Language Perception in Infants

Question 1

what is categorical perception?

Answer 1

a phenomenon indicating that certain stimuli (especially speech) are perceived categorically rather than continuously despite a continuous variation in their form

Question 2

findings of categorical perception in infants?

Answer 2

Infants perceive differences in speech sound categorically

Question 3

infants perceptions in non-native languages?

Answer 3

▪ Youngest infants (e.g., 6-8 months) respond to contrasts in many languages
▪ Response to distinctions in non-native language declines 8-10 months
▪ & is very poor 10-12 months

Question 4

conclusion for categorical perception in infants?

Answer 4

◦ Infants seem to come to the world with some ability that allows them to categorize speech sounds
◦ By ~ 8 months, infants attention starts to focus more on sounds of their native language

Question 5

what is prosody?

Answer 5

rhythm of speech such as patterns of intonation, syllable stress, & rate of production

Question 6

prosodic boot strapping hypothesis?

Answer 6

prosody can be used as cues to segmentation

Question 7

what do infants respond to in terms of speech?

Answer 7

patterns of rhythm

Question 8

increasing knowledge of sound combinations in infants produces?

Answer 8

◦ Statistical probabilities (distributional information) – keep track of sounds that go together
◦ Rule learning

Question 9

how do children figure out what a word means?

Answer 9

• cognitive constraints (for learning objects)
• adult naming processes
• cooperative nature of communication
• syntactic bootstrapping

Question 10

biases for children when figuring out what a word means?

Answer 10

• whole object bias: When an adult points to an object and says a word, a child assumes this word labels the entire object
• taxonomic bias: when child groups objects together based on shared characteristics
• mutual exclusivity bias: a bias to interpret a new word so that it has no referents in common with familiar words.

Question 11

what are adult naming practices?

Answer 11

◦ Adults tend to point out & label whole objects
◦ Adults tend to select basic-level terms

Question 12

what is the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis?

Answer 12

Children use syntax to learn verbs
- begins with a universal bias to map each noun phrase in a sentence onto a participant role in a structured conceptual representation of an event.

Question 13

what is shared book reading?

Answer 13

an adult reads a book to an individual child or to a group of children and uses one or more planned or structured interactive techniques to actively engage the children in the text

Question 14

what is shared book reading commonly associated with?

Answer 14

◦ increased vocabulary in children
◦ and with greater success in learning to read and later literacy