week 1- birth to babble Flashcards
what is empirical research?
research that uses evidence to make conclusions about a question or theory.
How can we test or measure language acquisition?
- Measure electrical charges in the brain
- Count the number of words they know
- Mean average sentence length
- Quantative or qualitive
how does crying help infant’s language development?
allows infant to rehearse breath control and voicing
what is the nature argument?
Knowledge is innately programmed; our minds are ‘set’ before birth and our cognitive capacity will not change (therefore our ability to acquire language won’t change).
• E.g. Chomsky and Halle (1968)
• Language is innate
• Infant model is deficient – goal is to reach adult model: ‘underlying form’ vs. ‘surface form’
what is the nurture argument?
Knowledge is acquired through experience; we are born as a ‘blank slate’ and cognitive development happens from the bottom up
• Pierrehumbert (2003, p.117) “The phonological system is built while being used”
• No assumption of any prior knowledge
• Language learnt through use – social interaction is important
what is the linguistic position argument?
nature - jakobson 0-6 months. The Prelinguistic Period. - Babble is random - Infant has no concept of input speech as meaningful
6-12 months. Silence.
- Infant develops awareness of speech in their input
- Begins to acquire perceptual distinctions between speech sounds
- Pairing between sounds & meanings established (Speech sounds distinct from babble sounds)
12+ months. The Linguistic Period.
- Speech sounds acquired in a specific order (predetermined by some innate capacity)
- ‘Universal principles’
- Based on adult language as a model
→ Discontinuous trajectory to language, but linear
what is the the ‘psychological’ position’ ?
nurture - Pierrehumbert
- Sound Approximation
- Babble shaped to sounds of language - Word Approximation
- Babble shaped to approximate words - Word Chaining
- Words combine into short phases - Sentence production
- Phrases become sentences
(gets increasingly word/phrase/sentence like)
→ Continuous trajectory to language, but non-linear
discuss a study surrounding language in the womb
DeCasper & Fifer (1980) • 10 DeCasper & Fifer (1980)
• 10 newborns <24 hours after birth
• Mothers recorded reading a Dr Seuss book (25 mins) • Infants placed in crib with headphones over ears and non-nutritive nipple in mouth
• Sucking activity recorded for 5 minutes to establish baseline sucking rate
• Half infants got mother’s voice after sucks, higher than baseline, half after sucks, lower than baseline
• 8/10 infants shifted sucking rate to that generating mother’s voice
• Conclusion: Infants prefer mother’s voice, and alter their behaviour to hear it
Canonical babbling
rhythmic, speech-like, consonant + vowel syllables
what happens to humans language knowledge in the womb?
From birth, humans have ready-established linguistic knowledge:
- they are drawn to language over non-linguistic acoustic signals
- they attend more to their mother’s voice than other female voices → i.e. they can discriminate between speakers
- they attend more to the ambient language
Perceptuo -motor
perception (hearing or seeing) + movement
what did Davis & MacNeilage say about babbling?
(1995):
6 monolingual English infants
1h recording at home every week from onset of babbling
All CV utterances analysed
Results: In favour of ‘frame dominance’. C+V combinations were predictable across the data, according to tongue position.
- Results suggest babble is motivated by motoric factors: vowel determined by position of tongue, not by any ‘drive’ to produce something language-like
“much of the patterning of babbling is a direct result of production of syllabic “Frames” by means of rhythmic mandibular oscillation.”
what did Boysson-Bardies say about babbling?
(1989):
20 infants age 10 months acquiring French, UK English, Algiers Arabic & Mandarin Chinese
Analysis of vowels (1047 in total) – vowel formants
Across the four languages, infants’ vowels were most like the adult model from the ambient language
Results suggest babble is motivated by input factors: vowel determined by ambient language
“perceptuo-motor attunements are already operating in babbling”
discuss the Moon et al study.
Hypothesis-
Newborns can respond to familiar voices
Familiarity with one language is necessary for discrimination between two languages
Newborns both respond to and prefer a familiar language
Experiment
Sixteen 2-day-old monolingual speakers of English or Spanish
Recordings of women speaking English or Spanish
Nipple connected to a pressure transducer
2 min baseline sucking period, 18 min of auditory stimuli
Two types of stimuli (Spanish and English)
Results
Relationship between reinforcer and period.
12 out of the 16 infants reacted to the recording that was in their native language by sucking for a longer period of time
Test number two:
Mean sucking burst periods recorded for Spanish and English.
Average burst length throughout the foreign language recording was subtracted from the average burst length during the native recording.
4 of the 16 subjects had longer sucking bursts through the recording of the foreign voice.
Native speakers also preferred those recordings to other recordings in the same language (was preference based on voice preference not language?)
- Therefore overall, the responses from the infants were larger for the native language.
How are babies ‘sensitive to the statistics’ of their ambient language
Babies’ knowledge of language is dependent on what they hear in the input: they are sensitive to the sounds they hear most often, and the sounds that go together most often.
