Midterm 3 Flashcards
1
Q
Growth Mindset Paper
A
- A problem with complimenting kids solely on their effort and not on their ability as well can backfire, and can communicate that they’re not very capable and therefore unlikely to succeed at future tasks.
- The praise itself, whether about effort or ability, is the main problem however
- It’s a verbal reward; research has shown that kids end up less interested in whatever they were rewarded or praised for doing because now their goal is to just get praise as opposed to actually doing well on something due to interest in the subject
- Praise also communicates that our approval is conditional on the child’s continuing to impress us or do what we say
- What kids really need is unconditional support
- Another problem with praise is that if kids are preoccupied with how well they’re doing in school, then their interest in what they’re doing may suffer; a study found that adopting a growth mindset wasn’t helpful for students whose self-worth was dependent upon their performance, and they were more likely to ‘self-handicap’
- The biggest problem with this idea of growth-mindset encouraging praise is focusing on mindset itself, believing that it emphasizes that there’s something that we need to change about ourselves, and that the environment/condition can’t be changed
- Related to the fundamental attribution error: paying so much attention to personality and attitudes that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we d and who we are; it causes us to ignore the politics behind things and not see how we can improve our conditions
Overall message: praise, whether it’s encouraging a growth mindset or not, causes kids to become focused on achievement as opposed to being focused on the actually learning itself. It also encourages the idea that our conditions/environment are fixed, and that we can only focus on fixing/improving ourselves as opposed to improving both ourselves AND the conditions we’re in, since the conditions we’re in can be a bit toxic (think ‘culture of poverty’); some educators would rather convince students that they need to adopt a more positive attitude than address the quality of the curriculum or the pedagogy
2
Q
Fundamental Attribution Error
A
- From growth mindset paper
- Def: paying so much attention to personality and attitudes that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and who we are
3
Q
Asher and Paquette: Loneliness and Peer Relations in Childhood Paper
A
- Loneliness inchildren is influenced by howwell accepted they are by peers,whether they are overtly victim-ized, whether they have friends,and the durability and qualityof their best friendships
- Loneliness definition: the cognitive awareness of a deficiency in one’s social and personal relationships, and the ensuing affective reactions of sadness, emptiness, or longing
- It is possible to have many friends and still feel lonely; it’s also possible to be poorly accepted by the peer group or lack friends and not feel lonely
- Chronic loneliness is associated with various indices of maladjustment in adolescents and adults, including dropping out of school, depression, alcoholism, and medical problems
- Kids start to have an at least rudimentary idea of loneliness at age 5 or 6; understand that loneliness consists of solitude and a depressed affect
- There is a consistent association between peer acceptance and loneliness; kids who are poorly accepted report experiencing higher levels of loneliness in kindergartners all the way up to middle school students
- There are distinct subgroups within rejected children however; withdrawn-rejected children consistently report greater loneliness than aggressive-rejected children. One factor that may account for variability in rejected children’s feelings of loneliness is overt victimization, as highly dislike children who are victimized are more likely to report elevated loneliness
- There is no evidence to date that the number of friends children have relates to loneliness, but it is important for children to have friendships that endure
- Children who make new friends but do not maintain their friendships experience higher levels of loneliness
- Children who participate in high-quality friendships experience less loneliness than other children
- Children who have ‘idealized’ views of their friends, like that their friends will never let them down and will always be there for them are likely to experience disappointments when outsiders would think the friendship is going well
- Children who believe that conflict is a sign of impending dissolution of a friendship are likely to experience higher levels of loneliness
4
Q
Kuhl on the Linguistic genius of babies
A
- Did the head-turn task, in which babies were conditioned to turn their heads when they heard a different sound
- Did this with two English language sounds that aren’t important to distinguish between in Japanese, and tested American and Japanese children
- At 6-8 months, both groups of kids were equally as likely to respond correctly
- At 10-12 months, the American children had become better at responding, and the Japanese children had become worse
- During this 2 month time frame, babies are listening to us and taking statistics on the sounds they’re hearing in our language, seeing different distributions of sounds, and using those statistics to become more or less sensitive to certain sounds
- Repeated experiment with American infants and Taiwanese infants and saw the same results, and then did a test in which in that critical time period, American babies were exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions. Babies who were exposed to Mandarin were then as good as babies in Taiwan when given these sessions
- Researchers then wanted to know what the presence of a human being there and talking to them had, so they repeated the experiment, but this time with the kids getting their exposure through a video, and babies who had just audio exposure. The audio and video group showed no learning; babies need humans to be there and be present for them to take their statistics.
