded
- the number of strong sucks is an indicator of the infant’s interest
- 2 variations
2
Q
What is the discrimination high amplitude sucking procedure?
A
- used to test whether infants can tell the difference between 2 auditory stimuli
- variation of visual habituation paradigm
- habituation phase: record number of sucks until decreases
- test phase: new sound and see if sucking increases
3
Q
What is the preference high amplitude sucking paradigm?
A
- used to test infants’ preference for different stimuli
- 2 different stimuli are played on alternating minutes
- number of strong sucks produced during presentation of each stimulus type is compared
4
Q
What has research shown about speech perception in infancy?
A
- newborns 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 language
- suggests that language learning starts in the womb
5
Q
What distinguishes similar speech sounds?
A
- voice onset time
6
Q
What is voice onset time?
A
- length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start to vibrate
7
Q
What is categorical perception?
A
- we perceive speech sounds as distinct categories even though the differences between speech sounds is gradual
- it is useful because focuses listeners on sounds that are linguistically meaningful while ignoring meaningless differences
8
Q
Do infants perceive the same speech categories as adults?
A
- yes, newborns have same categorical perception of speech as adults
9
Q
Do infants have cross-language speech perception?
A
- yes, until 12 months
- infants make more distinctions between speech sounds than adults
- adults do not perceive differences between speech sounds that are not important in their native language
- infants discriminate between speech sounds they have never heard before
- infants are biologically ready to learn any of the world’s languages
10
Q
When does perceptual narrowing of speech perception occur?
A
- ability to distinguish between non-native and native speech sounds starts to diminish around 8 months
- by 12 months, infants are better able to distinguish between native speech sounds vs. non-native
- improves perception of speech sounds in native language
11
Q
What is word segmentation?
A
- discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech
12
Q
When does word segmentation begin?
A
7 months
13
Q
How do we find words in speech?
A
- pick up on patterns of native language via statistical learning
- stress patterning
- distribution of speech sounds
14
Q
What is stress patterning?
A
- different languages place stress on different parts of a word
15
Q
What is distribution of speech sounds?
A
- sounds that appear together often are likely to be words
- sounds that don’t appear together often are more likely to be boundaries between words
- infants (at least by 8 months) understood word boundaries by detecting the likelihood of syllables belonging together
16
Q
What are the development milestones in speech production?
A
- 2 months: cooing
- 7 months: babbling
- 12 months: first words
- 18 months: knows 50 words
- 2 years: knows 2-3 word sentences
- 5 years: mastered basics of grammar
17
Q
What is cooing?
A
- starts around 2 months
- drawn out vowel sounds
- helps infants gain motor control over their vocalizations
- elicits reactions from caregivers leading to back and forth cooing with caregivers
18
Q
What is babbling?
A
- starts around 7 months (6-10 months)
- repetitive consonant-vowel syllables
- speech sounds not necessarily from native language, infant babbling is very similar across languages
- deaf infants also babble; suggests that babbling is innate and biologically based
- deaf infants that are exposed to ASL babble with repetitive hand movements made up of full ASL signs; evidence that language exposure plays a role in babbling
19
Q
What are the functions of babbling?
A
- social function
- learning function
20
Q
What is the social function of babbling?
A
- practicing turn taking in a dialogue
- infant babbling elicits caregiver reactions which in turn elicit more babbling
- parent positive reaction to babbling elicits more babbling
21
Q
What is the learning function of babbling?
A
- 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
22
Q
When do infants understand words?
A
- infants appear to understand high frequency words around 6 months
- infants understand more words than they can produce
23
Q
What are first words?
A
- produced around 12 months (10-15 months)
- any specific utterance consistently used to refer to or express a meaning
- meaning of a first word can differ from it’s standard meaning
- usually refer to family members, pets, or important objects
- meaning of first words are similar across cultures
24
Q
How are first words often mispronounced?
A
- omit difficult parts of words
- substitute difficult sounds for easier sounds
- re order sounds to put easy sound first
25
Q
What are the limitations of first words?
