Test 2

Question 1

What are two challenges for speech segmentation?

Answer 1

speech is continuous therefor identifying units is hard; words are not generally taught in isolation

Question 2

Why do children need to engage in speech segmentation?

Answer 2

segmentation is required for successful acquisition as the production of words requires the identification of words in the speech stream

Question 3

what is phonological/prosodic bootstrapping?

Answer 3

the use of phonological properties of the speech stream to identify boundaries between linguistic units; used in segmentation

Question 4

How do prosodic cues help with identifying word boundaries?

Answer 4

changes in pitch/pauses/lengthening of segments can help identify word boundaries

Question 5

How does segmental info help with identifying word boundaries?

Answer 5

by using transitional probability (probability of a segment/syllable occurring) and phonotactic constraints (constraints on which segments can appear next to each other)
-learners posit word boundaries where low TP is detected and ignore places where high TP is detected

Question 6

How does stress help with identifying word boundaries?

Answer 6

if a given language consistently exhibits stress in the same location in a word, children will learn that the word boundary aligns with or is close to the stress syllable
-strong-weak words are more easily acquired
-babies (7.5mo english-exposed) often mis-segmented weak-strong words

Question 7

What was learned from experiments surrounding segmental info?

Answer 7

that infants listened longer to part-words than to the words on which they had already been trained; this suggests that infants were surprised by and more interested in the novel words

Question 8

Why are function words good cues to segmentation?

Answer 8

they are a closed class (no knew words added); the type of function word will tell you info about the word that will follow
-articles/determiners, prns, conj.
-grammatical relationships

Question 9

Why do infants babble/why is it important?

Answer 9

allows infants to practice + adjust their articulatory capabilities AND builds sensory-motor representations of sounds

Question 10

Canonical vs variegated babbling

Answer 10

canonical: 7-9mo, consonant-like sounds, syllables in isolation (ex. ba, baba)
variegated: 9-12mo, sequences of cons + vowels that differ in quality, sounds like target language (ex. badi)

Question 11

Why may signers acquire words before speakers?

Answer 11

Hand signs are easier for babies than using their still-developing vocal tract

Question 12

Why do children use phonological processes to adapt words to their grammars?

Answer 12

they use them until they can refine their own grammar system to be like an adults system; markedness issues, for ex. in the area of speech sound and syllable structure complexity

Question 13

Define substitution in your own words

Answer 13

child substitutes a sound they don’t have in their phonemic inventory for one that they do have
ex. stopping is when fricative sounds become stops, like zebra becoming debra

Question 14

Define assimilation in your own words

Answer 14

a sound will take on the features of a nearby sound to become more similar
ex. voicing: cons picks up voicing of the following vowel, like pig to big (p to b)

Question 15

Define syllable simplification in your own words

Answer 15

sounds/syllables are reduced or omitted to simplify a cluster of consonants into something more manageable

Question 16

What’s the difference in a language being marked and unmarked?

Answer 16

simple/common structures in a language are considered to be unmarked; complex/less common structures are considered to be marked

Question 17

What is the Markedness Hypothesis?

Answer 17

a. first stage in development of construction is typically that which is cross-linguistically unmarked
b. the developmental path that children follow tends to mirror cross-language patterns in the sense that cross-linguistically marked patterns are acquired earlier than marked patterns

Question 18

What does the Markedness Hypothesis observe/imply?

Answer 18

parts of a language that are less marked are acquired before parts that are more marked; the most/least common consonants of a language will be the first/last acquired in any given language

Question 19

What is the Continuity Hypothesis?

Answer 19

a. all stages of child phonology correspond to possible (adult) phonological grammars
b. phonological development (from one stage to another) is gradual

Question 20

What does the Continuity Hypothesis observe/imply?

Answer 20

development is S-shaped
-incorrect production, followed by a period of gradual improvement, followed by target-like production

Question 21

What could a child’s mispronunciations be due to?

Answer 21

adult-like representations and non-adult phonological rules; anecdotal evidence suggests that children perceive adult forms in adult ways and therefor their underlying reps are adult-like

Question 22

Why do concrete nouns predominate in early speech?

