Lecture 6: Language Developement 2

Question 1

When does word production start?

Answer 1

Around 12 months

Question 2

When does the vocabulary spurt occur?

Answer 2

Between 18 and 24 months

Question 3

What is a vocabulary spurt?

Answer 3

An arbitrary mapping between a sound and a concept

Question 4

Three explanations of the vocabulary spurt?

Answer 4

Sound
Concept
Mapping

Question 5

Segmentation of speech

(Plunkett, 1993) coded utterances as containing what three things?

Answer 5

• target lexemes
• sub-lexical forms (SLFs)
• formulaic expressions

Question 6

What are target lexemes?

Answer 6

Words

Question 7

What are sub-lexical forms?

Answer 7

Undershooting solutions ( -raffe, -at of giraffe and that)

Question 8

What are formulaic expressions?

Answer 8

Overshooting solutions (wassat, gimme)

Question 9

How many words does a 6 yr old have?

Answer 9

13,000

Question 10

What did plunkett (1993) find?

Answer 10

That the vocabulary spurt was closely related to solution of speech segmentation problem

Question 11

Categorisation of objects:

Gopnik and Meltzoff (1987) found what?

Answer 11

A relationship between the age at which a productive naming spurt was seen and the emergence of ‘advanced object sorting’ skills

Question 12

What did Gopnik and Meltzoff argue?

Answer 12

That the vocabulary spurt reflects the understanding that all things belong in categories.

Question 13

Meints, plunkett&harris (1999) found that:
At 12 months:
At 18 and 24 months:

Answer 13

• 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)

Question 14

Naming insight: what did McShane (1979) argue?

Answer 14

That the vocabulary spurt reflects the child’s discovery of how language works (realise that all things can and should have names)

Question 15

What did Kamhi (1986) suggest?

Answer 15

That childrens realisation that all things should have names, is an observable developmental phenomenon

Question 16

Quine’s (1960) mapping problem: gavagai- what could it refer to? (The disambiguation problem)

Answer 16

The whole, part of it, the colour, its name, how it is moving, something else entirely?

Question 17

4 Solutions to the mapping problem:

Answer 17

A- syntactic bootstrapping
B- constraints on word meanings
C- the social pragmatic approach
D- the associative learning approach

Question 18

What is syntactic bootstrapping?

Answer 18

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)

Question 19

What is a count noun? (Katz et al, 1974)

Answer 19

‘This is a X’

Question 20

What is a mass noun? (Brown, 1985)

Answer 20

This is some X

Question 21

What is a proper noun? (Gelman, 1984)

Answer 21

This is X

Question 22

What is an adjective? (Smith et al, 1992)

Answer 22

This is a X one/ this is very X

Question 23

What are constraints on word meanings?

Answer 23

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)

Question 24

Some hypothesised constraints:

Answer 24

…

Question 25

An example constraint: the whole object principle

What is the behaviour?

Answer 25

• the beh: children apply new words to whole objects, rather than to salient properties of objects

Question 26

An example of a constraint: mutual exclusivity bias

Behaviour:

Answer 26

Behaviour: children apply new words to objects without names, rather than to objects that already have names

Question 27

Is mutual exclusivity innate or learned? (Halberda, 2003)

Answer 27

There is evidence of the bias at 16 months, but not 14 or 15 months

Younger infants looked more at the ‘name known’ image

Question 28

Is mutual exclusivity bias a result of infants’ experience with language? (Houston-price, caloghiris and raviglione, 2012)

What is there still to consider?

Answer 28

Monolingual infants have lots of experience of things having just one name

But bilingual children who hear more than one lang?

Question 29

What did Houston-Price et al (2010) do/ find?

Answer 29

• 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

Question 30

What does the social pragmatic approach assume?

Answer 30

That word learning occurs in situations of joint attention (JA)

Question 31

In what 2 ways might JA solve the mapping problem?

Answer 31

1. Adult speaker ‘follows-in’ on child’s focus of attention (labels object that is already attending to)
2. Infant switches focus to match adult speaker’s focus (attaches label to object attended to by adult)

Question 32

What are infants able to do by 18 months?

Answer 32

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.

Question 33

What does the associative learning approach assume?

Answer 33

That infants use general learning mechanisms (eg attention and memory) and the statistical variation of words and their referents to discover words’ meanings

Question 34

What did smith and yu (2008) find?

Answer 34

That 12-14 month old infants showed evidence of ‘cross-situational learning’.