Module 4 - Language and Symbolic Development Flashcards
What is a large part of why languages sound so different from one another?
Prosody
The characteristic rhythm and intonation patterns with which a language is spoken
Prosody
Both adults and infants perceive speech sounds as belonging to categories, this phenomenon is called
categorical perception
What is categorical perception
the perception of phonemes as belonging to discrete categories
What is called when the length of time when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating?
voice onset time (VOT)
How do we study VOT?
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/.
After hearing the same syllable repeatedly, the babies gradually sucked less enthusiastically
Habituation
If the infants’ sucking rate increased, the researchers inferred that the infants discriminated the new syllable from the old syllable
Dishabituation
Infants can distinguish between phonemic contrasts made in all the languages of the world - how many consonants and vowels?
about 600 consonants and 200 vowels
Why it is so difficult for adults to become fluent in a second language?
Partly because adults simply do not perceive differences in speech sounds that are not important in their native language
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?
By 12 months of age
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?
10-12 months
Infants’ ability to discriminate between speech sounds that are not in their native language declines between what ages?
6 and 12 months of age
Discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech
Word segmentation
What did the first demonstration of infant word segmentation focused on 7-month-old infants (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995) find?
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
Stress patterning
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”).
A regularity to which infants are surprisingly sensitive concerns the…
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
What is the most salient regularity for infants
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.
In preparation for sound production, what happens at about age 6-8 weeks?
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
When do babies begin babbling?
Between 6 and 10 months. They produce strings of consonant-vowel syllables
On average about 7 months.
Repetitive consonant–vowel sequences (“bababa …”) or hand movements (for learners of sign languages)
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
successful communication requires
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
At What age have infants begun to understand the communicative nature of pointing, with many infants also able to point themselves
12 months
Infants begin to understand highly frequent words at what age?
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
Eye tracking studies
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.
Rapid word comprehension study
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
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…?
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.
Overextension
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.
Underextension
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.
Language Achievement
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.
What is the most important way caregiver’s can influence word learning?
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.
One of the key determinants of the language children hear
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
Early word learning is influenced by
-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.
Mutual exclusivity
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
Cues for word learning
Mutual exclusivity
Pragmatic cues
Aspects of the social context used for word learning
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.
Whole object assumption
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
Linguistic context
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.”
Cross-situational word learning
determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels and meanings across scenes and contexts
syntactic bootstrapping
the strategy of using grammatical structure to infer the meaning of a new word
Children figure out the meaning of words through…
-Syntactic bootstrapping
-cross-situational word learning
-Shape bias
What did the DeLoache et al. (2010), study on vocabulary development show?
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
When do children begin to combine words into simple sentences?
By the end of their second year
short utterances that leave out non-essential words
telegraphic speech
Overregularization
speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular
What did Vgotsky believe about young children’s private speech?
Serves as a strategy to organize their actions
Collective Monologue
conversation between children that involves a series of non sequiturs
What is the difference in conversations of 3 year olds vs 5 year olds?
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).
Story-like structured descriptions of past events
Narratives
A crucial aspect of becoming a good conversational partner
pragmatic development
What was the behaviorist theory of language development?
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
Noam Chomsky (1959)
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).
Chomsky proposed that humans are born with…
Universal grammar.
a hard-wired set of principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages.
Universal grammar
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
What attribute of late talking toddlers are most likely to catch up to normal or near normal language skills?
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
DLD
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.
Genetically transmitted developmental disorders
Down syndrome, fragile-X syndrome, and ASD.
These tend to be delayed across all aspects of language development
Williams syndrome
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
Connectionism
a computational modeling approach that emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units
Treating a symbolic artifact both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself
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.
Challenges with dual representation
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
Scale model task
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.
Picture perception has provided what evidence?
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
At what age do children begin to draw pictures?
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
Children’s scribbles can reflect what?
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
Acquiring a language involves what?
learning the complex systems of phonology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics that govern its sounds, meaning, grammar, and use.
Language Development
-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).
The Process of Language Acquisition
-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.
Theoretical Issues in Language Development
- 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.
Nonlinguistic Symbols and Development
-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.
What is language
A system of signs and rules used to convey meaning in interactions with others
What is communication
The exchanging of information.
3 key features of language
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
Components of Language (7)
1) Phonemes
2) Morphemes
3) Semantics
4) Syntax
5) Grammar
6) Pragmatics
7) Meta-linguistic knowledge
Required for language
Human Brain
Human Environment
Phonemes
smallest speech sound that indicate meaning
Morphemes
minimal meaningful unit of language
Semantics
meaning system of language
Syntax
rules by which sentences are made
specifying how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc) can be combined.
Grammar
encompasses syntax and morphology (forms of words)
Pragmatics
Context of language
Meta-Linguistic knowledge
Ability to think about language and talk about it
Language Capabilities are usually localized to…?
Left Hemisphere. Broca’s area, Angular gyrus, insular cortex, wernicke’s area
Human Environment involves what?
Social interaction. Infant directed speech
Categorical perception
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.
Making sense of language
-categorical perception
-word segmentation
The ability to learn where divisions between words exist in the speech stream
Word segmentation
-Infant directed speech contributes to word segmentation but is also related to statistical detection mechanism