- Used MEG machines to record babies while listening to different languages and see their brain activity
5
Q
Symbols
A
- Systems for representing thoughts, feelings, and knowledge, and communicating them to others
- Language is the most powerful symbolic system
6
Q
Generativity of Language
A
- We can take the finite set of words in our vocabulary and put them together in an infinite number of sentences and express and infinite number of ideas
7
Q
Four different components of language
A
- Phonology: perception and production of speech sounds
- Semantics: how we segment words and learn their meaning
- Pragmatics: the context in which language is used
- Syntax: arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences
8
Q
Phonemes
A
- the elements of sound in speech
- Ex: when –> wh/e/n = 3 phonemes
- English uses just 45 of the 200 sounds found in all languages
- Perception of phonemes is not continuous, but is categorical
9
Q
What a child needs to be able to do to master phonology
A
- Discriminate the sounds of their native language
2. Categorize the sounds of their native language
10
Q
McGurk effect
A
- Example of phonological perception being categorical as opposed to continuous
- Shows that speech perception results from an interaction between sound and vision
- If we see a video of someone saying ‘far’ next to a video of someone saying ‘bar’ but hear the same word (either bar or far) over both videos, we will think that the individual is saying the word that they’re mouthing, and the word we hear will change as we look back and forth between the videos; we’ll only hear ‘bar’ or ‘far’ though, we won’t hear some intermediary sound
11
Q
How Phoneme Perception Develops
A
- Babies learn to NOT tell apart sounds that aren’t important in their language
- Shows that phoneme perception is also an example of perceptual narrowing, as well as the ‘use it or lose it’ function; the development of phoneme perception in infants is similar to their development of facial recognition
12
Q
Conditioned Head-Turn Study
A
- Used to measure perceptual narrowing of phonemes in babies
- Conditioned babies to look to the side when they heard a different sound
- Ex: ba..ba..ba..da
- Infants at 6 months were able to tell the difference between the sounds (‘universal listeners’)
- At 10-12 months, infants lost the ability to distinguish between sounds that weren’t important to distinguish between in their native language
- This loss of sensitivity (roughly) coincides with the onset of word learning (6 months to 1 year)
13
Q
Early vocalizations
A
- At 6-8 weeks, babies coo, which is the production of drawn-out vowel sounds
- They also have an increased awareness that vocalization elicits response from others
- By practicing vowels, they’re gaining motor control of their facial muscles
- At 6-10 months, babies start to babble, which is repeated strings of syllables (ba ba ba)
- This babbling gradually converges on sounds, intonation, and rhythm of their native language
- Congenitally deaf babies will do manual babbling if exposed to sign language
- Other animals babble as well, like birds and bats
14
Q
What children need to grasp to learn word meanings
A
- What are words (word segmentation)
2. What do the words mean
15
Q
Semantics Step 1: Word Segmentation
A
- Where do words start/end
- Attending to pauses generally won’t help grasp word segmentation, since human speech occurs without breaks
- Statistical learning helps babies segment words, as they pay attention to transitional? probabilities to guess what are individual words or not
16
Q
Mondegreens
A
- Mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase; occurs a lot with song lyrics
17
Q
Word Segmentation Experiment
A
- Took 8 month old babies and put them through a familiarity phase and a test phase
- In the familiarity phase, they played four made-up words for the babies being repeated over and over again in the span of 2 minutes at the rate at which normal speech is spoken (no pauses between words)
- Their only cues at word boundaries were thus to use transitional probability, which is how likely each syllable is to follow the previous one. It’s higher with actual words, of course
- The test phase then involved the babies listening to either a full word or part of a full word from the fake words they had just heard
- The babies were able to discriminate between ‘words’ and ‘parts-of-words’, showing that infants are sensitive to which syllables repeatedly occurred together
18
Q
Transitional Probability
A
- In semantics, it’s the likelihood that a particular syllable is to follow the previous one
- Is higher in actual words than syllables between words (ex: higher in ac-tual than tual-words)
- What babies use to determine what are words and what aren’t when hearing speech
19
Q
Semantics Step 2: What do words mean
A
- Kids have comprehension of highly familiar words at 6 months old (they’ll look towards an object you label, like ‘dog’)
- Kids say their first words around 10-15 months old
- A vocabulary explosion occurs around 18 months, at which children learn words fast, and can learn through just a single exposure via fast-mapping
- Word learning is not straightforward, and kids have to make some default assumptions when learning words
- They assume that the word refers to the object as a whole and not a portion, place, or property.
