limba Flashcards
Do non-human animals communicate?
Yes.
E.g. group of fish hunt together because they have different strengths and weaknesses
They work together through communicative gestures like hand shacking and nodding.
How do monkeys communicate?
Monkeys - see one kind of predator and make one type of call and then the other monkeys respond. They have different calls for each predator which indicate whether they should hide or go up high into the trees.
What experiment was used to see if animals can learn language?
Apes were taught sign language bc they have good motor control.
Apes learnt to use over 100 symbols.
So did apes learn language?
No. The symbols that they learnt were used to request things or to respond to experimenter commands and obtain rewards.
They did not produce sentences where they are combining all the symbols that they have learnt to make meaning of something.
What is different about human language?
Language is a productive system and by the time we are 3, we can produce innumerable sentences.
Language allows us to produce an infinite no. of sentences through a limited amount of words.
What are the properties of human language?
Generative - we can communicate an infinite no. of ideas from an infinite no. of parts
Recursive - can build upon itself without limits
Uses displacement - refers to things that are not directly present
What are the categories in which we split the study of language development?
We think about language acquisition in 2 categories.
- Receptive language - comprehension. Do infants understand what’s being said.
- Expressive language - using speech to communicate
What is perceptual narrowing of speech processing?
Older infants prefer their native language.
As infants become attuned to the info in their environment, they gain a preference for things they have been exposed to.
They lose the ability to discriminate between vowel and consonant sounds that are not from their native language.
What is prosody?
Prosody is an important property of speech.
It describes rhythm, stress and intonation of speech.
What is the role of prosody for expert listeners?
Prosody gives extra information on top of the meaning of words.
e.g.
-I- didn’t eat your chocolate.
Putting emphasis on the word -I-.
What is the role of prosody for naive listeners like infants?
Prosody provides important cues as to how to segment the signal.
What is infant directed speech?
Speech directed towards infants uses extra prosody to help infants learn.
We slow down.
We place more emphasis on important syllables.
How does infant directed speech facilitate word learning?
In an experiment they taught 21 months old babies new item they have never seen before.
They gave a new label for the object.
They were trained the object in either adult directed language or infant directed language.
RESULTS: Babies looked more at the target object when they were trained in infant directed speech.
When trained in adult directed speech, there was not a difference in looking time. - so they have not learnt the word.
Does infant directed speech facilitate learning in later childhood?
No.
A follow up study showed that 27 months old that were taught the word in adult directed speech still learnt the word.
Is infant directed speech comparable to a song?
English adults learnt Chinese.
They were either taught through IDS, ADS, or song
ADS had the worst word learning
IDS and song did not differ from each other.
SO
IDS and song produced better word learning and long-term memory for adults hearing an non-native language.
Is infant directed speech universal?
Yes
IDS appears to be universal and we can reliably detect IDS without understanding a word of what is being said (2022 study)
What are the universal properties people used to identify IDS?
Higher pitch
Higher vowel travel rate
Greater pitch variability
Does infant directed speech predict later development?
Longitudinal study of Palestinian infants - different features of mothers’ IDS predicts infant outcomes at 6 and 18 m.
How do infants link sounds to meaning?
Human language is not just about mapping sounds to referents (an object like apes can be trained to do)
There is a 3-way-relationship between:
- words
- referents
- mental representation of the referent
What is verbal reference?
The ability to use language to communicate about objects, events or ideas even if they are not witnessed directly such as past events.
What are the sub-divisions of the verbal reference pyramid?
Establishing and retrieving mental representations
Recognising the referential precision of words - cat does not refer to all fluffy animals
Knowing that speech communicates about present and absent entities
What is research on categorisation?
Infants use words to understand referent.
Baby is exposed to exemplar of a category: fluffy animals
On each trial they see the object and hear the word OR no word OR tones.
At test trial they see 2 objects, one that belongs to the category.
If you give label to the category, they learn and correctly identify the object in the test trial.
If you give generic statements OR tunes, they don’t learn.
What is research on categorisation and property?
By 13 months, they learn differences between category and property.
So labels are important for learning how a word maps to a referent.
How do infants know what the referent is or that we are communicating information to them about the name of that referent?
Because of ostensive cues
What is the theory of natural pedagogy?
Humans are sensitive to and biased by ostensive cues:
- eye contact
- infant directed speech
- contingent responses/turn-taking
What biases do we have about what the referent might be?
We have whole object bias.
Shape bias
Bouba-kiki effect
How do we learn a language?
Domain general learning mechanisms - memory
Environment - infant directed speech
In-built - biases
