Module 4 - Language and Symbolic Development

Question 1

What is a large part of why languages sound so different from one another?

Answer 1

Prosody

Question 2

The characteristic rhythm and intonation patterns with which a language is spoken

Answer 2

Prosody

Question 3

Both adults and infants perceive speech sounds as belonging to categories, this phenomenon is called

Answer 3

categorical perception

Question 4

What is categorical perception

Answer 4

the perception of phonemes as belonging to discrete categories

Question 5

What is called when the length of time when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating?

Answer 5

voice onset time (VOT)

Question 6

How do we study VOT?

Answer 6

Researchers create recordings of speech sounds that vary along the VOT continuum, so that each successive sound is slightly different than the one before.

-Adults do not perceive the continuous change in this series of sounds.

-All the sounds in this continuum that have a VOT of less than 25 ms are perceived as /b/

-All those that have a VOT greater than 25 ms are perceived as /p/.

-Thus, adults automatically divide the continuous signal into two categories—/b/ and /p/.

Question 7

After hearing the same syllable repeatedly, the babies gradually sucked less enthusiastically

Answer 7

Habituation

Question 8

If the infants’ sucking rate increased, the researchers inferred that the infants discriminated the new syllable from the old syllable

Answer 8

Dishabituation

Question 9

Infants can distinguish between phonemic contrasts made in all the languages of the world - how many consonants and vowels?

Answer 9

about 600 consonants and 200 vowels

Question 10

Why it is so difficult for adults to become fluent in a second language?

Answer 10

Partly because adults simply do not perceive differences in speech sounds that are not important in their native language

Question 11

Infants increasingly home in on the speech sounds of their native language. By what age do they become less sensitive to the differences between nonnative speech sounds?

Answer 11

By 12 months of age

Question 12

It has been shown that at 6 to 8 months of age, English-learning infants readily discriminated between non-English phonemes; they could tell one Hindi syllable from another, and one Nthlakapmx syllable from another. At what age could the infants no longer perceived these differences they had detected?

Answer 12

10-12 months

Question 13

Infants’ ability to discriminate between speech sounds that are not in their native language declines between what ages?

Answer 13

6 and 12 months of age

Question 14

Discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech

Answer 14

Word segmentation

Question 15

What did the first demonstration of infant word segmentation focused on 7-month-old infants (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995) find?

Answer 15

The researchers found that infants listened longer to words that they had heard in the passages of fluent speech, as compared with words that never occurred in the passages. This result indicates that the infants were able to pull the words out of the stream of speech

Question 16

Stress patterning

Answer 16

An element of prosody. For example - In English, the first syllable in two-syllable words is much more likely to be stressed than the second syllable (as in “English,” “often,” and “second”).

Question 17

A regularity to which infants are surprisingly sensitive concerns the…

Answer 17

Distributional properties of the speech they hear.

distributional properties of speech:
in any language, certain sounds are more likely to occur together than are others

Question 18

What is the most salient regularity for infants

Answer 18

Their own name.

Infants as young as 4 1⁄2 months will listen longer to repetitions of their own name than to repetitions of a different name.

Just a few weeks later, they can pick their own name out of background conversations.

This ability helps them to find new words in the speech stream. After hearing “It’s Jerry’s cup!” a number of times, 6- month-old Jerry is more likely to learn the word cup than if he had not heard it right after his name.

Question 19

In preparation for sound production, what happens at about age 6-8 weeks?

Answer 19

infants begin to coo —producing drawn-out vowel sounds, such as “ooohh” or “aaahh.” They click, smack, blow raspberries, squeal.

Through this practice, infants gain motor control over their vocalizations

Question 20

When do babies begin babbling?

Answer 20

Between 6 and 10 months. They produce strings of consonant-vowel syllables

On average about 7 months.

Question 21

Repetitive consonant–vowel sequences (“bababa …”) or hand movements (for learners of sign languages)

Answer 21

Babbling

Babbling provides a signal that the infant is attentive and ready to learn.

When an adult labels an object for an infant just after the infant babbles, the infant learns more than when the labeling occurs in the absence of babbling

Question 22

successful communication requires

Answer 22

Intersubjectivity.

Intersubjectivity – in which two interacting partners share a mutual understanding.

