Lecture 16: language acquisition

Question 1

Newborn babies prefer:

Answer 1

their own mother’s (voice/language/nursury rhymes) over other women’s voices

Question 2

Language development in the first year

Answer 2

recognition of own name, 1st word, vocal play, canonical babbling, intentional communication urges

Question 3

language development in the 2nd year

Answer 3

conversational initiative and responsiveness grows, reorganization and consolidation of phonological representations, 50 word vocab

Question 4

language development in the 3rd year

Answer 4

narrative skills develop, phonological awareness grows, phonetic inventory completion, knowledge of derivational morphology increases vocab, negatives and questions forms, complex utterances

Question 5

Parsing language sounds

Answer 5

parsing heard speech into phonemes (chop it up)

Question 6

“citizens of the world”

Answer 6

in the 1st year, infants can discriminate all phonemes from all languages

Question 7

Evidence for statistical learning:

Answer 7

infants showed discrimination of the word stimuli from the nonword stimuli

Question 8

Evidence for a role of PSTM in language learning 1

Answer 8

baddeley: 4 year olds predicted their vocab one year later, PV was completely unable to make associations between spoken word and nonword pairs

Question 9

evidence for a role of PSTM in language learning 2

Answer 9

vocab servise: demonstrated that the ability to represent unfamiliar phonological material in working memory predicted FL acquisition 2 and a half years later

Question 10

Learning rules

Answer 10

grammar, must generalize to novel sentences, need to acquirerules that can be applied to new sentences

Question 11

Holophrastic stage

Answer 11

1 word, under/over generalization

Question 12

Telegraphic stage

Answer 12

2 word, subject-action, action-object

Question 13

learning syntax/rules

Answer 13

syntactic overgeneralization

Question 14

Adults usually do not explicitly correct children’s ______ or pronunciation

Answer 14

grammar.

only correct meaning

Question 15

The poverty of the stimulus

Answer 15

suggests linguistic universals: general language principles, innate

Question 16

Early language: learning to generalize formulas = pivot schemas

Answer 16

Over the course of 6 weeks, a child’s word utterances are 63% the same, then have changes

Question 17

Pivot schema ex.

Answer 17

all X
where’s X
let’s X

Question 18

learning rules: u-shaped learning

Answer 18

u-shaped curve for irregular past

Question 19

critical period effects

Answer 19

people who learn language after age 10-12 hardly ever acquire native ability

Question 20

Age effects

Answer 20

debating

Question 21

Language and social interaction

Answer 21

results show phonetic learning in the live-exposure group, but no learning in the TV or Audio only group

Question 22

Child directed speech (AKA motherese)

Answer 22

simplified grammar, meaning, restricted range of patterns. slower speech, use of special words and sounds, high pitch, etc

Question 23

which part of the sentence is exaggerated to infants?

Answer 23

vowels

Question 24

Effects of experience

Answer 24

children whose mothers address a great deal of speech to them develop vocab more rapidly