Ex: if you point to a rabbit and say ‘rabbit’, they assume the whole rabbit is a rabbit, not that its’ tail is a rabbit - They assume the new word refers only to objects of that shape, and that each thing will only have one shape (a rabbit is only a rabbit, not a rabbit and bunny)
- Kids also infer what a new word means by ruling out objects they already know (ex. show them a rubber duck and an unknown object and ask which is the ‘koba’, they’re going to select the unknown object)
- Linguistic context is also useful to help kids understand word meanings
20
Q
Fast Mapping
A
- The technique/name for when kids are able to learn a word after just one exposure to the word, even if the word is only referred to indirectly
21
Q
Fast Mapping Koba Study
A
- Kids were shown an object that was unfamiliar to them and were told it was a ‘koba’
- Kids were then brought back a week later and a month later and shown various objects, asked to point out the ‘koba’, and they remembered
22
Q
Linguistic context
A
- Useful in semantics
- the syntactic form of a word (noun, verb, etc) can help children figure out what a word is referring to
Ex: If a person is shown mixing up some small objects with their hands in a bowl/container and are told ‘this is a sib’, the kids will think the sib is the container - If they are told ‘he is sibbing’, they’ll think the action he’s doing is sibbing
- If they’re told “this is some sib’, they’ll think the objects are sibs.
- Shows that children are sensitive to grammatical cues
23
Q
Word Production in Babies
A
- Usually say their first word at 10-12 months
- When they first start speaking, they use one word utterances/phrases to communicate (ex. ‘water’ for ‘I want more water’)
- Kids will first go through underextension, in which they think a name of a group refers to only that specific type of object in the group as opposed to the group itself( ex. ‘flower’ refers to only roses, and not sunflowers or any other type of flower)
- Kids will then go through overextension since what they want to talk about quickly out-strips their vocabulary (ex. will use the word ‘ball’ to refer to a ball, a balloon, a marble, and apple, etc)
- The number of words a child knows is intimately related to the number of words they hear
24
Q
Pragmatics and Word Learning
A
- Pragmatics involves paying attention to social cues/context and to where the speaker is attending
- Ex: a toddler can use the speaker’s gaze to determine what the novel word they used is referring to
- Understanding the speaker’s emotion can help as well
25
Q
Speech Inflection Study
A
- Example of pragmatics
- A researcher looked in various buckets for an object, changing their voice inflection when they looked in the bucket that had the object
- When kids were asked to choose the bucket that the object was it, they chose the right one, showing that they can use emotion in speech to interpret things
26
Q
Parentese
A
- The distinctive speech pattern we tend to take on when talking to babies and young children
- It’s warm, affectionate, has a higher pitch, extreme intonation, slow speech, and exaggerated facial expressions
- Babies seem to prefer parentese
- In one study, when babies turned their head one way, they would hear a speech recording spoken normally, and when they turned their head the other way, they would hear a recording in parentese, and after about 8 trials the babies picked up on this trend, and would turn their heads to hear the parentese
- The advantages of parentese is that it directs the infant’s attention to the speaker and increases infant communication and language skills
- Babies even like parentese in other languages
27
Q
Parentese Intervention Study
A
- One group of parents was given feedback on parental language quality, speaking style, and parent-child turn taking that also discussed appropriate daily routines that promote language interactions.
