Prelinguistic Development and Word Learning Flashcards
Why study language development?
Speech allows the communication of ideas
Enables humans to work together to build the impossible
Hockett’s Design Features of Language
Semanticity Arbitrariness Displacement Productivity Duality of patterning Discreteness Vocal auditory channel Broadcast transmission Rapid fading Interchangeability Total feedback Specialisation Traditional transition
Arbitrariness
No necessary connection between the sounds used and the message being sent
Displacement
The ability to communicate things that are not currently present
Productivity
The ability to create new utterances from previously existing utterances
Duality of patterning
Meaningless phonic segments (phonemes) are combined to make meaningful words, which in turn are combined again to make sentences
Aspects of language
Phonology
Syntax/morphology
Semantics
Pragmatics
Phonology
The sounds of language
Syntax/morphology
The rules that control sentence formation and word endings (plural/past tense)
Semantics
The meaning of individual words
Pragmatics
The social use of language in context and social exchanges
Phones
The different sounds in language
Phonemes
The smallest segmental units of sound employed in a language to form meaningful contrasts between words
Tonal phonemes
Using different tones of the same phoneme to mean different things
Infants are born being able to perceive ______ used in world languages
All the sounds
Approximately 600 consonants and 200 vowels, plus tones
What happens to the ability to perceive sounds in language?
Over the first year of life they tune into phonemic contrasts which are used in their language and tune out to the ones that aren’t
Japanese _____ distinguish [ra] and [la], whereas Japanese ______ find this difficult as ________
8 month olds
1 year olds and adults
There is only one /r/ phoneme in Japanese
Language ability from birth
Crying, involuntary sounds of bodily functions
Language ability 2-4 months
Cooing and later laughing
Language ability 4-7 months
Squeals, yells, raspberries, vowels, marginal babbling
Language ability ~ 7 months
Sudden onset of reduplicated or canonical babbling eg. dada, guhguh
Language ability ~ 10 months
Babbling comes to reflect frequent sounds in the ambient language
Language ability ~ 1st birthday
Increase in rate of variegated babbling, eg. bag and production of longer strings of sounds with varied intonation and stress patterns
McGillion et al (2017)
The age at which children begin to produce canonical babble predicts when they will produce words
And how many words they will be able to produce at 18 months
Donnellan et al (in prep)
Caregivers’ responses to infant’s babble also predict word learning
Range of infants vocalisation is limited due to….
Size and placement of tongue in relation to the vocal cavity
Neuromuscular limits on the movements of the tongue, which is adapted at birth for sucking and swallowing but not so able to produce fine articulatory movements
Gaze following
Early in infancy infants begin to follow other people’s line of regard
Gaze following at 18 months
Children can use gaze following to check where someone is looking in order to figure out the meaning of a new word
(Baldwin, 1991)
When do infants become able to engage in joint attention
Around 9 months
What is joint attention
Occurs when two (or more) people are attending to something and they are mutually aware that they are attending to it together
Carpenter (1998)
Times spent in joint attention predicts later word learning
When do infants begin to point?
Between 9 and 14 months
What types of pointing do they do?
Imperatively - to tell someone to do something
Declaratively - to inform someone about something
What does index finger pointing predict?
Later vocabulary learning
Colonnesi et al (2010
When do babies start to produce their first word?
Around 10-15 months
By the age of 6, children have something in the region of ______ words in their lexicon
10 - 14000
The learning rate continues to accelerate until about ______ when children learn something like ____ new words a day
8 - 10 year
12
Malapropisms
The mistaken use of a word in place of a similar sounding one
Spoonerisms
Verbal error in which the speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words
_____ is often ahead of their _______
Comprehension
Production
Inability to produce certain sounds
Some children struggle to produce certain sounds such as ‘r’ and may end up saying something like “wabbit’ rather than “rabbit”
Errors of scope
Underextension - car only means the family car
Overextension - daddy means any adult male, dog means any four legged animal
Quine’s (1960) Indeterminacy of Translation Problem
The problem of determining which of a large number of possible meanings a word is used to convey
The Gavagai Problem
Argument that word learning needs to be constrained so that children don’t run into Quine’s (1960) indeterminacy of translation problem
Solutions to Gavagai Problem
Children have constraints on what words will refer to
Children use associative learning across contexts
Children use social cues to meaning
Children use linguistic cues to meaning
There are _____ individual differences in rate of word learning
Enormous
Lower SES children tend to start school with _____ language skills, and this predicts later outcomes
Weaker
Contingent talk
Child directed speech that is contingent on infant’s focus on attention both semantically (about what the infant is attending to) and temporally (in response to infant vocalisation)
