Week 1 - phonological perception and discrimination

Question 1

Areas of language development

Answer 1

– Phonology: the study of sound as a linguistic system
– Prosody: the study of how our intonation affects language
– Lexicon: totality of the words in a language
– Morphemes: sounds combined to make units which are not full words e.g., ‘ment’ in ‘government’
– Morphology: morphemes are combined to make larger words, phrases or sentences e.g., ‘govern’ and ‘ment’ for ‘government’
– Syntax: the rules of language
– Pragmatics: social use of language

Question 2

The “Cat in the Hat” study (DeCaspar and Spence, 1986)

Answer 2

• Mothers 7 ½ months pregnant read one story to their unborn babies
• Twice a day until birth (average of 67 times)
• Each mother read aloud 1 of 3 variations of the same story
• Story 1: first part of the original story
• Story 2: adaption – same rhythm, different words ‘The Dog in the Fog’
• Story 3: adaption – different rhythm, different words ‘The king, the mice and the cheese’
• Stories had similar length and shared 60-80% vocabulary
• At 3 days old the babies heard recordings of all three stories
• Strong preference shown for the story read to them before birth

Based on the findings DeCaspar and Spence believed that the babies were picking up prosodic aspects of their mothers’ speech (intonation) and could process, recall, and recognise these after birth.

Question 3

The High Amplitude Sucking Paradigm (HAS Paradigm)

Answer 3

– Non-nutritive sucking: dummy connected to a computer via a tube – tube measures differences in pressure
– Pressure indicates sucking – changes in strength of pressure indicate changes in sucking rate
– The sucking rate is our dependent variable (what we are interested in measuring)

Question 4

Rhythm-based language discrimination hypothesis

Answer 4

infants can discriminate between two foreign languages based on intonation

Question 5

Vowel-based discrimination Hypothesis:

Answer 5

infants can discriminate between languages based on the rhythmic representation of the language:

Question 5

Vowel-based discrimination Hypothesis:

Answer 5

infants can discriminate between languages based on the rhythmic representation of the language:

Question 6

Evidence:

Answer 6

Infants can discriminate between:
• Stress-timed and syllable times languages (English/Catalan, English/Italian)
• Stress-timed vs mora-timed languages (English/Japanese)
Children do not discriminate languages within the same class e.g., English/Dutch

Question 7

Bertoncini et al, 1998

Answer 7

Habituation a group of infants to a set of four syllables sharing the same vowel (bi, si, li, mi)
Habituation of another group of infants to a set of four syllables sharing the same consonant (bi ba, bo ,bƏ)

Experimental phase – same sequence plus a new syllable pairing:
• Either the vowel with the syllables used in the habituation phase (bi si li mi di)
• OR the consonant with the syllables used in the habituation phase (bi ba bo bƏ bu)
If the di/bu is perceived as a new stimulus infants sucking rate should increase

Findings:
• Infants detected the presence of a new syllable when the vowel of the new syllable differed e.g., bi ba bo bƏ bu
• Infants did not detect the new syllable when the consonant differed e.g., bi si li mi di

Question 8

Werker and Tees (1984)

Answer 8

This indicates that we are born with the ability to differentiate between any sound contrasts even ones we have never heard before, but this ability is lost as we grow older.

Showed that 6–8-month-olds are ‘universal listeners’ as they can discriminate Hindi contrasts as well as Hindi-speaking adults.

Our ability to differentiate between phonemic contrasts outside of our native language diminishes at the end of the first year of life

But the ability to differentiate between phonemic contrasts within our native language is maintained at 100%

We become attuned to sound contrasts in our own language and our discrimination of native contrasts improves with age.

