Task 6 Language development (article kuczaj)

Question 1

In what three categories can we divide the development of the phonological system?

Answer 1

Speech perception

Speech production

Development of articulation

Question 2

In what three categories can we divide speech perception?

Answer 2

Speech segmentqtion

Categorical perception of speech sounds

Becoming a native listener

Question 3

In what consists speech segmentation?

Speech stream and IDT

Answer 3

To learn relevant sounds of their language, infants must separate speech streams (= undifferentiated series of speech sounds) into individual sounds and combinations. This is facilitated by IDT (infant-directed speech). By age of 7 months, they are able to recognize familiar words in speech stream.

Question 4

In what consists the categorical perception of speech sounds?
phonemes
how does the habituation method prove chomskys idea?

Answer 4

Phonemes are sound categories in human speech and depending on the language, we use and discriminate different sets of phonemes. The process that allows us to discriminate different phonemes while making it difficult to discriminate phonemes within same category is called categorical perception.

Habituation method showed that infants as old as 1 month, can discriminate different phonemes but just like adults, infants have difficulties discriminating phonemes from same category. Since categorical perception is developed this early, it suggests that there is an innate mechanism.

Question 5

In what consists becoming a native listener?

Answer 5

Between 6 – 12 months, infants lose ability to discriminate sounds from non-native languages, while becoming experts at distinguishing sounds from native language. This ability depends on experience.

Question 6

In what categories can we divide speech production?

Answer 6

this categories are divided by age

Reflexive vocalizations(birth to 2 months)

Cooing and laughing( 2-4 months)

Babbling and vocal play (4-6 months)

Canonical babbling(6-10 months)

Modulated babbling (10 months onwards)

Question 7

In what consist reflexive vocalizations?

Answer 7

First sound an infant does are reflexive vocalizations, characterized by cries, coughs, burps and sneezes. Infant has different types of cries, which suggests that each has a different meaning.

Question 8

In what consists cooing and laughing?

Answer 8

Infants begins laughing and combining sounds with one another. Reciprocal cooing between infant and parent helps infant to learn that communication involves taking turns.

Question 9

In what consists babbling and vocal play?

Answer 9

Infants gain control over vocal cords, lips, tongue and mouth, and produce wide range of sounds and combinations, called babbling.

Question 10

In what consists canonical babbling?

Answer 10

Sound combinations produced that sound like words. There is no evidence that infants understand it. Neither hearing human speech or having others respond to infant vocalizations is necessary for early babbling to occur, evidence of this lies on fact that deaf (parents) children also babble. Beyond age of 6 months, hearing speech plays role in continuation of babbling (deaf infants stop babbling).

Question 11

In what consists Modulated babbling?

Answer 11

Infants produce variety of sound combinations, stress and intonation patterns. They also begin to have meaningful speech. Modulated babbling plays role in acquisition of intonation patterns.

Question 12

What is the development of articulation?

Answer 12

Children know when they pronounce something wrong and thus, are more likely to use words that they can pronounce. As they learn to produce pronunciations, they make phonological distinctions that sometimes adults cannot perceive. This is done by saying the same word slightly different(‘gwass’ for grass and glass).

Question 13

What is syntax?

Answer 13

Syntax is a set of rules dealing with the manner in which words and parts of words are related to one another to produce grammatical sentences.

Question 14

What is the surface structure?

Answer 14

Level of syntax that corresponds to spoken sentences, like noun – verb - adjective. It can have more than one meaning.

Question 15

What is the deep structure?

Answer 15

– Level of syntax that is a more abstract representation of a sentence and determines its meaning.

Question 16

What is the one word period?

Answer 16

Acquisition of syntax follow predictable pattern during first two years of life.
 Between 10 – 18 months – Children begin to produce single word utterances.
 First words include people-based terms, followed by object nouns and action verbs.
 Although in this period children are limited to producing single-word utterances, they are capable of conceiving of and comprehending more complete sentences.
 Example: 17-month-old infants watched two videos and each video had a sentence describing it. Infants looked longer at video that corresponded to sentence they heard, which suggests that even if they can produce only a single word at a time, they understand aspects of word order.

Question 17

What is the two word period?

Answer 17

Between 18- and 24-months age, most children begin to produce two words at a time.
 They choose words that convey the most meaning and omit word endings, plurals and adverbs.
 They use words salient in their environment such as nouns, verbs and adjectives.
 Words that were initially produced as gestures are more likely to be used.
 Example: ‘Mummy go’, ‘kick ball’ and ‘dog water’.

Question 18

Later syntactic development

Answer 18

After two-word period, children’s syntactic knowledge increases dramatically.
 Skills between 24 and 36-month-old child are very different. At 36 months they can use past forms and language exceptions.

Question 19

What happens as children learn syntax?

Answer 19

As children learn syntax, they produce variety of errors that demonstrate that they are learning these rules.

Question 20

What are the two types of errors that happen while children are learning syntax?

Answer 20

Overregularization errors

Creative overgeneralizations

Question 21

Overregularization errors
Plurals
Past tense

Answer 21

– Occur when children apply a rule to an exception to the rule. These mistakes are understandable because they do not know yet about certain exceptions to the rules they are learning.
 Plurals – Infants are unlikely to attach ‘-s’ to mass nouns (= cannot be counted) but they do so for count nouns (= can be counted).
 Past tense – Overregularize use of suffix ‘-ed’ for many years.

Question 22

Creative overgeneralizations

Answer 22

Occurs when children generalize rules they are learning to produce novel words they have never heard of. They basically create new forms of words based on regularities in language they hear.