T7 - Language Development

Question 1

Components of Language:

• Phonology
• Morphology
• Semantics
• Syntax
• Pragmatics

Answer 1

Phonology:

• rules within language for combining sounds
• the basic unit of a sound is called a phoneme.

Morphology:

• rules for combining sounds to create meaning
• Morpheme: smallest unit of meaning in language
• Dog-s - s is a morpheme = carries the meaning that there is more than one.

Semantics:

• refers to the meaning converted by words and sentences.
• morpheme = smallest unit of meaning
• free standing morphemes: dog, cat. etc.

Syntax:
- rules within a language that specify how words are combine to create a phrase or sentence that can be understood by other people

Pragmatics:

• rules or conventions we have communicating with other people
• how we speak when we talk to a child or someone we are going for a job interview with
• knowing when someone does not understand what we are saying

Question 2

What is the learning/empiricist perspective/ theory of language?

What is the Nativist Perspective?

Answer 2

Learning/Empiricist Perspective:

• children learn language through initiation and reinforcement.
• If a child produces an aspect of language we want to see more of, then this is rewarded by the parents
• imitation plays a role
• no evidence to suggest that learning of any component of language occurs through reinforcement.

language is just too complex to learn. We are born with innate knowledge about the rules of language.
- we are born with a Language Acquisition device (LAD)
- This has general rules that apply to all languages
- However, if this were the case then there would be one specific brain region for language acquisition, but instead it is spread.

Question 3

What is the sensitive-period hypothesis - theory of language?

What is the interactionist perspective - theory of language?

Answer 3

There is an optimal time in life in which a language has to be learnt. For example, infants and children learn languages better than adults.
Evidence for a critical period: The case of Genie
- Case of a severely abused and neglected child.
- Learning a second language: Infants and children learn language better than adults.

Interactionist perspective:

• born with specialised parts of the brain to learn language.
• However, input from the environment is required for language learning to take place.
• The interactionists perspective suggests both environment and genetics are important.

The role of the environment
Lessons learnt from joint activities:
- Even before babies learn to speak, parents will often engage in “turntaking” conversation behaviour. This might be the basis infants language different components of language (pragmatics, phonology)

Lessons from negative evidence:

• When children do make mistakes in their speech, parents do provide them with a correction. But often do not explicitly provide a correction.
• Child: “Doggie go”
• Parent: “Yes doggie is going away”.

Question 4

What is the Pre-linguistic Period of language development?

What is receptive language?

What is productive language?

What are:

• gestures and non-verbal responses?
• Declarative gestures?
• Imperative gestures?

Answer 4

Pre-linguistic Vocalisations

• Before infants speak (10 - 13 months of life) they are actively learning and responding to language.
• In early infancy, infants are able to differentiates between different sounds of language compared to adults.
• Also during the prelinguistic period infants become increasingly more able to process adult- like speech

Receptive language = that which the individual comprehends when listening to others speech

Productive language = that which the individual is capable of expressing (producing) speech

• Gestures and non-verbal responses: Before infants speak the use gesture to indicate they understand what is being spoken to them, but also, to request things from others
• Declarative gestures: infants direct others attention to an object by pointing at or touching it
• Imperative gestures: infant tries to convince others to grant his request through such actions
  as appointing or tugging caregivers leg

Question 5

What is the Holophrastic period of language development?

• Semantic and Vocab
• Meaning to words
• errors in word use

Answer 5

Early Semantics and Vocabulary:

• from 11 months onwards, infants demonstrate they understand common words
• 1 word at a time - a single word represents a sentence worth of meaning
• infants first words around 12 months
• naming explosion occurs - 10-20 words every week
• by 2 years - 200 words

Attaching meaning to words:

• fast mapping = learn a word following a single exposure
• expressive vocab lags behind productive vocab
• over extensions - use same word for similar objects
• under extension - general word only applies to one object

Question 6

Holophrastic period continued..

Strategies for inferring word meaning - 4 assumptions

What is syntactic bootstrapping?

Answer 6

Strategies:
2-year-olds have a
number of other cognitive strategies, or processing constraints, that help them narrow down what a new word might possibly mean

1. Object Scope constraint
   - The assumption that words refer to whole objects rather than parts
2. Taxonomic Constraint
   - Words label categories of similar objects that share common features
3. Lexical Contrast Constraint
   - each word has a unique meaning
4. Mutual Exclusivity - each object has one label and that different words refer to seperate, non-overlapping categories.

Syntactic bootstrapping = Evidence suggests infants use syntax to work out what a word might mean. In particular what
a verb means.

Question 7

What is the Telegraphic Period of Language Development?

• pragmatics in early speech

Answer 7

• Between 18-24 months, infants begin to produce multi-word phrases.
• These are very simple sentences such as “Daddy Eat” and “Kitty Go”.
• Missing from these sentences are words like “is” (e.g., Daddy is eating). This is probably
  because infants have yet to learn the meaning of these words.

Pragmatics:

• Pragmatic development also takes places as well.
• Toddler’s take-turns during communication and also begin stand at the appropriate distance

Question 8

What is the Preschool period of language development?

• Grammatical Development
• Semantic Development
• Pragmatics and Communication Skills

Answer 8

2 1/2 to 5-years (in English) sentences spoken by children become adult like.
- Development of grammatical morphemes

Order of acquiring grammatical morphemes: 
First
 -ing
 Prepositions (in, on)
 -s (plural)

Later
 Articles (the, a)
 Is, were
 -ed (past tense)

• As children are learning to use grammatical morphemes, they do make mistakes.
• Run-ed away (instead of saying ran)
• Children also learn transformational rules. These are changes we can make to a sentence often
  to make a question or modify the original sentence.

Semantic dev:

• Children begin to understand concepts such as size (big vs. little; tall/short).
• They can also express concepts in speech: The dog is bigger than the cat.

Pragmatics:

• Children from age three and older begin to modify their language depending on who they are talking to.
• Example: 5-year old talks differently to an adult than to a baby