Readings

Question 1

Violations of expectation trigger infants to search for explanation (Perez, feigenson): research question and key finding

Answer 1

Are infants’ surprise-induced explorations driven by heightened arousal or a search for explanation?

Infants actively seek explanations for unexpected events

Question 2

Violations of expectation trigger infants to search for explanation (Perez, feigenson): experiments

Answer 2

Experiment 1: Infants explored more when objects violated expectations.
Experiment 2 & 3: When an explanation was provided, infants’ exploratory behavior decreased.

Question 3

Bilingualism in the Early Years: What the Science Says (Byers Heinlein, Lew Williams): main points

Answer 3

Bilingual children can distinguish between languages and are not confused.

Cognitive Benefits: Bilingualism may offer cognitive advantages, such as enhanced problem-solving and memory.

Language Exposure: High-quality and quantity of language exposure in both languages is crucial for successful bilingual development.

Code-Mixing: Code-mixing is a common strategy used by bilingual children and is not detrimental to language development.

Question 4

Putting Mutual Exclusivity in Context: Speaker Race Influences Monolingual and Bilingual Infants’ Word-Learning Assumptions
(Weatherhead et al.): research question and key finding

Answer 4

How does the race of a speaker influence infants’ word-learning assumptions?

Both monolingual and bilingual infants use mutual exclusivity with familiar-race speakers but are more flexible with unfamiliar-race speakers.
(Infants rely on nonlinguistic social cues, such as speaker race, to guide their word-learning strategies)