Week 3 - Words: learning and importance

Question 1

When does the critical period end?

Answer 1

7 years for language

1st birthday for phonemes

Question 2

What determines an infants first words?

Answer 2

• Sounds they produce in babble (McCune and Vihman 2001)
• Words most frequent in their input (Goodman, Dale and Li 2008)
• Words that a most salient in their input (Foursha-Stevens et al. 2017)

Question 3

What kinds of sounds/words are often come first?

Answer 3

• Bilabial sounds
• Babble-like sounds
• Immediate needs eg. more
• Words relevant to baby’s world eg. nouns

Question 4

Babble and first words study

Answer 4

• Laing and Bergelson (in prep b)

- Infants produced their preferred consonant when attending to objects that matched that consonant eg. /n/ for nose

Question 5

Facts about word learning

Answer 5

• One word per week learnt at first
• Between 2-6 they acquire 10 new words a day
• Infants understand more than can produce, productive capacity must catch up

Question 6

Fast mapping

Answer 6

• Learning and retaining some knowledge with little experience
• Short term
• Poor retention
• Ability improves with age

Question 7

Slow mapping

Answer 7

• Developing full knowledge of words through experience
• Long-term
• Good retention
• Might take years to achieve full knowledge

Question 8

Factors affecting word learning

Answer 8

• Gender
• Socioeconomic status
• Race (African American vs White)
• Mothers age
• Mothers with depression
• Siblings

Question 9

Gender differences in language development study

Name
Date
Method
Results

Answer 9

Eriksson et al. 2012

• 10 non-English languages
• Girls produced more word types
• Differences varied by language

Question 10

SES differences in language development study

Name
Date
Method
Results

Answer 10

Fernald et al. 2012

• Low vs High SES families
• CDI
• Higher SES children performed better

Question 11

Birth order differences in language development study

Name
Date
Method
Results

Answer 11

Laing and Bergelson prep c

• CDI forms
• Infants grouped by sibling numbers
• Infants with 2 or more siblings were slower

Question 12

The Word Gap

Answer 12

• Low SES children hear 30 million less words by age 3 (Hart and Risley 2003)
• Vocab at age 3 is predicator of vocab age 8 (Head et al. 2016)

Question 13

Learning words and sounds key points

Answer 13

• Infants transition organically from babble to words
• First words shaped by babble and other factors
• Analysis bias towards white, middle class Western infants