Language Development Flashcards
Steps of language learning
Phonological development: the mastery of the sound system of their language.
Semantic development: the learning of the system for expressing meaning in a language, including word learning.
Syntactic development: the rules in a language that specific how words from different categories can be combined
Pragmatic development: acquire knowledge about how language is used e.g use of context
Phonemes
The elementary units of meaningful sounds used to produce languages
Morphemes
One or more phonemes, the smallest units of meaning in language
DeCasper and Spence (1986)
Had mothers read to their babies a story twice a day whilst they were in the womb for 6 weeks and two days after birth the babies showed a preference for previously exposed stories by increasing sucking frequency.
Vouloumanos et al (2010)
Found that 3 month olds prefer human nonsense vocalisations or rhesus monkey vocalisations to artificial noises with same timing and pitch.
By 18 months babies prefer the human vocalisations to rhesus monkeys.
What is required for language?
A human brain
A human environment
Critical period for language development
The time during which language develops readily and after which (sometime between age 5 and puberty) language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful.
Also true for second language acquisition
Johnson and Newport (1989)
Tested English proficiency of Chinese and Korean immigrants to the US who had begun learning English as children or adults, which decreased significantly with
age.
Less is more hypothesis
Newport (1990)
Explain why children are better learners
children abstract and store smaller chunks of language than adults e.g phonemes instead of whole words.
Infant directed speech (IDS)
The distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies an very young children.
The emotional tone of this speech is affectionate and sweet. It’s also much slower and exaggerated, in a higher pitch.
Tone and pitch can often change depending on whether the parent wants to convey they are happy or disappointed by something the baby has done.
Infants seem to prefer this type of speech showing it is beneficial for their development.its very common but not universal e.g in Papa New Guinea parents do not speak to babies.
Speech perception
Basic early learning is prosody - the characteristic rhythmic, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns and so forth with which language is spoken.
Differences in prosody accounts mostly for why certain languages can sound so different.
Categorical perception- speech sounds are perceived as belonging to different categories E.g p and b differ in VOT
Eimas et al (1971)
Using habituation measurements with sucking device it was found infants 1-4 months old also categorise sounds based on VOT
Young infants were found to make more distinctions than adults, and can detect differences in sounds of all languages.
This research reveals that its innate to discriminate between speech sounds they’ve never heard before.
Developmental changes in speech perception
Perceptual narrowing for native language towards end of first year
Werker (1989) - head turning technique to identify a change which deteriorated with age for other languages
Word segmentation
The process of discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech which begins in the second half of first year
Infants may learn rules to do this for example listening for the stress on syllables as in English the stress is placed on the first syllable in a two syllable word.
Infants also use distributional properties that certain sounds are more likely to appear together than others, to overcome this challenge.
Infants at 4.5 months will listen longer to repetitions of their own name than another name which can help them to segment words around their name in a sentence.
Jusczyk and Aslin (1995)
Used head turn procedure designed to assess infants auditory preferences. 7 month olds listened to passages where a particular word was repeated and found later infants listened longer to words they had heard in the passage than new ones.