The foundation of intersubjectivity is joint attention, in which the caregiver follows the baby’s lead, looking at and commenting on whatever the infant is looking at

Question 23

At What age have infants begun to understand the communicative nature of pointing, with many infants also able to point themselves

Answer 23

12 months

Question 24

Infants begin to understand highly frequent words at what age?

Answer 24

When 6-month-olds hear either “Mommy” or “Daddy,” they look toward an image of the appropriate person

Showing infants pairs of pictures of common foods and body parts and tracked the infants’ eye gaze when one of the pictures was named

Question 25

Eye tracking studies

Answer 25

When this infant hears the word mouth, will she look at the mouth or the apple? The speed and accuracy of her response provide a measure of her vocabulary knowledge.

Question 26

Rapid word comprehension study

Answer 26

Infants were presented a pair of objects and hear one of them labeled. 15-month-olds waited until they had heard the whole word to look at the target object 24-month-olds looked at the correct object after hearing only the first part of its label, just as adults do

Question 27

Initially, infants express their thoughts with one-word utterances. But what they want to talk about quickly outstrips their limited vocabularies. This dilemma results in...?

Answer 27

Overextension Ex: when children use dog for any four-legged animal, moon for a dishwasher dial, or hot for any reflective metal. Both overextensions and underextensions represent efforts to communicate given the child’s limited vocabulary. They may also reflect incorrect mappings between words and meanings that will have to be revised as language learning continues.

Question 28

Overextension

Answer 28

an overly broad interpretation of the meaning of a word Ex: when children use dog for any four-legged animal, moon for a dishwasher dial, or hot for any reflective metal.

Question 29

Underextension

Answer 29

using a word in a more limited context than appropriate Ex: believing that dog refers only to their dog, but not the neighbor’s dog.

Question 30

Language Achievement

Answer 30

On average, American children say their first word at about 13 months, experience a vocabulary spurt at about 19 months, and begin to produce simple sentences at about 24 months.

Question 31

What is the most important way caregiver's can influence word learning?

Answer 31

Talking to their children the amount and quality of talking that children hear predicts how many words they learn. -Play naming games (ex: where's your tummy?) -Choosing Optimal naming moments (ex: toddlers show better word learning when the object being labeled is centered in their visual field rather than in the periphery) -Using IDS -Facilitate word learning by stressing or repeating new words.

Question 32

One of the key determinants of the language children hear

Answer 32

socioeconomic status of their parents. the average child whose parents were: on welfare - 616 words per hour working-class -1,251 words per hour professional family- 2,153 words per hour

Question 33

Early word learning is influenced by

Answer 33

-Caregiver's Ex: talking to their children, playing games, repeating words, etc. - the contexts in which words are used. Ex: New words that are used in very distinct contexts (like kitchens or bathrooms) are produced earlier than words that are used across a range of contexts -Children's contribution. Ex: When confronted with new words, children exploit the context in which the word was used in order to infer its meaning.

Question 34

Mutual exclusivity

Answer 34

Children expect that a given entity will have only one name Note: bilingual and trilingual infants, who are accustomed to hearing more than one name for a given object, are less likely to follow the mutual exclusivity assumption in word learning

Question 35

Cues for word learning

Answer 35

Mutual exclusivity Pragmatic cues

Question 36

Aspects of the social context used for word learning

Answer 36

Pragmatic cues For example, children use an adult’s focus of attention as a cue to word meaning. In a study by Baldwin (1993), an experimenter showed 18-month-olds two novel objects and then concealed them in separate containers. "Modi" experiment.

Question 37

Whole object assumption

Answer 37

A constraint of word learning where children expect a novel word to refer to a whole object rather than to a part, property, action, or other aspect of the object

Question 38

Linguistic context

Answer 38

When Roger Brown, a pioneer in the study of language development, described a drawing like this as “sibbing,” “a sib,” or “some sib,” preschool children made different assumptions about the meaning of “sib.”

Question 39

Cross-situational word learning

Answer 39

determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels and meanings across scenes and contexts

Question 40

syntactic bootstrapping

Answer 40

the strategy of using grammatical structure to infer the meaning of a new word

Question 41

Children figure out the meaning of words through...

Answer 41

-Syntactic bootstrapping -cross-situational word learning -Shape bias

Question 42

What did the DeLoache et al. (2010), study on vocabulary development show?

