the acquisition of our first language part 2 Flashcards
what is the main problem when discriminating words as an infant
the segmentation problem
what is the segmentation problem
-fluent speech does not provide unambiguous indications of where words start or end
-speech doesnt have the equivalent of spaces between words
-learning lang involves figuring out which sounds clump tog to form words
-parents only to speak to infants in one word utterances 10% of the time
-babies are often confronted with many words sewn seamlessly tog and must work out where the edges of words are
what are the techniques to solving the segmentation problem
1.isolated word hypothesis
2.phonotactic constraints
3.the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis
4.infant directed speech
5.statistical learning- transitional probabilities
what is the isolated word hypothesis
-1st technique to resolve segmentation issue
-bortfeld et al 2005: babies use this at 6 months ish
-baby captures strings of sounds within a sentence
-the sounds regularly heard in isolation must be a word
-to fill in the rest the baby must make inferences
what is phonotactic constraints and what is a weakness of it
-2nd technique to resolve segmentation issue
-sensitivity at age 7 1/2 - 9 months
-uses intuition of which sound sequences are allowed at the beginnings and ends of words e.g there are no english words starting with pk/pt etc
-baby might reject the word ptangb bc of ingrained templates which this word does not match
-weakness: if infant does not know where word begins or ends, how will they learn some sequences are more frequential at the beginning or end or a word
what is the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis
-3rd technique to resolve segmentation issue
-use of stress patterns to segment speech
-90% of bi-syllabic words have stress syllable at start of word (trochaic)
-trochaic e.g BOttle, iambic e.g boTTLE
-weber 2004
–stress patterns not seen in infants at 4 months
–at 7 1/2 months infants recognise words with trochaic stress patterns
-errors are common here e.g guiTAR is might be put as one word TARis until 10 months when errors stop
-older infants do not rely on stress patterns as much
what goes on when babies solve the segmentation problem
they begin to understand words have meaning
what is statistical learning- transitional probabilities
Saffran et al 1996
-5th technique to overcome segmentation issues
-babies exposed to stream of sounds from invented language for 2 mins
-sound stream could be segmented in many diff ways
-infants quite capable of segmenting words even w artificial language
transitional properties
-brain knows /tee/ follows /pri/ 80% of time so brain assumes these as a package
-high probability pairs become words and low prob pairs treated as separate speech entities
what is infant directed speech (IDS)/ motherese
-4th technique to resolve the segmentation issue
-exaggeration of the prosody of speech and is short
-not all cultures have IDS
what is the main challenge of understanding words have meaning
poverty of stimulus
-environment does not provide enough info for child to identify 1 meaning of a word so often errors occur
what comes first understanding or production
understanding (perception before production)
what is it called when an infant learns a word they have only heard once
fast mapping
when does understanding language occur
-end of 1st year: initial associations of sound sequences and meaning
-understanding is dependent on context and is a gradual process
-10months: 40 words understood
-18 months: 250 words understood
process of speech production
-12 months: produce 1st word
-12-16 months: 2/3 words learnt per week
-18-22 months: vocab of 50 words
-22 months +: word spurt = 8/9 words per week
does this fast learning of language support the LAD
yes, indicates a special mechanism for word learning (predisposition for lang)
