Task 6 Flashcards
Development of Language
Methods
- Habituation
- habituate infant to stimulus
- novel stimulus —> longer looking time = infant can discriminate
Methods
- Head-turning
- infant more likely to longer at novel stimulus —> more interesting
Stages of language learning
- becoming a native listener
- 6 months: discriminate wide range of phonemes
- 12 months: discriminate phonemes of language they are learning
Stages of language learning
- speech production
- all children pass though same phases of vocal production
- birth-2 months: refelxive vocalizations (cries, caughs, and burps)
- 2-4 months: cooing and laughing (laugh and combine sounds with each other)
- 4-6 months: babbling and vocal play (babbling = play with sounds)
- 6-10 months: canonical babbling (sound combinations that sound like words)
- 10 months on: modulated babbling (variety of sound combinations, stress and intonation patterns, and overlaps with the beginning of meaningful speech)
Stages of language learning
- Periods
- One-Word Period
- 10 and 18 months
- single-word utterances (often over-interpreted)
- understand more than what they can formulate in a sentence
Stages of language learning
- Periods
- Two-Word Period
- 18 and 24 months
- two words at a time
- unclear how much they know but start using higher-meaning words
Stages of language learning
- Periods
- Later syntactic development
- 36 months
- full sentences
Stages of language learning
- perceptual basis of word learning
- must learn to recognize and represent contrasting acoustic forms of words
- 7-8 months: word segmentation
- 9-10 months: prefer words from own language
- pairing words and objects:
- 6 months: associate highly frequent words and their referents
- 8 months: link novel words to novel objects after only few repititions
- 17 months: phonetic sensitivity when learning new words
- 13 months: bilaterally distributed —> 20 months: left-hemisphere dominant
Innate vs Developed
- categorical perception of speech sounds
- use of phonemes; problems with distinguishing phonemes from same category
Innate vs Developed
- infants discriminate between phonemes
- young infants engage in categorical percdeption of speech sounds —> distinguish sounds between categories; difficult to distinguish within a category
- innate mechanism
Innate vs Developed
- syntax
- s-structure
- d-structure
- Syntax = manner in which words and parts of words are related to one another to produce grammatical sentences
- s-structure = surface structure, can have more than one meaning
- d-structure = deep structure
Innate vs Developed
- overregularization errors and creative overregularization
- overregularization errors = chilfren apply a rule to an exception to the rule
- irregular plural words —> children understand the rule, but do not know all the exceptions
- creative overregularization = create new verbs by treating nouns as verbs
Innate vs Developed
- initial perceptual biases
- prenatal auditory experience tunes neonatal perception
- prefer mother’s voice and sounds they heard in the womb
- infant’s have a preference for speech
- infants can discriminate grammatical and lexical words
- ability to discriminate forward but not backward (because of different rhythmic pattern)
Innate vs Developed
- language specific reorganization
- 9 months: active in using the categories they learned
- native language input reorganizes perceptual sensitivity —> maximizes attention to phonetic features of native language
- infants prefer words that fit into pattern of their input
Theories
- required for language
- human brain
- human environment —> exposure to other people using language crucial
- infant-directed speech —> helpful for children