Answer 42

the infants who learned from parents performed best on the study’s measure of word learning. Infants in the two video-learning conditions did not perform significantly better than the control group

Question 43

When do children begin to combine words into simple sentences?

Answer 43

By the end of their second year

Question 44

short utterances that leave out non-essential words

Answer 44

telegraphic speech

Question 45

Overregularization

Answer 45

speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular

Question 46

What did Vgotsky believe about young children's private speech?

Answer 46

Serves as a strategy to organize their actions

Question 47

Collective Monologue

Answer 47

conversation between children that involves a series of non sequiturs

Question 48

What is the difference in conversations of 3 year olds vs 5 year olds?

Answer 48

Three-year-olds’ conversations include occasional brief references to past events (if any). 5-year-olds produce narratives—descriptions of past events that have the form of a story (with a beginning, middle, and end organized coherently).

Question 49

Story-like structured descriptions of past events

Answer 49

Narratives

Question 50

A crucial aspect of becoming a good conversational partner

Answer 50

pragmatic development

Question 51

What was the behaviorist theory of language development?

Answer 51

Behaviorists believed that development is a function of learning through reinforcement and punishment of overt behavior. Skinner argued that parents teach children to speak by means of the same kinds of reinforcement techniques that are used to train animals to perform novel behaviors

Question 52

Noam Chomsky (1959)

Answer 52

Pointed out some of the reasons why language cannot be learned via reinforcement and punishment. One key reason was that we can understand and produce sentences that we have never heard before (generativity).

Question 53

Chomsky proposed that humans are born with...

Answer 53

Universal grammar. a hard-wired set of principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages.

Question 54

Universal grammar

Answer 54

a proposed set of highly abstract structures that are common to all languages The Universal Grammar hypothesis is highly relevant to investigations of emerging languages like Nicaraguan Sign Language

Question 55

What attribute of late talking toddlers are most likely to catch up to normal or near normal language skills?

Answer 55

toddlers with better word recognition skills, as indexed by the eye-movement tasks described earlier in this chapter, are the most likely to catch up

Question 56

DLD

Answer 56

Developmental language disorder roughly 7% of school-age children in the United States—are diagnosed with DLD. Challenges in language related tasks such as: speech perception, word segmentation, and sentence comprehension. As well as working memory, sequence learning, and processing speed.

Question 57

Genetically transmitted developmental disorders

Answer 57

Down syndrome, fragile-X syndrome, and ASD. These tend to be delayed across all aspects of language development

Question 58

Williams syndrome

Answer 58

how markedly less impairment in language than in other aspects of cognition. They also tend to be very interested in music and other auditory stimuli, and as infants they are able to track the statistical properties of speech in the same manner as typically developing infants

Question 59

Connectionism

Answer 59

a computational modeling approach that emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units

Question 60

Treating a symbolic artifact both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself

Answer 60

Dual representation Young children have substantial difficulty with dual representation, finding it challenging to treat an object both as itself and as a representation of something else.

Question 61

Challenges with dual representation

Answer 61

Young children find it challenging to treat an object both as itself and as a representation of something else difficulties are reminiscent of Piaget’s preoperational stage, in which children have difficulty considering multiple dimensions of objects simultaneously (as in conservation tasks). Challenges with dual representation limit toddlers’ ability to exploit symbolic artifacts. Young children have particular difficulty with self-symbols—symbols intended to represent themselves—even when the symbols are the same size as the child

Question 62

Scale model task

Answer 62

In a test of young children’s ability to use a symbol as a source of information, a 3-year-old child watches as the experimenter (Judy DeLoache) hides a miniature troll doll under a pillow in a scale model of an adjacent room. The child searches successfully for a larger troll doll hidden in the corresponding place in the actual room, indicating that she appreciates the relation between the model and room.

Question 63

Picture perception has provided what evidence?

Answer 63

That North American infants as young as 13 months of age understand that properties of objects presented in pictures can be extended to real objects

Question 64

At what age do children begin to draw pictures?

Answer 64

At about 3 or 4 years of age, most children begin trying to draw pictures of something; they try to produce representational art. Prior to this age their focus is almost exclusively on the activity per se, with no attempt to produce recognizable images

Question 65

Children's scribbles can reflect what?

