LECTURE 8- LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT 2 Flashcards
What are the four key challenges in language learning for children?
Segmentation, learning word order rules, marking verbs, and generalizing appropriately.
What is the segmentation challenge in language learning?
Identifying individual words from a continuous stream of speech with no clear boundaries.
How do infants segment words in speech?
By using transitional probabilities and language-specific cues like stress patterns.
What are transitional probabilities?
The likelihood that one syllable will follow another, helping infants identify words.
What did Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996) study?
How 8-month-olds use transitional probabilities to distinguish words from non-words.
How was the head-turn preference procedure used in segmentation research?
Infants listened longer to non-words or part-words, indicating they could discriminate words from the speech stream.
What did Fló et al. (2019) find about newborns?
Newborns show different brain responses to words and part-words, indicating early sensitivity to transitional probabilities.
What stress pattern is dominant in English words?
Trochaic stress (STRONG-weak), like “CAN-dle” or “DOC-tor.”
What did Jusczyk et al. (1999) demonstrate about stress patterns?
English-speaking 7.5-month-olds recognize trochaic-stressed words better than iambic-stressed words.
What errors do English-speaking children make due to stress biases?
Simplifications like “RAFFE” for “gi-RAFFE” or “PU-ter” for “com-PU-ter.”
When do infants become sensitive to language-specific cues like stress?
By 7.5 months old.
What is the challenge of learning word order rules?
Children must understand how word order conveys meaning (e.g., SVO in English).
What is the Verb-Island Hypothesis?
Children initially learn specific verbs in isolation and gradually generalize word order rules.
What did Akhtar & Tomasello (1997) find about verb-general knowledge?
2-year-olds often lacked verb-general knowledge, performing at chance in novel word order tasks.
What method did Gertner, Fisher & Eisengart (2006) use to study word order comprehension?
A preferential-looking technique to test if children looked longer at correct sentence interpretations.
At what age do children show verb-general knowledge of SVO word order?
By 21 months, as shown by looking-time studies.
What is the challenge of marking verbs?
Learning to mark verbs for agreement (e.g., “-s”) and tense (e.g., “-ed”).
What did Brown (1973) observe about early verb marking?
Children’s early speech is often telegraphic, omitting verb markings like “-s” or “-ed.”
What is Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)?
A language deficit affecting around 7.5% of children, marked by difficulty with verb marking and other areas.
How do children with DLD struggle with verb marking?
They show significant deficits in marking past tense (“-ed”) and 3rd person singular (“-s”).
What is MOSAIC?
A computational model simulating how children learn from child-directed speech, focusing on verb errors.
Why do English-speaking children make frequent verb errors?
They rely on more frequent verb forms (e.g., “see” over “sees”) and learn from the right edge of sentences.
What is the generalization challenge in language learning?
Children must learn patterns like adding “-ed” for past tense without overgeneralizing to irregular verbs.
What are past tense overgeneralization errors?
Applying the “-ed” rule to irregular verbs, e.g., “bringed” instead of “brought.”
How do children learn low-frequency irregulars like “bled”?
By analogy with similar-sounding irregulars like “read” → “read.”
What did Blything, Ambridge & Lieven (2018) demonstrate?
Children use phonological similarity to group irregular verbs and produce correct past tense forms.
How do children make overgeneralization errors in sentence structures?
By applying rules incorrectly, e.g., “Don’t giggle me” or “They just cough me.”
How do children learn verb-specific sentence frames?
By analogizing verbs with similar meanings, e.g., understanding that “giggle” behaves like “laugh.”
What did Ambridge et al. (2008) find about semantic classes?
Even 5-year-olds know you can’t “expression someone” (e.g., “The funny man giggled Bart”).
What is the difference between language-general and language-specific cues?
Transitional probabilities are language-general; stress patterns are language-specific.
What is the prevalence of DLD in the UK?
About 7.5%, equivalent to 2 children per classroom.
How do children with DLD compare to typically developing children in verb errors?
They make errors for longer and struggle more with long-distance dependencies.
How do transitional probabilities help segmentation?
Infants identify word boundaries by tracking how likely syllables are to follow one another
How does stress replace transitional probabilities in older infants?
By 7.5 months, infants rely more on stress patterns like trochaic stress in English.
How do children handle novel verbs like “wug”?
They start with simple structures and gradually learn to use complex patterns as vocabulary grows.
What did Rice, Wexler & Hershberger (1998) find about verb marking in DLD?
Children with DLD show deficits in verb marking compared to both age-matched and language-matched peers.
What is the role of input frequency in verb errors?
Children are more accurate with verb forms they hear more frequently in child-directed speech.
How do children generalize appropriately in grammar?
By building families of similar-sounding or similar-meaning verbs to support rules and exceptions.
