Psy 3 Flashcards
Prelinguistic Communication
- Vocalizations, crying, cooing, babbling
- Anything before producing communicative intent
- 8 months: gesturing is intentional
DeCasper and Spence (1986): prenatal learning
• Mothers-to-be who were read Dr. Seuss aloud - infants hearing the familiar story increased sucking rate
Child-directed speech
- “Motherese” – to get and maintain the attention of children
- Higher in pitch, more variable, more exaggerated, concrete referents, directive utterances
Development of Communicative Intent
Waiting –> persistence –> development of alternative plans
Fis phenomenon (Berko and Brown)
- Children at 12 months can make more phonetic distinctions than they can produce
- Reading during pregnancy: prenatal learning and retention
Categorical perception in infants
• Infants able to perceive phonetic differences between phonemes from ANY language : until ~12 months
Werker and Tees (1984)
• Study of phonemic distinction during infancy
o 1 month: the developmental decline in ability to distinguish between different phonemes in all languages
o 6-8 months: highly sensitive to phonemic distinctions
o 8-10 months: considerable decline
o 10-12 months: essentially unable to perceive non-native phonemic contrasts
Development of phonemic and word boundaries, Saffran et al. (1996) , Marcus et al. (1999)
• Saffron – evidence of statistical learning
- infants were given string of nonsense syllables “Bidakupadotigolabubidaku” with some syllables being more likely to coincide than others
- infants used transitional probabilities to detect statistical irregularities in syllable order in only two minutes of speech
- Transition from /pre/ to /ty/ > /ty/ to /ba/
• Marcus: rule learning
- infants demonstrated evidence of learning the rule (ABA vs. ABB pattern) even when training stimuli were based on different phonemes
- applied the concept (RULE) to new sequences
- ABA: /wo/fe/wo/
- ABB: /wo/fe/fe/
Statistical vs rule learning
- Statistical: certain sounds more likely to occur together – infants sensitive to these probabilities
- Rule: infants use statistical learning to form an understanding of underlying grammatical rules
Babbling
- 4-6 mo: infant spontaneously utters intentional but nonsense sounds (“bah” “dah” “pah”)
- Deaf babies sign babble (!)
Re-duplicated babbling
• 6-10 mo: same syllable repeated (“bababababa”)
Variegated babbling
• 11-12 months: sequences of varying consonants and vowels
Idiomorphs
• Invented “words” that children use to refer to familiar things
Fast mapping
• Infants are able to learn new words very quick (single exposure); rapid word acquisition
Over/Underextensions
• Overextensions: including too many words in word classes (anything 4-legged = dogs, all round objects = moon)
- Context bound – specific action/situation (only say “duck” when hitting toy duck off bathtub)
- Referential – certain subset (clock when referring to wall clock)
- Occur in 1/3 of first 75 words
• Underextensions: using word in more restrictive way (“where’s the shoes?” – only referring to mother’s shoes)
- Categorical – higher order category (“dada” for mother, “truck” for bus)
- Analogical – no clear categorical relation
- – Perceptual – “tick tok” for sound of water
- – Functional – “hat” for basket on head
- – Affective – “hot” for object that’s forbidden to touch
- Less frequent / harder to detect
Holophrase
• Single word that’s used to express complete, meaningful thought (juice, go, food)
Syntactic growth, MLU
- MLU (mean length of utterance): average number of morphemes per sentence
- 2 year old: important to get their attention
- Production reflects Behavior, which can be measured “relatively” easily
Speech production stages
• STAGE 1: 0-2 mo.
Reflexive vocalizations, crying
• STAGE 2: 2-4 mo
Cooing (oooo, ahhhhhh)
• STAGE 3: 4-6 mo
Babbling (bah, dah, pah)
No meaning, phonetic info
Deaf infants – sign language babble
• STAGE 4: 6-10 mo Reduplicative babbling (bababababa)
• STAGE 5: 10-14 mo
Non-reduplicative babbling (oollaaaa, bida)
Diff syllables combined
Sounds language-like
• STAGE 6: 1st birthday First words (Dada, mama, go)
•18 mo
15-20 words
Multiword utterances, telegraphic speech
- 2 y/o
* Early speech stage in which a child speaks using mostly nouns and verbs and eliminates function words
Preferential looking and infant sucking procedures
- Preferential fixation task: infants control duration of stimulus presentation by looking at the blinking light more for a novel pattern, suggesting acquisition for the repeated pattern
- More frequent/intense sucking = recognition of novel stimulus