Question 9

Pigdins and Creoles

Answer 9

• Pidgins – languages that are created from a mix of lexical items from one or more languages but with its own, primitive grammar.
• Hawaiian Pidgin English arose on sugarcane plantations in Hawaii during the early 20th century when immigrant workers from Japan, Korea, and the Philippines came together; they shared no language with one another (Bickerton, 1981, 1984)
• Creole: a language that used to be a Pidgin and subsequently became a native language for some speakers (Todd, 1974)
• Swahili may be the result of contact between Arabic and Bantu language (Todd, 1974)

Question 10

• The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (Bickerton, 1984)

Answer 10

humans are endowed with an innate skeletal grammar that constitutes part or all of the human species-specific capacity for syntax.

Question 11

Methods of neurolinguistic investigation

Answer 11

• Lesion method – correlate bits of missing brain with bits of missing psychological functioning (Damasio, 1988)
• Studying split-brain patients provides a unique window into how each hemisphere functions
• Dichotic listening task – presenting information to the right and left side of the brain to see if the person reports hearing the information presented in the right ear if the stimuli is presented to the left hemisphere.
• Functional brain imaging methods – present stimuli to patients and obtain data on where the brain is most active as it processes those stimuli
• EEG/ERP – measures electrical activity in the brain via electrodes on the scalp. The location of ERPs associated with different mental activities is taken as a clue to the area of the brain responsible for those activities (Caplan, 1987).
• Optical topography – light emitting and light detecting devices are placed on the scalp at particular landmarks and measures of light transmission are taken as evidence of oxygenation of the blood and thus neural activity occurring between the emitter and the detector (Pena, Maki, Kovacic et al., 2003).

Question 12

The equipotentiality hypothesis – at birth the left and right hemispheres have equal potential for acquiring language (Bishop, 1983)
• Evidence: The degree of asymmetry in brain function increases with development and the ability of the right hemisphere to take over language functions for a damaged left hemisphere is greater in children than in adults

Answer 12

– at birth, the left and right hemispheres have equal potential for acquiring language (Bishop, 1983)
• Evidence: The degree of asymmetry in brain function increases with development and the ability of the right hemisphere to take over language functions for a damaged left hemisphere is greater in children than in adults

Question 13

Invariance hypothesis

Answer 13

– left hemisphere has the adult specialisation for language from birth and that lateralization does not change with development
• Evidence
• Neuroimaging studies of intact children suggest some cortical specialisation from birth
• Developmental changes in which hemisphere handles language may also arise from changes in how children process language as they gain expertise. For example, experienced musicians showed a right hemisphere advantage for music whereas naïve listeners showed a left ear advantage.
• Children who suffer early brain damage also subsequently experience seizures, so it is difficult to untangle the effects of the initial brain damage from the effects of the seizures (Rowe, Levine, Fisher and Goldin-Meadow, 2009)

Question 14

The critical period hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1967)

Answer 14

• Lenneberg – language acquisition is an ‘age-limited potential’
• A biologically determined period during which language acquisition must occur
• Critical periods within other species e.g., imprinting in birds
• Some environmental input is necessary for normal development, but biology determines when the organism is responsive to that input

Question 15

Evidence

Answer 15

• Wild Child (Victor of Averyon) suffered early isolation and was not successful in acquiring normal language
• Isabelle – lived in a dark room with her deaf-mute mother. Was able to acquire language with training. At 8 she was described as having a normal IQ and not easily distinguished from ordinary children of her age (Brown, 1958)
• Genie – social isolation until 13, no language. At 17 she scored in the range of a normal 5-year-old on standardised language tests. Vocabulary and semantic skills exceeded her syntactic skills. Deficient grammar in production and comprehension. Dichotic listening tests showed that language was a right hemisphere activity for Genie.
• Suggests that at age 13 a left hemisphere that has never been used for language has lost that capacity

Question 16

how heritable are different types of language development?

Who are the KE family?