A
- infants express themselves initially with only one word utterances so cannot clearly communicate what they want to say
- overextension
- underextension
26
Q
What is overextension?
A
- using a word in a broader context than is appropriate
27
Q
What is underextension?
A
- using a word in a more limited context than appropriate
28
Q
What is a vocabulary spurt?
A
- rate of word learning accelerates
- 18 months
29
Q
How do children learn words?
A
- children’s assumptions about language
- social context: caregivers and peers
30
Q
What are children’s assumptions when learning a new word?
A
- mutual exclusivity
- whole-object assumption
- pragmatic cues
- adult’s intentionality
- grammatical form
- shape bias
- cross situational word learning
31
Q
What is the mutual exclusivity assumption?
A
- a given object/being will have only one name
- a child will turn their attention to the object they don’t have a name for when they hear a new word
- bilingual children will follow this rule less
32
Q
What is the whole-object assumption?
A
- a word will refer to the whole object rather than to a part or action of the object
33
Q
What are pragmatic cues?
A
- using the social context to infer the meaning of a word
- adult gaze: when an adult says a new word, the child assumed that it refers to the object the adult is looking at, even if the child cannot see it
34
Q
What is adult’s intentionality?
A
- 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
35
Q
What is grammatical form?
A
- grammatical form of a word influences whether it’s interpreted as a noun, verb, or adjective
36
Q
What is shape bias?
A
- children will apply a noun to a new object of the same shape, even if that object is different in size, colour, or texture
37
Q
What is cross situational word learning?
A
- determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels and meanings across contexts
38
Q
What are caregivers influence on word learning?
A
- children’s vocabularies are hugely impacted by the vocabularies and speech of their caregivers
39
Q
What are caregiver factors influencing word learning?
A
- infant directed speech
- quantity of speech
- quality of speech
40
Q
What is infant directed speech?
A
- distinctive mode of speech when talking to babies and toddlers
- common in majority of cultures around the world, but not universal
41
Q
What are the characteristics of infant directed speech?
A
- greater pitch variability
- slower speech
- shorter utterances
- clearer pronunciation of vowels
- more word repetition
- more questions
- accompanies by exaggerated facial expressions
42
Q
What is the function of infant directed speech?
A
- draws infants attention to speech
- infants prefer IDS to regular adult speech
- even if in a non native language
- because infants pay greater attention to IDS, it facilitates their language learning
- IDS facilitates recognition of words
43
Q
What is quantity of speech?
A
- the number of words children hear used around them predicts children’s vocabulary size
- children that hear more words have larger vocabularies
44
Q
How does SES impact quantity of speech?
A
- children from high SES have larger vocabularies than kids from low SES
- differences in language exposure contribute to achievement gap between higher and lower SES children
45
Q
What is quality of speech?
A
- richness of adult communication with their child predicts children’s language ability
- joint engagement
- fluency
- stressing and repeating new words
- playing naming games
- naming an object when a toddler is already looking at it
46
Q
What is the grocery store intervention?
A
- an intervention to close the word gap
- focuses on increasing amount of time parents spend talking to child
- signs placed in grocery stores in low SES neighbourhoods encouraging parents to talk to their children about the foods in the store
- parents increased quantity and quality of speech to their child
47
Q
What is peers’ influence on language?
A
- placing preschool children with similarly poor language ability in the same classroom negatively impacts their language growth
- better chance to catch-up on language ability if placed with children with higher language ability and teacher uses rich communication with students
48
Q
What are first sentences?
A
- 2 years
- begin to combine words into short phrases
- telegraphic speech
49
Q
What is telegraphic speech?
A
- short utterances that leave out non essential words
50
Q
When do children learn grammar?
A
- by 5 years, mastered the basics of grammar
- allows children to express and understand more complex ideas
- we know that children have learned the grammar of their language when they can apply a grammatical rule to a new word/context
51
Q
What are overregularization errors?
A
- speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular
- evidence that they have learned grammatical rules but not the exceptions to the rule
52
Q
How is grammar learned?
