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