Answer 22

concrete nouns refer to physical objects and are easy to learn because babies can see them in their FOV; the form-meaning pairing can be made very easily; child-directed speech includes many concrete nouns

Question 23

What is over and underextension?

Answer 23

over: uses a word to cover a wider range of things than it actually means (ex. “dog” for any animal)
under: a word only has a very narrow range of meaning (ex. “bottle” is only for child’s feeding bottles) (not as common i think)

Question 24

Why does over/underextension occur?

Answer 24

semantic representations may not be target like due to the length of time since first learning the word of because the word is not as frequently used; recently acquired words likely have less semantic info and thus have the highest likelihood of being overextended in comprehension and production

Question 25

What are the 3 principles of word learning?

Answer 25

Principle of Reference, Whole Object Constraint, Principle of Mutual Exclusivity

Question 26

Principle of Reference (principle of word learning)

Answer 26

assumes that children know that nouns have the property to be referential

Question 27

Whole Object Constraint (principle of word learning)

Answer 27

Gavagai problem revisited; says that words refer to whole objects, not parts nor properties of the object

Question 28

Principle of Mutual Exclusivity (principle of word learning)

Answer 28

children assume that is an object already has a name that they know, the same object cannot have another name (no synonyms); if a new word is introduced that could refer to the object, children assume it must mean smth different (it refers to a part or property of the object)

Question 29

What are the 3 principles of word learning used for?

Answer 29

guide children’s learning of words, which narrows down the hypothesis space to something more manageable
(used to create meanings for new words(?); when given new words, kids will choose a picture of a whole object rather than a specific part of an object)

Question 30

What is taxonomic bias?

Answer 30

children will extend words to objects of the same category (cow, pig = taxonomic, cow, milk = thematic)

Question 31

What is syntactic bootstrapping?

Answer 31

the use of semantic info to narrow down the meanings of verbs; used to learn the meanings of nonreferential words; syntax restricts what main verb can mean which helps children learn verbs

Question 32

How does syntactic bootstrapping relate to sentence-to-world mapping?

Answer 32

understanding the basics of argument structure can help children learn the meanings of verbs; verbs that select the same # of arguments tend to share certain semantic features

Question 33

What is the preferential looking paradigm?

Answer 33

an experimental technique used specifically for studying infants and toddlers in order to assess how they orient to and understand visual/audio stimuli

Question 34

What is the child’s task when building grammar?

Answer 34

-segment words into their morphemes + give meaning to each
-learn the categories a morpheme can fall into
-learn the structure of morphologically complex words
-assign a unique underlying rep to each morpheme
-learn that morphemes are pronounced according to the morpho-phonemic rules (ex. plural S allomorphs)

Question 35

What is the Mean Length of Utterance and how is it calculated?

Answer 35

the total number of morphemes in all utterances divided by the total number of utterances

Question 36

How is frequency, saliency, and semantic weight relevant to the acquisition of grammatical morphemes?

Answer 36

frequency: how often the morphemes occur
saliency: how noticeable or important they were
semantic weight: unsure :-(

Question 37

What does the wug test tell us about the acquisition of grammatical morphemes?

Answer 37

tests generalization of rules on novel forms
RESULTS: correct use of allomorphs [s] and [z]

Question 38

How does acquisition of grammatical morphemes in English acquisition take place?

Answer 38

children have a predisposition for learning language (rule learning, semantic category info, morphological processes); children must perform segmenting inflection from the stem to which it attaches to and assign an interpretation to an inflectional affix

Question 39

What is the difference between agreement morphology in English and Hungarian? Why this difference?

Answer 39

English has a relatively fixed word order while Hungarian has relatively free; in English, word order + preps indicate role of noun while in Hungarian the suffix on the noun indicates its role; Hungarian kids acquire morphemes earlier because there is less material that intervenes the noun and the suffix; in English there can be many words that come between the noun and the prep
ex. IN the big old yellow HOUSE vs haːz-ak-ban (house-pl-in)

Question 40

Why are suffixes easier to acquire than prefixes?

Answer 40

Slobins Operating Principle A: we pay attention to the end of words
recency effects: adults tend to remember the most recently presented info the best