Lecture 6: Language Developement 2 Flashcards
When does word production start?
Around 12 months
When does the vocabulary spurt occur?
Between 18 and 24 months
What is a vocabulary spurt?
An arbitrary mapping between a sound and a concept
Three explanations of the vocabulary spurt?
Sound
Concept
Mapping
Segmentation of speech
(Plunkett, 1993) coded utterances as containing what three things?
- target lexemes
- sub-lexical forms (SLFs)
- formulaic expressions
What are target lexemes?
Words
What are sub-lexical forms?
Undershooting solutions ( -raffe, -at of giraffe and that)
What are formulaic expressions?
Overshooting solutions (wassat, gimme)
How many words does a 6 yr old have?
13,000
What did plunkett (1993) find?
That the vocabulary spurt was closely related to solution of speech segmentation problem
Categorisation of objects:
Gopnik and Meltzoff (1987) found what?
A relationship between the age at which a productive naming spurt was seen and the emergence of ‘advanced object sorting’ skills
What did Gopnik and Meltzoff argue?
That the vocabulary spurt reflects the understanding that all things belong in categories.
Meints, plunkett&harris (1999) found that:
At 12 months:
At 18 and 24 months:
- infants concepts only include typical referents (dog, bird, car)
- both typical and atypical referents are included in their concepts of words (pug, ostrich, racing car)
Naming insight: what did McShane (1979) argue?
That the vocabulary spurt reflects the child’s discovery of how language works (realise that all things can and should have names)
What did Kamhi (1986) suggest?
That childrens realisation that all things should have names, is an observable developmental phenomenon
Quine’s (1960) mapping problem: gavagai- what could it refer to? (The disambiguation problem)
The whole, part of it, the colour, its name, how it is moving, something else entirely?
4 Solutions to the mapping problem:
A- syntactic bootstrapping
B- constraints on word meanings
C- the social pragmatic approach
D- the associative learning approach
What is syntactic bootstrapping?
When pre-school children use sentence context to infer the meanings of words (count nouns, mass nouns, proper nouns, adjectives, verbs- dockrell and mcshane, 1990)
What is a count noun? (Katz et al, 1974)
‘This is a X’
What is a mass noun? (Brown, 1985)
This is some X
What is a proper noun? (Gelman, 1984)
This is X
What is an adjective? (Smith et al, 1992)
This is a X one/ this is very X
What are constraints on word meanings?
They are when children make assumptions about new words’ meanings as they are equipped with a set of word learning biases and constraints (markman, 1989)
Some hypothesised constraints:
…
An example constraint: the whole object principle
What is the behaviour?
- the beh: children apply new words to whole objects, rather than to salient properties of objects
An example of a constraint: mutual exclusivity bias
Behaviour:
Behaviour: children apply new words to objects without names, rather than to objects that already have names
Is mutual exclusivity innate or learned? (Halberda, 2003)
There is evidence of the bias at 16 months, but not 14 or 15 months
Younger infants looked more at the ‘name known’ image
Is mutual exclusivity bias a result of infants’ experience with language? (Houston-price, caloghiris and raviglione, 2012)
What is there still to consider?
Monolingual infants have lots of experience of things having just one name
But bilingual children who hear more than one lang?
What did Houston-Price et al (2010) do/ find?
- compared mono and bilingual children
- finding that children in monolingual families had increased looks towards an unfamiliar object: showing that the language we hear teaches us HOW to learn words
What does the social pragmatic approach assume?
That word learning occurs in situations of joint attention (JA)
In what 2 ways might JA solve the mapping problem?
- Adult speaker ‘follows-in’ on child’s focus of attention (labels object that is already attending to)
- Infant switches focus to match adult speaker’s focus (attaches label to object attended to by adult)
What are infants able to do by 18 months?
Infants attach new words to objects at the focus of the speaker’s attention and will attach a new word to the object looked at by the speaker not the object the infant was looking at when they heard the word.
What does the associative learning approach assume?
That infants use general learning mechanisms (eg attention and memory) and the statistical variation of words and their referents to discover words’ meanings
What did smith and yu (2008) find?
That 12-14 month old infants showed evidence of ‘cross-situational learning’.
