Lecture 9 - Language Flashcards
Early social interaction
Humans are biolglcvially social - e.g. primed for faces - necessary for survival
Importance of crying - bring other to infant and drives interaction
Adults attribute meaning to expression of infants before they hold these meanings - helps drive development of intentional communication
Are emotions innate or socially constructed?
Scaffolding - adults strcutre and simplify the child’s environment in order to facilitate learning
Innate primary intersubjectivty (trevarthen, 2015)
Perceptual systems of baby are selectively tunes and socially preadapted (e.g. faces, touch)
Turn-taking in pseudo-conversations
Coordination - suck-pause cycles during feeding. Care-givers fit into the reflexive pattern
Neonatal imitation vs accompanying gestures
Meltzoff and Moore (1977): infnats cann imitate because they already know they bare like other people
Zazzo (1957): newborns stick their tunes out at lots of things
Uzgiris (1999): imitation is a process in itself - nan interpersonal phenomenon (rather than individual capacity)
Mutual interaction
Infants begin to respond to adults with new and extensive expressions around 6 weeks
- more mutual eye contact
- social smiling
- mutual intentions e.g. arm lift to complete the intention to be lifted @ 5 months
By 9 months infants use the gesture to initiate the interaction
Dyadic to triadic interactions
Dyadic: subject-subject (birth), subject-object (4momths)
Triadic: occurs towards end ofn first year
-use of gestures to intentionally communicate
- production occurs just before comprehension of communicative gestures - contrasts with language development as well as ostensive gestures
- magnet effect: infnat reaches towards the place an adult has acted on an object - object becomes a communicate referent
- first intentions are borrowed from the adults
- by 9 months infants use gestures to intentionally communicate
Communicative gestures
Infant can now direct other people;s attention
Absence = ‘red flag’
Ostensive gestures @ 8/9 momths
- giving or showing objects
- fucntion:
~ imperative (e.g. show object so that other help)
~ declarative (attracting other’s attention)
~ interrogatives (asks a question about object)
~ phatic (keeping the communication channel open)
Distal pointing @ 122/12 momths
- excellent predictor of language
- functions
~ imperative (e.g. asking for our of reach object)
~ declarative (drawing another’s attention)
~ informative (report to other)
~ interrogative (asks a question)
Innate or learned?
Pointing as a natural gesture
- great apes, dolphins, ravens, dogs in captivity ‘understanding’ human pointing
- great apes in the wild use some pointing (imperative function) has well as petition gestures naturally
Adults start and schaffold the process
- adult uses ostensive gestures to infant (e.g. shwoing objects, touch pointing to pictures)
- infants begins using ostensive to themselves to direct own attention
- adult uses petition (requesting) gesture to arouse ‘giving’ in infant
- infnat uses communicative Ostensive gestures (giving and showing)
What is language?
“A code in which spoken sound is used in order to encode meaning”
Conventional and creative
Limitless
Human language
A communicative system
A symbolic system: words and parts of words represent meaning, they refer to things other than themselves, the symbols are conventional
Rule governed: rules that reflect regularities and are abstract e.g. articles precede nouns they refer to
Productive: a finite number of units and rules can make an infinite number of grammatical utterances and meanings
What makes human language unique?
Many communication systems across diverse species (e.g. bees, lions, dolphins)
- none possess all of the characteristics found in human language
Main areas of language
Phonology
- ‘phonemes’ or sound segments
- e.g. d + o + g
Semantics
- system of meaning - “morphemes” - smallest unit of meaning
E.g. prefixed and suffixes e.g. (re) form(ed) and words
Syntax
- rules by which words/phrases are arranged
- e.g. Jane hit sue vs sue hit Jane vs Jane was hit by sue
Pragmatics
- how to use language in different contexts or genres
Sequence of language development: speech perception
Before birth?
