Week 1 Lecture 1 - language

Question 1

Is language generative?

Answer 1

yes

Question 2

What is phonology?

Answer 2

small units that are combined
make up language

Question 3

What are semantics

Answer 3

they convey meaning

Question 4

What is syntax?

Answer 4

rules about how language goes together

Question 5

Is language social?

Answer 5

yes

Question 6

What are 3 types of infant study designs?

Answer 6

1.) preference studies
2.) habituation/ familiarisation
3.) change detection - can infant tell the difference between 2 things?

Question 7

What is prosody?

Answer 7

The pattern of stress and intonation in a language

Question 8

Do languages have different prosodic patterns?

Answer 8

Yes

Question 9

What are phonemes?

Answer 9

The perceptually distinct units in a language that distinguishes 1 word from another

Question 10

Do languages differ in the sounds that they use as phonemes?

Answer 10

Yes

Question 11

When is the foetal auditory system fully functioning by?

Answer 11

During the last trimester

Question 12

Whose voice do newborns prefer? (De Caspar & Fifer, 1980)

Answer 12

their mothers

Question 13

What languages can newborns discriminate between? (Nazzi et al., 1998)

Answer 13

Those with different prosody but not similar

Question 14

What language do newborns prefer? (Moon et al., 1993)

Answer 14

their native language

Question 15

true or false
newborns cry with an accent (Mampe et al., 2009)

Answer 15

True

Question 16

Worldwide there are 600 consonants and 200 vowels but how many do languages tend to use?

Answer 16

40

Question 17

What is children’s babble made up of and when does it change? (Levitt & Wang, 1991)

Answer 17

Initially a wide range of sounds but in 1st year it moves more towards producing sounds of the target language

Question 18

By what age can infants discriminate between all sounds, even foreign ones?

Answer 18

1-2 months

Question 19

By what age do infants decline in their ability to discriminate sounds for non-target language but increase in ability for their target language?

Answer 19

7-11 months

Question 20

When can infants segment words from their language? (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995)

Answer 20

7.5 months

Question 21

By what age can infants track the co-occurrence of syllables? (Saffran et al., 1996)

Answer 21

8 months

Question 22

Why is co-occurrence important in word segmentation? (Saffran et al., 1996)

Answer 22

syllables that co-occur are likely to be part of the same word
If infants listen longer to part-words, it suggests they found words in the stream

Question 23

What is infant directed speech?

Answer 23

• higher pitched
• slower speaking rate
• important words at the end and are exaggerated
• boundaries between phrases are enhanced

Question 24

Is IDS preferred by infants?

Answer 24

yes

Question 25

Do infants find it easier to segment IDS than adult directed speech? Are they better at it?

Answer 25

Yes and Yes

Question 26

What 2 types of words act as anchors

Answer 26

highly frequent words e.g., mummy, child’s name
linguistic words e.g., the, he, she

Question 27

Why is frequency important in word segementation?

Answer 27

If you can identify a word in the speech stream you can identify 1 boundary of the adjacent words

Question 28

At what age do infants use linguistic words such as “the” to segment nouns? (Shi & Lepage, 2008)

Answer 28

8 months
At test, infants listened longer to an isolated word that was taught with a real function

Question 29

Where do function words appear in language?

Answer 29

in English they appear before but not in all languages

Question 30

By what age are infants sensitive to word order? (Gervain et al., 2008)

Answer 30

8 months
Italian is a frequent-first language
Japanese is a frequent-final language

Question 31

At what age could infants learn abstract rules with linguistic stimuli i.e. ABA pattern vs ABB pattern (Marcus et al., 1999)

Answer 31

6 months

Question 32

What 3 things must infants do to learn language?

Answer 32

• identify sounds of language
• segment speech into smaller units
• figure out how those smaller units are organised to convey specific meaning