Language Experience And Language Development

Question 1

Language universals

Answer 1

Vocal development and pointing

Question 2

Language specifics

Answer 2

Phonology morphology semantics lexicon

Question 3

Development of vocalisation

Answer 3

• 0-2 months reflexive vocalisation (cough, sneeze, cry)
• 1-4 months cooing (vowel like sounds)
• 3-8 months expansion (clear vowels, new sounds)
• 5-10 months canonical babbling (CVCV)
• 10 months conversational babble (intonation, stress)

Question 4

What age can babies discriminate the speech sounds of different languages up until

Answer 4

6-8 months

Question 5

What age does pointing emerge at

Answer 5

11 months

Question 6

Pointing

Answer 6

• Children point in meaningful ways: to communicate about absent entities, to share attention, to provide information.
• Closely linked with language development.
• Early pointing predicts vocabulary development.
• Frequency of pointing increases with vocabulary spurt.

Question 7

Across languages how many words should a child know at 13 months

Answer 7

10 words

Question 8

Across languages how many words should a child know at 18 months

Answer 8

50 words

Question 9

Across languages how many words should a child know at 24 months

Answer 9

310 words

Question 10

Language specific aspects of language development: theory
Nativism

Answer 10

Nativism: because children acquire key aspects of language at the same pace cross linguistically, it must unfold at a (genetically?) predetermined rate.
Eg syntax: universal grammar: innate, domain specific syntactic knowledge that drives language development.
As children experience language, parameters of their universal grammar are set (eg word order), subject omission, but learning plays a minor role: majority of language knowledge is prespecified.

Question 11

Language specific aspects of language development: theory
Constructivism

Answer 11

Constructivism: all typically developing children have a universal, domain general (not specific to language) set of cognitive abilities: pattern spotting, speech perception, gaze following.
All of language is learned: there is no innate language specific knowledge.
Children learning different languages are influenced by the input they receive.

Question 12

Nativist phonological acquisition

Answer 12

Nativism: phonology acquired in a prespecified order (possibly based on developing articultory skills)

Question 13

Constructivism phonological acquisition

Answer 13

Constructivism: phonology acquired at different times in different languages.

Question 14

Evidence for phonological acquisition

Answer 14

Evidence: the particular phonemes that are required and the ages at which they are acquired reflect their frequency and salience in the input.
Eg longitudinal study of children acquiring English, Swedish, French or Japanese: consonant frequency in babbling reflected cross- language differences in the frequency of consonants in adult language.

Question 15

Morphological acquisition- nativism

Answer 15

Nativism: rate of acquisition of morphological features should be unrelated to input.

Question 16

Morphological acquisition- constructivism

Answer 16

Constructivism: rate of acquisition of a feature will reflect frequency of feature in the input

Question 17

Evidence for morphological acquisition

Answer 17

Eg Brown (1973): analysed naturalistic speech: no correlation between input frequency and age of acquisition. Evidence for nativism?
But children may know a form but simply not use it…
Alternative approach: analyse errors (errors will reflect what children do/ don’t know)

Question 18

Alternative approach for morphological accquisiton

Answer 18

Alternative approach: analyse errors (errors will reflect what children do/ don’t know)
Nativism: children should make the same errors on all forms
Constructivism: children should make more errors on rare forms.
Children make errors until they are around 8 years old.
Substatial evidence that error rates reflect frequency of form in the input.

Question 19

Semantics nativism

Answer 19

Nativism: concepts are universal- don’t differ across languages. Children map words to these pre existing concepts (core knowledge)

Question 20

Semantics constructivism

Answer 20

Constructivism: concepts are influenced by the way in which a language packages semantics.

Question 21

Semantics evidence

Answer 21

Languages differ in how they organize spatial relationships into semantic categories.
English sorts some spatial events on the basis of containment and support ( ball IN box and cup ON table).
Korean focuses on the fit between two objects (eg tight fit or loose fit)

Question 22

Lexical development nativism

Answer 22

Nativism: children should acquire nouns and verbs at the same rate across languages.

Question 23

Lexical develpment constructivism

Answer 23

Constructivism: children may acquire nouns and verbs at different rates, and this will reflect the N/V structure of the input.

Question 24

Evidence for lexical development

Answer 24

Early studies: early vocabulary is dominated by nouns.
Natural partitions hypothesis: nouns label perceptually salient things so are learned first. Noun biase should be found cross linguistically.
However more recent studies of less researched languages eg Korean and mandarin provide evidence for verbs emerging before nouns.
Mandarin- verbs salient (end or beginning of sentence), twice as frequent as nouns. Nouns can be omitted.
English- noun salient, often occur at the end of sentences, more noun types than verb types.

Question 25

CDS, SES, VOCAB

Answer 25

• Many studies have found links between SES and a range of aspects of development including language.
• Hoff (2003) recorded mid and high SES mothers interactions with their 2 year olds at two time points and measured children’s vocabulary.
  Why?
• Children had different language learning experiences.
• Higher SES mothers used more word tokens and word types, more topic continuing replies and had a greater MLU.
• Overall input to high SES children was richer.
• Importantly, MLU predicted vocabulary growth for all children as differences in vocab weren’t due to SES per say, but due to the way mothers used language.

Question 26

Why might mothers from different ses backgrounds use language differently

Answer 26

• Higher and lower SES mothers may have different views on the desirability of having talkative children.
• Parents of different SES may have different goals for communicative interaction with their children eg directing their behaviour versus eliciting talk.
• Higher ses mothers may have more time to spend talking to their children.

Question 27

Child directed speech and syntax

Answer 27

In all English questions all auxilalries invert with the subject (come before it)
What can they see? [they can see it]
Will she stop? [she will stop]
Why wont she go? [she will go]
This could be a rule: always invert the aux in a question (nativist) or this could be learned form the input on an item-by-item basis (constructivist)
Rowland and pine (2000) researched parent child conversations.
176 wh- questions in child speech
65.9% correctly inverted auxilaries
34.1% uninverted auxillaires
The wh+aux combinations that the child used correctly were more frequent in the mothers input than those that the child failed to use correctly.
Children will only produce correctly inverted wh-questions when they have learned the relèvent wh+aux combinations from the input.