Answer 16

• Heritability of grammatical development was 39% and 25% for lexical development (Dale et al., 2000)
• Genetic factors account for 26% of the variance in syntax and 5% of the variance in vocabulary among normally developing twins (Stromsworld, 2006)
• Larger environment effects on lexical development than on grammatical development (Arriaga et al., 1998)
• Individual differences in children’s language skills are to a degree genetically based
• The importance of genetic factors differs depending on the age of the child and the aspect of language
• Some areas of language development are likely to rely more on environment e.g., vocab while others more on genetics e.g., grammar
• Different genes relevant to language may be activated at different points in development and schooling
• KE family 16/30 family members were seriously language impaired (Gopnik and Crago,1991)
• A mutation that effects the encoding of a particular protein known as FOXP2 which affects the formation of neural structures that are important for speech and language
• No one gene for language development
• Evidence suggests that in most cases of language impairment the cause is multiple genes in interaction with the environment (Stromswold, 1998)

Question 17

Universal Grammar

Answer 17

Chomsky/generativist/nativist - human beings are innately endowed with a system of richly structured linguistic knowledge.
― New-borns come into the world with a genetically determined left lateralised cortical organisation, like that recruited by adults, which responds specifically to continuous speech

Question 18

Evidence

Answer 18

― This anatomical organisation is present in preterm infants as early as 28 weeks gestation – unlikely to be influenced by the environment
― UG specifies that all languages have lexical categories and functional categories. Constraints hold across languages suggests that languages are set up in a way that human biology expects them to be (Gleitman and Liberman, 1995)

Question 19

― Structure dependency hypothesis - the linguistic principle that grammatical processes function primarily on structures in sentences, not on single words or sequences of words

Answer 19

 Musso et al., (2003) asked participants to judge legal or illegal sentences
 The more accurate the participants were in judging sentences obeying legal rules, the more Broca’s area increased in activity. For illegal rules Broca’s area activation decreased as accuracy increased
 This indicates that an area of the cortex is dedicated to processing hierarchical linguistic structures and recognises in linguistic material those rules that are structure dependent
 This evidence comes from adults, that does not prove that children are born with the same ability

Question 20

― Principles and parameters model (Chomsky)

Answer 20

– the model of human language endorsed in UG
― Principles encode those invariant properties of language; parameters encode the properties that vary from one language another
― They can be thought of as switches that must be turned on or off

Question 21

Evidence for nature debate

Answer 21

― Children achieve linguistic milestones in parallel fashion and in a similar sequence regardless of the specific language they are exposed to
― At 6-8 months all children start to babble, at 10-12 months they speak their first words, at 20-24 months they begin to put words together
― Children exposed to sign language acquire language much as children exposed to oral language do, following a similar sequence of acquisition
― Deaf children born to late learners of American sign language (ASL) receive rudimentary linguistic input because their parents avoid complex structures and often omit functional morphemes. Despite this, these children achieve a more refined competence than their parents do
―
Nicaraguan sign language – children took the raw material provided by the previous generation and structured it in a language like way and introduced consistency
― This language exhibited new grammatical structures and a morphological system of verbal inflection and spatial modulation, and the second cohort were more fluent in using NSL than the first (Senghas, 2003)
―
Even when the language input is degenerate or absent e.g., some deaf children born to hearing families and therefore without access to a conventional sign language, have been reported to invent a home sign system so they can communicate with other deaf peers
― The invented gesture words are stable, can be decomposed into morphemes, and have an arbitrary relation with their referent

Question 22

Evidence for the nurture debate

Answer 22

― Knowledge of language consists of knowledge of constructions used to perform communicative or socio-pragmatic functions
― Assumes that infants are born with a predisposition to learn language however, they are not born with a specific capacity dedicated to language. Language is learned based on general innate mechanisms e.g., the ability to read other human beings’ intentions, and to extract patterns (Tomasello, 2003)
― These enable children to understand the meaning and function of words and utterances and to perform a functionally motivated distributional analysis of the input

Question 23

Critical period hypothesis

Answer 23

― Critical – the relevant ability can no longer be acquired once the optimal period is past

