Language Development Flashcards
What happens during the development of behavioural and cognitive functions?
They become lateralised to specific areas of the brain from being diffuse
What happens during structural brain development?
Massive reorganisation into early adulthood
Development of neurons, synaptic connectivity and myelination (grey matter thins, white matter increases)
Synaptic pruning:
Initial overproduction of neurons and synaptic connections
Massive destruction of neurons and their connections:
Strengthening of functional synapses regularly used
Elimination of unused neurons and synapses
Functional reorganisation
What happens to brain structure during word learning?
Activation of the right hemisphere gradually diminishes
NOT that the left hemisphere develops
Therefore lateralisation or hemispheric specialisation
When does lateralisation occur?
Evidence of some lateralisation from birth
Most between 5 and 20 years
What is lateralisation able to tell us about later language abilities?
Earlier it is focused and lateralised the more likely to have greater language ability
What are the consequences of focal left hemisphere damage in early life?
NO serious long term consequences specifically for language (if unilateral and early in life)
What are the consequences for language development of focal right hemisphere damage in early life?
Reports of transient difficulties
Slower receptive language development/ gesture
Major involvement of the right hemisphere in language processing in very young children
What is plasticity/ flexibility?
Ability to recover/ reorganise after damage
What are the influences on brain structure/ development?
1) genes
2) environment:
stimuli and experience
trauma
These can influence each other:
Environment is affected by genetic code - i.e. access to stimuli and experience (hearing difficulties etc)
Genes can also be affected by environment - someone may have typical genes but if not exposed to environment by a certain age will never be able to access it
What evidence can we look to regarding the critical period hypothesis?
1) feral children: we must remember we cannot control for other factors lots of other things may have affected the children would need just linguistic stimuli to prove anything
2) second language acquisition: easier to learn when younger but again has no control just observation. Other evidence has proved adults can learn just as well given same intensive environment
Why is the critical period hypothesis important for SLT?
Need to know when to fit cochlear implants
What is nativism?
Suggests some aspects of language development may be innate:
Intentions/ desire to communicate
Innate ability to perceive and discriminate phonemes
Innate constraints to aid the word learning process
Innate grammatical knowledge
What is emergentism?
Child develops linguistic capacity because it has mechanisms that keep it on a developmental growth path that (as it so happens) leads to that capacity
How can emergentism explain early behaviour?
1) disposition to pay attention to talking people:
Helpless infant
Lots of facial and vocal stimulation whilst cortical areas of the brain are developing
2) joint attention, vocal attention, lexical imitation
Pleasurable - later communicative functions
3) store vocal utterances
Predict caregiver behaviour - are they behaving normally?
What is the phonological loop?
Short term memory
Allows us to store phonological information for long enough to develop a long term representation
Even if we are not asked to remember words we will store information in the working memory in phonological form
How might we assess the phonological loop?
Non word repetition
Important we don’t use real words as these can be assisted by semantics
What affects storage of representations in the phonological loop?
Polysyllabic words are remembered more poorly
Phonologically similar words are remembered more poorly
What can non word repetition tell us about new word learning?
Children with good NWR learn new words faster
How do lexical representations shift during development?
Shift from under specified and global to efficient and phonological
What is inference?
The ability to go beyond literal meaning
Integrate additional understanding from context, knowledge and experience
What is elaborate inference?
Extend literal meaning with world knowledge
What is bridging inference?
Extend literal meaning with previous linguistic material
Referring back to something we read eariler
What linguistic elements can have inference?
Pronouns
Intended meaning of multiple meaning words
Figurative meaning
More or less any word can have a non literal intended meaning dependant on:
Context
How they say it
Nonverbal signals
What do we use inference for when reading?
Intent
Appearance
Location
Emotions/ mental state
Make predictions
Mental imagery