- foetal reactions to sounds from 20 weeks
- distinguish between male and female voices near term
- presence for “uterine” version of mother;s voice after birth
Speech percpetion
Neonates
- prefer speech over non speech
- prefer native language
- prefer sounds produced by mother
- discriminate word types
Infant-directed speech/motherese
Higher pitch
Exaggerated pitch contours
More rhythmic
Helps infants decipher the speech stream
By 7 months
Infants can recognise and remember familiar words within the speech stream
They are suing cues such as strongly stressed syllables to indicated the onset of words
Phonemes
Smallest unit of speech that can affect meaning
Set of sounds that are not physically identical but are treated as equivalent by speakers in language
E.g. K in Key and sKi in English are the same, but in Chinese they are treated as different phonemes
Evidence that human infants are innately predisposed to categorical percpetion of speech sounds i.e. distinguish between different phonemes but not discriminating between different examples of the same phoneme
This is probably to do with auditory processing skills rather than innate speech processing skills per se, bit it sets them up to learn
Sequence of language development: production
From brith - 2 months: reflexive vocalisations e.g. different types of cry
2-4 months: cooing and languing
4-6 months: babbling - the first controlled vocalisations
Canonical babbling - 6-10 momths
- include more vowels and consonants
- Combine these in a way that start to sound like words e.g. mamma
- genetically determined e.g. deaf chidlren m produce same babbling )when younger than 7 months)
- gestural babbling in dead infants and hearing infnats taught to sign - impl;citations for evolution of our vocal language system
Modulated babbling - 10+ momths
- add stress and intonation patterns and learn about these e.g. different intonations signal statements and questions
- overlaps with meaningful speech period
Enriched gesture input/baby sign: controversy and future
Evidence:
Use of key word signing with speech and cognitive delay
Research on impacts of BS
Gesture and language research
Anecdotal and parental report
Communcation/language: gestures and words
Gestures closely linked with development of language e.g. first deictic points correlated with first word onset
Gesture = a ‘way-station’ on the road to language over ontogenetic and evolutionary time
Coraballis (2002): language developed from and within gesture systems rather than vocal calls
2-item gesture & word strings e.g. “give” + point to cup predicts 2-word strings
Mostly complemtary where a single referent is singled about a dietician gesture e.g. flowers and point to flowers
Gesture + gesture combination rarely seen
Supplementary combinations increase between 16-20 months
Mostly gesture-word e.g. all gone + apple
Kids don’t produce 2 word utterances until they have produced supplemtary combinations
Increased representational gestures?
Volterra et al (2006) - exposure to sign enhances awareness of the represnat5ional Portugal of gesture/sign
In sign exposed infant: combination of 2 representational gestures at 20 months and more cross modal combinations that monolingual controls
Doherty-Sneddon (2008): a case study of key word signer showed similar use of gesture-gesture combination
- often supplemtary e.g. SAD + ME. Never seen in non-signing hearing chidlren
Ergative structure in opposing to spoken available (English)
E.g. - swim brother - eat me
The pragmatic system
Abilities that allow us to communicate in an effective way in a social context
Maintaining and repairing conversations
- e.g. using repetition or revisions “i wnat cake” “i want pink cake”
- by 3 years will ask for clarification
Turn-taking:
- altering listener and speaker
- early imitation and then later
- first in early carer-infant interactions
- e.g. jiggling-sucking pattern during feeding
- touching or vocalising to initiate interaction and maintain interactions
- proto-conversations: dyadic then Triadic
Initiating interactions
- initially nonverbal, e.g. early pointing
Pragmatics
Adjuster to different contexts
- differences in communication to different listeners as young as 2
- e.g. informal or formals
Take account of listener’s perspective
- 4-5 years
Master convention of different genres
- 3 years
- e.g. “once upon a time”= telling story
Syntactic system
The way that words and parts of wrofds are related to one other to create grammatical sentences (governed by rules)
Chomsky (1957)
- s-strcutre = surface strcutre (what is spoken)
- d-strcutre - deep strcutre (the actual meaning)
“Hot” = “that pot is making the soup hot”,”if I touch that hot pot I’ll get burned”
Innate language acquisition device
Nativist theories
Born with basic language production/comprehension capacity
Chomsky’s LAD
- human language have universal features
~ phonological, syntax, “deep structures”
-innate know ledge of basic grammar rules
- LAD perceives regularities in heard utterances
~ LAD generates hypotheses about regularities
~ hypotheses are tested against new utterances
Support for LAD?
