Lecture 16: language acquisition Flashcards
Newborn babies prefer:
their own mother’s (voice/language/nursury rhymes) over other women’s voices
Language development in the first year
recognition of own name, 1st word, vocal play, canonical babbling, intentional communication urges
language development in the 2nd year
conversational initiative and responsiveness grows, reorganization and consolidation of phonological representations, 50 word vocab
language development in the 3rd year
narrative skills develop, phonological awareness grows, phonetic inventory completion, knowledge of derivational morphology increases vocab, negatives and questions forms, complex utterances
Parsing language sounds
parsing heard speech into phonemes (chop it up)
“citizens of the world”
in the 1st year, infants can discriminate all phonemes from all languages
Evidence for statistical learning:
infants showed discrimination of the word stimuli from the nonword stimuli
Evidence for a role of PSTM in language learning 1
baddeley: 4 year olds predicted their vocab one year later, PV was completely unable to make associations between spoken word and nonword pairs
evidence for a role of PSTM in language learning 2
vocab servise: demonstrated that the ability to represent unfamiliar phonological material in working memory predicted FL acquisition 2 and a half years later
Learning rules
grammar, must generalize to novel sentences, need to acquirerules that can be applied to new sentences
Holophrastic stage
1 word, under/over generalization
Telegraphic stage
2 word, subject-action, action-object
learning syntax/rules
syntactic overgeneralization
Adults usually do not explicitly correct children’s ______ or pronunciation
grammar.
only correct meaning
The poverty of the stimulus
suggests linguistic universals: general language principles, innate
Early language: learning to generalize formulas = pivot schemas
Over the course of 6 weeks, a child’s word utterances are 63% the same, then have changes
Pivot schema ex.
all X
where’s X
let’s X
learning rules: u-shaped learning
u-shaped curve for irregular past
critical period effects
people who learn language after age 10-12 hardly ever acquire native ability
Age effects
debating
Language and social interaction
results show phonetic learning in the live-exposure group, but no learning in the TV or Audio only group
Child directed speech (AKA motherese)
simplified grammar, meaning, restricted range of patterns. slower speech, use of special words and sounds, high pitch, etc
which part of the sentence is exaggerated to infants?
vowels
Effects of experience
children whose mothers address a great deal of speech to them develop vocab more rapidly