Question 24

Evidence

Answer 24

― Genie (Curtis, 1977) – discovered at 13 after being raised deprived of linguistic and social interaction
― Even after several years of linguistic rehabilitation, Genie’s language abilities were limited especially in syntax
― The conditions in which Genie was reared could have compromised her development and led to linguistic difficulties
―
Deaf adults exposed to ASL at different ages indicate that production and comprehension of verb morphology declines linearly with age of first exposure
― Individuals exposed to ASL from birth performed better than those exposed from 4-6 years of age and the latter performed better than individuals exposed after the age of 12 (Mayberry and Eichen, 1991)

Question 25

Sensitive period hypothesis

Answer 25

the window opens and closes gradually but it may never shut completely e.g., they may still be able to learn language outside of the sensitive period but not to the same level of competence

Question 26

Evidence for sensitive period hypothesis

Answer 26

― A foreign accent can be detected in individuals first exposed to a second language at 3, accents get stronger as the age of first exposure increases (Flege et al., 1999)
― Only speakers who have been exposed before the age of 7 to American English as a second language achieve native performance on an exam testing morphosyntax and syntax
― Speakers exposed after the age of 7 do not acquire native competence
― The sensitive period for attaining native phonological competence may be shorter for the one for achieving native syntactic competence
― Bilingual infants maintain the ability to discriminate non-native languages for a longer period than monolinguals

Question 27

The rhythm-based language discrimination hypothesis

Answer 27

holds that infants perceive and represent speech in terms of syllable-like units, or more likely some covariant unit, the vowel (the vowel is the universal unit that infants use at first to organise speech)

Question 28

Evidence for the rhythm based language hypothesis

Answer 28

― 4-day old infants detect a change from disyllabic to trisyllabic item (Bijelac-Babic et al., 1993)
― 4-day old infants born into French-speaking environments have been found to discriminate between bi and trisyllabic Japanese items but not between pairs of disyllabic items varying in number of morae
― New-borns detected the presence of the new syllable when the vowel of the new syllable differed from the vowel of the habituation syllables but not when the change involved the consonant

Question 29

Vocal babbling

Answer 29

form of linguistic production characterised by syllabic organisation, the use of a subset of the possible sounds found in natural languages and an absence of associated meaning (Elbers, 1982)

Question 30

Cannonical vs variagated babbling and influencing factors

Answer 30

― Canonical babbling: sequence of CV syllable, the most typical type of syllable in adult languages
― Variegated babbling: syllables and prosody more varied and vocal patterns resemble words
― Infants may produce these both at the same time (Oller, 1980)
― Quality of vowels produced by infants reared in different linguistic communities varies which reflect ambient languages
― Infants belonging to different speech communities display a preference for those segments that are more frequent in the words of their target language e.g., labial are more frequent in French words than English words and infant French learners produce more labials than English learners
― By 8-10 months the choice of sounds in babbling is to some degree influenced by linguistic experience
― Language specificity is evident in production (babbling) and perception

Question 31

Manual babbling

What does this show?

Answer 31

― Also occurs in canonical and variegated
― The similarity in time course, form and organisation of vocal and manual babbling suggest that the onset of vocal and manual babbling is not exclusively determined by the development of the articulatory/motor system underlying speech production but is controlled by a unitary language capacity (MacNeilage and Davis, 2000)
― From 6 months of age hearing infants exposed to sign language produce two kinds of hand activities with distinct rhythmic patterns (one is low frequency which corresponds to canonical babbling, and one is higher frequency. Infants not exposed to sign language only produce the second type of hand activity
― Deaf American and Chinese children who are not exposed to a conventional sign language spontaneously create their own gesture system (Feldman et al., 1978)

― Language capacity is amodal and open to different modalities of expression

Question 32

What are the benefits of babbling?

Answer 32

Babbling and word production
― Babbling allows infants to try out their articulatory capacities, fine-tune them through auditory feedback, and build sensory-motor representations of speech sounds leading up to the production of words
― Infants more advanced in babbling learn words more rapidly (Keren-Portnoy et al., 2010) and display more accurate phonological memory (Keren-Portnoy et al., 2009)
― 10-12 months while they are still babbling, infants start to produce their first identifiable words
― Babbling and first word production overlap
― Babbling is an important milestone in the process of acquiring language