Week 1 Lecture 1 - language Flashcards
Is language generative?
yes
What is phonology?
small units that are combined
make up language
What are semantics
they convey meaning
What is syntax?
rules about how language goes together
Is language social?
yes
What are 3 types of infant study designs?
1.) preference studies
2.) habituation/ familiarisation
3.) change detection - can infant tell the difference between 2 things?
What is prosody?
The pattern of stress and intonation in a language
Do languages have different prosodic patterns?
Yes
What are phonemes?
The perceptually distinct units in a language that distinguishes 1 word from another
Do languages differ in the sounds that they use as phonemes?
Yes
When is the foetal auditory system fully functioning by?
During the last trimester
Whose voice do newborns prefer? (De Caspar & Fifer, 1980)
their mothers
What languages can newborns discriminate between? (Nazzi et al., 1998)
Those with different prosody but not similar
What language do newborns prefer? (Moon et al., 1993)
their native language
true or false
newborns cry with an accent (Mampe et al., 2009)
True
Worldwide there are 600 consonants and 200 vowels but how many do languages tend to use?
40
What is children’s babble made up of and when does it change? (Levitt & Wang, 1991)
Initially a wide range of sounds but in 1st year it moves more towards producing sounds of the target language
By what age can infants discriminate between all sounds, even foreign ones?
1-2 months
By what age do infants decline in their ability to discriminate sounds for non-target language but increase in ability for their target language?
7-11 months
When can infants segment words from their language? (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995)
7.5 months
By what age can infants track the co-occurrence of syllables? (Saffran et al., 1996)
8 months
Why is co-occurrence important in word segmentation? (Saffran et al., 1996)
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
What is infant directed speech?
- higher pitched
- slower speaking rate
- important words at the end and are exaggerated
- boundaries between phrases are enhanced
Is IDS preferred by infants?
yes
Do infants find it easier to segment IDS than adult directed speech? Are they better at it?
Yes and Yes
What 2 types of words act as anchors
highly frequent words e.g., mummy, child’s name
linguistic words e.g., the, he, she
Why is frequency important in word segementation?
If you can identify a word in the speech stream you can identify 1 boundary of the adjacent words
At what age do infants use linguistic words such as “the” to segment nouns? (Shi & Lepage, 2008)
8 months
At test, infants listened longer to an isolated word that was taught with a real function
Where do function words appear in language?
in English they appear before but not in all languages
By what age are infants sensitive to word order? (Gervain et al., 2008)
8 months
Italian is a frequent-first language
Japanese is a frequent-final language
At what age could infants learn abstract rules with linguistic stimuli i.e. ABA pattern vs ABB pattern (Marcus et al., 1999)
6 months
What 3 things must infants do to learn language?
- identify sounds of language
- segment speech into smaller units
- figure out how those smaller units are organised to convey specific meaning