A
- parents and other caregivers model grammatically correct speech but generally don’t correct children’s grammatical errors
- statistical learning; infants can pick up on grammatical patterns even after brief exposure
53
Q
How and when does conversation begin?
A
- 1-4 years
- children initially struggle to engage in mutual conversation
- private speech
- egocentric discussion between children
54
Q
How is children’s conversation by 5 years?
A
- stick to the same conversation topic as their conversation partner
- produce a narrative - beginning, middle, end
- can use emotional tone to read between the lines
55
Q
What is the Universal Grammar hypothesis?
A
- humans are biologically programmed to learn language
- language acquisition device
- proposed by Noam Chomsky
- generally accepted by modern language theorists
56
Q
What is the language acquisition device?
A
- hypothetical brain mechanism preprogrammed with the specific grammatical structures common to all languagesW
57
Q
What is the evidence for the UG hypothesis?
A
- generativity of language: we can produce sentences that we’ve never heard before
- overregularization errors
- many languages are fundamentally similar
- infants recognize speech as something important very early on; prefer to listen to speech sounds than artificial
- there are language brain areas
58
Q
What is the sensitive period for language acquisition?
A
- period from birth to before puberty
- due to maturational changes in the brain whereby language brain areas are less plastic
- crucial period in which an individual can acquire a first language if exposed to adequate linguistic stimuli
- after this period, languages are learned with difficulty and native like competence is rare
59
Q
What is the evidence for the sensitive period for language acquisition?
A
- Genie
- recovery after brain damage
- deaf individuals
- second language learners
60
Q
Who is Genie?
A
- from 18 months old until she was rescues at 13, deprived of linguistic input
- could barely speak
- language ability never fully developed despite intensive training after age 13
- difficulty learning language may be due to inhumane treatment rather than linguistic deprivation
61
Q
What is the evidence of recovery after brain damage?
A
- children that sustain brain damage to language areas usually recover full language capability
- children’s brains are highly plastic; other parts of the developing brain can take over language functions
- adults that sustain brain damage to language areas are more likely to suffer permanent language impairment
- more mature brain is less plastic
62
Q
What is the evidence in deaf individuals?
A
- deaf individuals with exposure to language in infancy, even though spoken, performed better on language task than those with no language exposure
- performance of deaf adults with early exposure to ASL was the same as deaf adults with exposure to spoken language
- shows that exposure to language, regardless of the modality, in infancy is critical for full language development
63
Q
What is the evidence in second language learners?
A
- language proficiency is related to first age of exposure to that language
- birth to 7 years have best performance
- language performance is highly variable when a language is learned after puberty
64
Q
What are the implications of the sensitive period?
A
- deaf children should be exposed to sign language as young as possible to develop native like ability
- foreign language exposure at school should begin as early as possible to maximize opportunity to achieve native like ability
65
Q
Bilingualism in Canada
A
- 17% of Canadians are English-French bilingual
- 20% of Canadians’ first language is neither English nor French
- 55% of Montrealers are English-French bilingual
66
Q
What is the monolingual brain hypothesis?
A
- belief that infants’ brains are programmed to be monolingual and that they treat input in 2 languages as if it were one language
- bilingualism stretches limited processing capacity of infants
- implies that if bilingual from birth, children will confuse their languages and could result in language delays
67
Q
When does bilingual learning begin?
A
- in the womb
- bilingual babies show no preference for either language
- they can discriminate between their two native languages
- suggests that learning begins before birth
- suggests that bilingual infants are developing two separate language systems
68
Q
What is the evidence for two separate linguistic systems?
A
- language development in bilingual vs. monolingual children follows a very similar timeline and milestones
- children select language they use based on conversational partner
- in general, language mixing in bilinguals is normal, not a sign of confusion
69
Q
What are cognitive advantages of bilingualism?
A
- bilingual children perform better on measures of executive functioning than monolingual children
- bilingualism seems to delay onset of Alzheimer’s in older adults
- bilingual individuals have to quickly switch between languages, both in comprehension and production, which serves as practice for executive functioning
70
Q
What are the implications of the advantages of bilingualism?
A
- schools should support learning both native and non native language from a young age