- The other group received no training (control group)
- The amount of parentese speech increased in intervention group, and the babies in this group knew nearly twice as many words at age 18 months than those in the control group
28
Q
Producing Grammar
A
- Related to syntax
- Syntactic rules are learned naturally, without explicit teaching
- Around 4-5 years old, children’s grammar is as good as that of a college student
- When producing grammar, kids start with one-word speech, in which they may string multiple words together, but only because they’ve heard these words used together so often that they probably can’t tell that it’s multiple words (ex. ‘Iwant’)
- They start using two-word, telegraphic speech at age 2 (ex. ‘Juice daddy’)
- children have trouble forming complex sentences, however, until they’re well into their school years
29
Q
Grammar sensitivity study
A
- Done to test to see if kids actually understand grammar (just not 100%, which is why they have trouble forming complex sentences) or if they’re just imitating what they hear
- A recording was played, that either said “big bird is ticking cookie monster”, or “cookie monster is tickling big bird”, and kids ages 12-16 months were shown the two scenarios
- Kids looked longer at the scenario the recording said, indicating that they understand those sentences
30
Q
Wugs and Syntactic Rules
A
- Wanted to see if 4 year olds could generate correct endings for novel words
- showed kids an object they called a ‘wug’, and then showed kids two of the objects and asked what they saw
- Kids were able to pluralize the objects, responding with ‘wugs’, showing they can transfer the plural rule
- This also worked for activities (‘wugging” vs “wugged’)
31
Q
Over-regulation errors
A
- Evidence that kids have grammar knowledge
- Kids tend to have over-regulation errors, in that they treat irregular words as regular (he go-ed to the store, when i growed up)
- Kids are over-applying rules; they aren’t just memorizing what they hear
32
Q
Noam Chomsky
A
- Hypothesized that the ability to learn grammar must be innate, and that development is not just simple associative learning (nativism)
- Came to this conclusion by observing these over-regulation errors and kids over-applying rules, causing them to produce speech they have never heard and aren’t rewarded for (‘I break-ed it, I want some-s”)
- We aren’t born with the ability to understand grammar, but are born with the ability to LEARN to understand grammar
- Before Chomsky, it was believed that kids were just learning through association and that they didn’t actually understand grammar
33
Q
Critical Period of Language learning
A
- Language becomes much harder to pick up on after age 7
- Between the ages of 5 and puberty, language acquisition becomes more difficult, mainly the syntax and grammar bit of language
- Genie is an example of this: She was able to learn word meanings very fast, but she never picked up on the syntax and sentence structure
34
Q
Critical Learning period Study in Chinese and Korean children
A
- Looked at kids who came to the U.S. from Korea and China at different ages
- Those who arrived before the age of 7 had the grammar of a native English speaker
- The grammar declined with age of arrival until about 17 at which it leveled out
35
Q
Nicaraguan Sign Language
A
- There was no formal sign language, and the deaf were normally isolated from one another (no deaf schools until 1970s)
- Some children spontaneously developed their own sign language
- Age matters: the younger learner’s signs are more fluent and grammatical
- Input matters: those who heard less mature languages are less fluent
- This provided evidence that we have a pre-disposition for language, and that our experience with the input of language plays a role in our language development
36
Q
Nativism
A
- The idea by Chomsky that language is innate
There are several facts supporting nativism: - All human children and no domestic pets learn language
- There are strong similarities in how all languages are structured
- When input is chaotic, children structure it, and when the language is absent, children create it (like those in Nicaragua)
37
Q
Constructivism
A
- From Behaviorism
The idea that children learn the specific language around them; babies in the U.S. learn English, babies in China learn Chinese, etc - I don’t think this idea competes with the nativist approach, I think these ideas work together
38
Q
Language development and socioeconomic status
A
- Parents in families of higher SES tend to speak more to their kids (more linguistic exposure) and this adds up over the years to give dramatically different estimated word exposures
- Remember that the number of words a child is exposed to is correlated with how many words they have in their vocabulary
39
Q
High SES vs Mid SES Mother Study
A
- Took mothers of High SES and Mid SES and observed the differences in maternal speech, as well as their kids’ speech
- Found that the mother’s number and length of utterances, richness of vocabulary, and sentence complexity predicted their child’s spoken vocabulary, how quickly their toddler recognized familiar words, and the toddler’s speed at processing/understanding words
40
Q
Technology and Language Learning
A
- Took a group of kids age 12-18 months old and their parents and split them up into four different categories:
- Control, in which parents did what they normally would do for teaching language
- Video w/ interaction: parents watched educational videos with their babies and interacted with the babies
- Video w/ no interaction: parents just sat the kids down with the video
- Parent teaching: parents taught kids what was taught in the videos
- The found that the parent teaching group scored best, followed by video w/ interaction, showing that parent interaction assists in language learning
- Also did a similar study in which children watched videos that were either interactive, as in they were just video chatting with someone and were actively engaging with them, or a pre-recorded video
- They found that the live video maintained social contingencies between the infant and the teacher
41
Q
Dual Representation
A
- Crucial to be able to understand symbols
- Need to be able to understand the symbol itself, and its relation to the thing or idea it’s referring to
- Kids under 3 lack dual representation, and thus often have scale errors
42
Q
Scale Errors
A
- Seen in kids under 3 due to there lack of dual representation
- The kids don’t really understand that toy cars are just representations of the real thing, and may try to get into a car that is wayyy too small for them because that’s been their experience with cars – that you can get inside them
43
Q
Scale Model Task study
A
- Showcases how kids under age 3 have a lack of dual representation and are prone to scale errors
- Show kids a scale model of a testing room and hide an object in the scale model, then take the kids to the actual testing room and ask them to find it
- Kids under 3 will look everywhere in the room, failing to understand the symbolic relation between the actual room and the model
- Kids 3 and older will go directly to where the object was hidden in the model room, showing they understand that the model is a symbol