Chidlren learn quickly and learning governed by rules
- sequence of language acquisition similar across languages
Systematic mistakes (logical errors)
- no fault model of these mistakes
Correct order early on
- e.g. ‘me want that coat’ not ‘want that coat me’
First words
First words ~ 10-18 months
- act as labels consistently
- ‘holophrases’ condense meaning: more than 1 possible d-strcutre
- Italy people based labels, then object nouns then action verbs - some variability
@ 18 months - word explosion
- roughly 20 words @ 18m -> 200 words and 21m
- mainly nouns - labels of objects, people
- some action, state, fucntion words
Combinations pf gestures + words
- comes before word + word
- gesture + gesture -> baby signing?
Multi-word speech
18 months - 24 months - 2 word utterances
- telegraphic speech
- importance of scaffolding
- often don’ t use word order meaning meaning e.g. ‘run horsie’ ‘horsie run’
- mostly highly salient words (including nouns, verbs and adjective) few articles (in, and, of) and few word endings (ED)
- e.g. mummy go shop
24-27 months - 3-4 word utterances
Starts to see some evidence of grammatical rules
- e.g. logical errors “mouses”
- prepositions, irregular verbs
- re-order words (negative statements, wh-questions)
Multi-word speech
By 3 years, speech under stable to even unfamialr adults
- vocabulary ~ 1,000 words
- complex sentences with relative clauses
- e.g. my sister, who has 4 dogs, is more of a crazy-dog lady than i am
- still perfecting smoke linguists systems (pronouns, verbs)
By 5 years language simialr to that of adult
- still perfecting Some tenses and constructions
- e.g. passive tense, conditional tense
Overregularisation
A previously learned syntactic rule is applied to the exception the rule e.g.
- buyed instead of bought, mouses instead of mice
They have learned the rule and are using forms they have never heard creatively
Creative overgeneralising e.g. the progressing ‘ing’ is the first suffix used by young chidlren. There are no irregular progressive forms in e=English so hence no errors - but we still see creative overgeneralisations
Acquisition of word meaning
Comphrening the meaning behind sounds i.e. what they represent
They need to guess this meaning from the context
Under extension: using a word too narrowly e.g. dog for toy dog not for dogs in park
Overextension: extending the meaning too broadly e.g. birds for all flying things
Highly complex task which is accomplished with relatively few errors - 14,000 words by 6 years of age
Meaning is constructed incrementally over experiences and time
A semantic system (of semantic relations) is contracted rather than a list
- e.g. opposites
- dimensions
- subordinate-superordinate
Constructivist or cogntive theorties
Cognitive anf langauge development are interdependent
Linage development reflect stages of cogntive development
- cognitive abilities enable understanding and use of language
- rules come from wider cognitive system not LAD
Similarities in lanage driven by similarities in experience and development
Experience matters
SES impacts on language development
- language processing and vocabulary lower in SES children
- chidlren in the top SES 60% higher scored than those in the lowest quintile
Why?
- lower SES chidlren hear fewer words per hour than higher SES?
- lower SES mother talks to child less, use less complex sentences, read to them less
Vocab at age 3 predicts language competence at 9 and 10
Genie - A case study
Extreme deprivation
- 20 months until 13 years restrained, alone in room
- no one spoke to her and she was beaten for maki9ng any attempt at communcation
Recovery
- first few months started recognising words
- then 1 and 2 word utterances, few multi word
Deficits
- never learned to use pronouns
- never mastered questions
- never developed complex senstcned
- relied more on gestures
