Lecture 4

Question 1

Prelinguistic

Answer 1

making sounds

Question 2

Phonlogy

Answer 2

parts of words.

Question 3

Profanity

Answer 3

swearing

Question 4

Phoneme

Answer 4

smallest unit

Question 5

Morpheme

Answer 5

a unit with a meaning. can not be further divided

Question 6

Prosody

Answer 6

melody and stress patterns of the language. Where words or sentences end. for example

Question 7

Morphology

Answer 7

cover the internal structure of words.

Question 8

syntax

Answer 8

the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.

Question 9

grammar

Answer 9

morphology and syntax

Question 10

Pragmatics

Answer 10

the branch of linguistics dealing with language in use and the contexts in which it is used, including such matters as deixis, the taking of turns in conversation, text organization, presupposition, and implicature.

rules how to use language, how to communicate effectively when there are rules at play

Question 11

The three internal factors that contribute to language developments

Answer 11

• LAD (language acquisition device)
  Innate mechanism to understand grammar and ability to learn rules of language
• wiring of infant brain
  ability to track statistical dependencies and conditional probabilities
  detect patterns and apply those through imitation
• drive to communicate

Question 12

Broca’s area

Answer 12

Production of language, to speak and write

Question 13

Wernicke’s area

Answer 13

Comprehension of language, you ncan say a lot, but you don’t say much haha.

Question 14

External factors in language acquisition. name three

Answer 14

• interactive environment
• infant-directed speech: greater pitch variability, slower speech, shorter sentences, more word repetition, ore questions, exaggerated facial expressions
• draw infants’ attention –> facilitates word learning
  both quantity and quality helps during language development

Question 15

Prenatal language learning

Answer 15

• Language acquisition already starts in the womb
• preference for the mother’s voice and native language of their mother

Question 16

What was the conclusion of a study where a story for children of 4 days old in their native language got played?

Answer 16

In the correct order the children preferred their own native language, but when the story was told backwards, so only the rythm stayed the same, the children didn’t have a preference for a native or non native language

Question 17

consonants in phoneme meaning

Answer 17

medeklinkers

Question 18

vowels

Answer 18

klinkers!

Question 19

What was a conclusion about the ability to discriminate non native phonetic contrasts by a distinguishing phonemes study?

Answer 19

Study set up: monolingual and bilingual adults and infants

English ba en da
American indian Ki and Qi

Infants: head turning
Adults button pressing when phonemes changed

Conclusion: the ability to discriminate non-native phonetic contrasts deceline during the first year of life. But there is no decline in multi lingual environment.

Question 20

What is a ERP signature MMN?

Answer 20

This is a mismatch negativity.
So when the same stimulus is presented repeatedly , after a different stimulus, the MMN is produced. A larger MMN response means a larger difference!

Question 21

What can we conclude out of the study forom Cheour et al. (1998) about Finnish and Estoninan vowels and children of 6 month and 12 months old?

Answer 21

There is a decline in sensitivity in phonemes of non native languages. The MMN is produced less when the children hear phonemes of their non native language.

Question 22

What can we conclude of the study of Kuhl et al. (2003) about learning phonemes of Mandarin Chinese to children?

Answer 22

Only if there’s a goal to communicate and only when there is an interaction, infants pick up these new phonemes

Question 23

Perceptual narrowing

Answer 23

losing the ability to distinguish phonemes in other languages, so only retain ability to distinguish between stimuli that are important/relevant

Question 24

Language phonotactics

Answer 24

Rules that govern the sequence of phonemes in a word.
A language’s phonotactics is comprised of the sounds and placement of sounds that will be found in its words. English and Swahili, for instance, are governed by very different sound rules. In English, a word can end with the sound “ng,” as in “sing,” but it cannot begin with that sound.

Question 25

What was the conclusion of Saffran et al. (1996) study of infants about word segmentation?

Answer 25

There was a training set with different words with no meaning.
When during the test set words infants already knew, they didn’t care and din’t look so much, but when they heard a new word that they haven’t learned in the training set, they watched for a longer priod of time. they knew which syllables should come after each other! they were able to detect these rules even when they were 8 months old

Question 26

When do infants use top down processing with semantic development?

Answer 26

They use their own name and mommy as a cue for learning new words. So they already know these words, and they use it to acquire a broader vocabulary. “The child drinks from Harry;s cup” works better than “The child drinks from Peter’s cup”

Question 27

Does labeling objects help infants to learn new words?

Answer 27

es, it seems like it’s easier for them to link the world to the world (objects). A study with 10 month olds show that they preferred labelled objects, but shared attention could also play a role here.

Question 28

Fast mapping

Answer 28

rapidly narrowing down the potential meanings of a new word by excluding other possibilities.

Question 29

What comes first, comprehension of production?

Answer 29

Comprehension

Question 30

When does word comprehension start?

Answer 30

Between 8-10 months old

Question 31

How many words do two year old learn each day?

Answer 31

10

Question 32

How many words can children understand before they can produce 10 words?

Answer 32

50

Question 33

How big is the gap between comprehending 50 words and producing 50 words?

Answer 33

five months

Question 34

How can parents influence on word learning> name 5 things!

Answer 34

• Prosody
• infant-directed speech
• repeat new words
• focus infants attention on object before labelling
• use familiar words in combinatgion with new words

Question 35

Initial speech production goes…
name the 4 phases

Answer 35

• 0-2 months : comfort sounds –> warm, happy, satisfied, vowel
• 2-3 months phonetic sequences (cooing) –> ooo, aaa, baby talk.
• marginal babbling: 4-6 months –> baa maa, hmmm
• 7-10 months: canonical babbling –> mamamama, gagaga, sounds sequences, syllables.

Question 36

Foreign babbling

Answer 36

Adults can distinguish babbling in their native language vs a foreign language

Question 37

Why is the ability to hea important for babbling?

Answer 37

Deaf infants, starts babbling later and with fewer vocalisations

Question 38

Babbling in sign language

Answer 38

infants start babbling in language they are exposed to

Question 39

what does cross cultural overlap in first words indicate

Answer 39

that there’s a similar interest of infants

Question 40

After producing first words:

Answer 40

rapid increase in word production in general, but also large variability between children!

Question 41

Mean Length of utterance (MLU)

Answer 41

measuring this we can measure grammar.
number of morphemes. Is flawed, aspects of grammar and n eglect other parts of grammar. if you use inflectional morphology (-ed, -s) less, but grammatical function words more. the/he, you score lower.
So we should actually just look at how children communicate.

Question 42

over regularisation

Answer 42

Tendency to over-regularise irregular forms of words.
- past tense: goed
Plural: gooses

It’s not a u development, no. It is actually quite rare. More common for unfamiliar words. Consequences of marking tense intentionally.

Question 43

what is better for solving children errors?

Answer 43

not giving feedback, continuing converstation without correction is better in the long run!

Question 44

Pragmatic Development

Answer 44

Knowledge about how language can be used to communicate effectively and socially appropriately

Develops from concrete to more abstract

Strong links with theory of mind and social cognition