Week 2

Question 1

What is the critical period?

Answer 1

the notion that a biologically determined period exists during which language acquisition must occur, if it is to occur at all

Question 2

What is imprinting in ducks & geese?

Answer 2

• there is a critical period with 13-16 hours of hatching where they will follow the first moving thing that they see
• imprint on that moving thing and follow them around
• if they don’t see any moving thing after 16 hours then they don’t follow anything which means that they are out of luck

Question 3

Explain the experiment on the vision in kittens.

Answer 3

• they sewed their eyes shut for the first 12 weeks of life

- eyes were perfectly normal but they couldn’t see because that critical period had expired

Question 4

What happened to Genie and the “critical period”?

Answer 4

• neglected for first 13 years of life
• within 4 years, she had the vocabulary size of a 5 year old, but morphology, and syntax were off
• never reached fluency despite having a whole bunch of therapy and training
• maybe there is a critical period
• might be other impairments due to the abusive situation though

Question 5

What did they find when they looked at native chinese speakers and native spanish speakers learning English as L2?

Answer 5

• gradual decline in the degree of proficiency that you eventually reach in your second language
• kids who start learning second language at birth achieve a better fluency then later start

Question 6

Evidence for critical period

Answer 6

• kids reach fluency in L2
• adults don’t reach fluency in L2
• isolated children don’t reach fluency in L1
• kids use language in more situations than adults
• kids have greater neural plasticity

Question 7

Evidence against critical period

Answer 7

• age effects with CP
• age effects outside CP
• effects of amount & type of language use inside & outside CP

Question 8

What are the four stages of early vocalization? Explain them.

Answer 8

1) vegetative sounds: newborns cry, burp, cough
- use the vocal tracts, vibrate vocal folds to cry, use the same apparatus as you would for language
2) cooing: (6-8 weeks) long vowels, not much control of muscles but make noise, not as much crying, learning how to vocalize
3) laughter & vocal play: (16 weeks) gain more control of articulators, not accidental sounds, (marginal babbling)
- back consonants, ‘gaah’; velar sounds (because they are mostly lying down- back of mouth)
4) babbling: (6 months), sitting up, sounds at the front of the mouth, (canonical babbling), repeated syllables: CVCV etc., not much control for vowels yet, most often a stop consonant: ‘bababa’, voiced consonants (not coordinated enough to say voiceless ones), non-referential, ex: ‘baba’ refers to bottle

Question 9

When does canonical babbling occur and what is it?

Answer 9

• 6 months
• before they have words
• involves reduplicated sounds containing alternations of vowels and consonants (CVCV- baba)

Question 10

When does variegated babbling occur and what is it?

Answer 10

• 9 months
• sentence-like intonation
• more complex combinations of consonant and vowel syllables (e.g.; babadoobe)

Question 11

Explain the universal theory of babbling.

Answer 11

• kids babble for a while and have a silent period
• the patterns we see in children’s babbling follow markedness
• marked: unusual or remarkable properties/features (fricatives, voiced stops)
• any language that has marked will also have unmarked but NOT vice versa
• unmarked= default (ex; voiceless stops like t, p)
• the unmarked things are the things that kids would produce first

Question 12

Explain the biomechanical theory of babbling.

Answer 12

• babbling is not language behaviour at all
• rhythmic movements of babbling are just muscle movements (side-effect of sucking or eating)
• babbling is not under the infant’s conscious control
• babbling is just rhythmic mandibular (jaw) oscillation (back and forth)
• opposite universal theory

Question 13

Explain the interactive theory of babbling.

Answer 13

• middle ground theory of babbling
• develops as a result of genetics and physiology and child’s language experience
• interaction shapes production
• influenced by ambient language
• perceptual system is becoming tuned by that language, their production is being influenced by it too

Question 14

If we observed this evidence, what theory of babbling would it support?
All children start to babble in the same way, first with sounds at the front of the mouth [bibibi], then sounds made in the middle of the mouth [dədə], then sounds towards the back of the mouth [gugugu]

Answer 14

biomechanical

Question 15

If we observed this evidence, what theory of babbling would it support?
All children start to babble in the same way, first with [tɑtɑ], then [pɑpɑ], then [dɑdɑ]

Answer 15

universal

Question 16

What did the researchers do in the experiment about what kids actually do pertaining to consonants? What were the results?

Answer 16

• recorded babies whose parents spoke Japanese, French, English and Swedish
• picked up patterns of consonants with influence of ambient language
• swedish babies produced more stops
• french babies produced more bilabial sounds

Question 17

What did the researchers do in the experiment about what kids actually do pertaining to vowels? What were the results?

Answer 17

• measured difference in vowels

- vowel space differed across languages that correspond to differences in adults

Question 18

What did the researchers do in the experiment about what kids actually do pertaining to syllable structures? What were the results?

Answer 18

• french, english and swedish babies go ‘bababa’ (CVCV)
• aruba babies go ‘ababab’ (VCVC)
• french babies produced fewer closed syllables and more open syllables than english babies
• japanese have more [_o] syllables

Question 19

What did the researchers do in the experiment about what kids actually do pertaining to intonation? What were the results?

Answer 19

-intonational differences in french and english babies that were consistent with adult speakers

Question 20

What do deaf kids do when it comes to babbling?

Answer 20

• deaf kids whose parents speak sign don’t babble the same way that hearing kids do
• around 6 months, they babble on their hands- same properties of canonical babbling
• repeated CVCV syllables, more into alternating syllables at same stage
• favourite phonemes are the same ones as the first phonemes that they use

Question 21

Describe the experiment about hearing kids acquiring sign.

Answer 21

• two sets of 3 kids, matched for age
• one set was acquiring speech and one set was acquiring sign
• carseat; infrared LEDs on their hands
• speech: hand activity was 3 times faster
• sign: slower hand activity- one sign per second

Question 22

Explain the native-language cries experiment.

Answer 22

• french and german babies
• location of FO peak (where does the pitch peak show highest pitch)
• location of amplitude peak (loudest pitch)
• categorized into 4 melody types:
  1) “quickly rising and slowly decreasing
  2) slowly rising and quickly decreasing
  3) symmetrical rising-and-then-falling
  4) a relatively stable fundamental frequency with a rising or falling trend”
• newborns of both groups generated all 4 types
• on average, the pitch peak and amplitude peak came later in French babies cry than german babies cry
• the people who were grouping the cries were not blind to the hypothesis (big red flag), they knew what they were expecting to find
• maybe ambient language influence shows up in womb? some evidence

Question 23

The influence of ambient language on babbling and crying.

Answer 23

• on babbling production, by around 9 months (strong evidence)
• on crying, at birth (weak evidence)