Answer 65

their emerging understanding of writing. Even in their earliest scribbles, before age 3, children produce different types of scribbles when writing versus drawing By age 4, children understand a key difference between writing and drawing, namely that written words correspond to specific spoken words, whereas a drawing can correspond to many different words

Question 66

Acquiring a language involves what?

Answer 66

learning the complex systems of phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics that govern its sounds, meaning, grammar, and use.

Question 67

Language Development

Answer 67

-learning the complex systems of phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics that govern its sounds, meaning, grammar, and use. -Language ability is species-specific. The first prerequisite is a human brain. -Early years constitute a sensitive period for language acquisition; many aspects of language are more difficult to acquire thereafter. -Second prerequisite is exposure to language. (IDS).

Question 68

The Process of Language Acquisition

Answer 68

-Infants are remarkably sensitive to the distributional properties of language and use them to segment words from fluent speech. -Infants have remarkable speech-perception abilities. exhibit categorical perception of speech sounds -Infants begin to recognize highly familiar words at about 6 months of age -Infants begin to babble at around 7 months of age, either repeating syllables (“bababa”) or, if exposed to sign language, using repetitive hand movements. -During the second half of the first year, infants learn how to communicate with other people, including developing the ability to establish joint attention. -Begin to produce words at about 1 year of age. Infants use a variety of strategies to figure out what new words mean. -By 24 months, most toddlers produce short sentences. The length and complexity of their utterances gradually increase. -In the early preschool years, children exhibit generalization, extending such patterns as “add -s to make plural” to novel nouns, and making overregularization errors. -Children develop their burgeoning language skills as they go from collective monologues to sustained conversation.

Question 69

Theoretical Issues in Language Development

Answer 69

- current theories agree that there is an interaction between innate factors and experience. -Nativists such as the influential linguist Noam Chomsky posit an innate knowledge of Universal Grammar, the set of highly abstract rules common to all languages. -Theorists focused on social interaction emphasize the communicative context of language development and use. -Other perspectives argue that language learning requires powerful general-purpose cognitive mechanisms.

Question 70

Nonlinguistic Symbols and Development

Answer 70

-Symbolic artifacts like maps or models require dual representation. To use them, children must represent both the object itself and its symbolic relation to what it stands for. -Drawing and writing are popular symbolic activities. Young children’s early scribbling quickly gives way to the intention to draw pictures of something. Early attempts at writing, while illegible, contain some characteristics of mature writing systems.

Question 71

What is language

Answer 71

A system of signs and rules used to convey meaning in interactions with others

Question 72

What is communication

Answer 72

The exchanging of information.

Question 73

3 key features of language

Answer 73

1) Arbitrariness: signs don't resemble what they stand for 2) Displacement: signs convey meaning in the absence of their referent 3) Generativity: potential to create an infinite # of sentences

Question 74

Components of Language (7)

Answer 74

1) Phonemes 2) Morphemes 3) Semantics 4) Syntax 5) Grammar 6) Pragmatics 7) Meta-linguistic knowledge

Question 75

Required for language

Answer 75

Human Brain Human Environment

Question 76

Phonemes

Answer 76

smallest speech sound that indicate meaning

Question 77

Morphemes

Answer 77

minimal meaningful unit of language

Question 78

Semantics

Answer 78

meaning system of language

Question 79

Syntax

Answer 79

rules by which sentences are made specifying how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc) can be combined.

Question 80

Grammar

Answer 80

encompasses syntax and morphology (forms of words)

Question 81

Pragmatics

Answer 81

Context of language

Question 82

Meta-Linguistic knowledge

Answer 82

Ability to think about language and talk about it

Question 83

Language Capabilities are usually localized to...?

Answer 83

Left Hemisphere. Broca's area, Angular gyrus, insular cortex, wernicke's area

Question 84

Human Environment involves what?

Answer 84

Social interaction. Infant directed speech

Question 85

Categorical perception

Answer 85

In early development, infants can discern differences among all phonemes of the world's languages. But quickly declines 6-12 months due to perceptual narrowing.

Question 86

Making sense of language

Answer 86

-categorical perception -word segmentation

Question 87

The ability to learn where divisions between words exist in the speech stream

Answer 87

Word segmentation -Infant directed speech contributes to word segmentation but is also related to statistical detection mechanism