week 4

Question 1

Language acquisition

Answer 1

Between birth and 5 years of age, children transform into linguistically competent individuals who have mastered the basic structure of their native language

Question 2

The Process of Language Acquisition

Answer 2

Acquiring a language involves both comprehending what other people communicate to you and producing language of your own
Infants know a great deal about language long before their first linguistic productions

Question 3

Language comprehension

Answer 3

Understanding speech sounds, words and sentences produced by others

Question 4

Language production

Answer 4

Articulating sounds and words; combining words into sentences that others can understand

Question 5

areas of language

Answer 5

Phonology: learning the sound and combinations of sound used in native language
Semantics: learning the meaning encoded in word/sentences
Syntax: learning the rule about how words can be produced
Pragmatics: learning how language is used in different context

Question 6

Phonological development

Answer 6

Learning the sounds and combinations of sounds that constitute words in your language
Infants are born able to perceive and distinguish speech sounds from all the world’s languages
With experience, the zero in on the sounds of their native language
Over time, they develop enhanced processing of their native language, and reduced ability to distinguish sounds of foreign languages
This is an example of perceptual narrowing

Question 7

The challenge of word segmentation

Answer 7

One of the earliest linguistic challenges children face is segmenting the speech stream

Question 8

Statistical learning

Answer 8

Ability to perceive and track regularities (patterns) in language

Allows infants to identify candidate words in speech streams

Powerful, domain-general mechanism (i.e., not specific to language learning)

Question 9

Statistical learning: Saffran et al. (1996)

Answer 9

8 month old infants were familiarized to 2 minutes of this artificial language
Some speech sounds always occurred next to each other (“ki-bu”; others rarely/never did (e.g, “ti-ku”)
Then presented infants with familiar “words” (ki-bu) or non-words (ti-ku)
Infants listened longer to nonwords than words, showing a novelty preference for these new nonwords
Suggests that 8 month olds were sensitive to the statistical regularities with which speech sounds co-occurred

Question 10

semantic Development

Answer 10

Comprehension:
Around 4.5 months: own name
Around 6 months: first nouns (common objects, body parts, people)
10-13 months: verbs

Production:
- First words around 10 to 15 months

• Large individual differences. Median vocabulary size:

        16 months:	produce 55 words
        23 months:	produce 225 words
        30 months:	produce 573 words
        6 years:	produce 6000 words

  By 6 years, comprehend approx. 14,000 words

Question 11

Comprehension

Answer 11

Associating words with correct person/object/action signals true understanding of word’s meaning
2 images presented side-by side

Hear word/phrase that matches one of the images

Comprehension  look longer at image that matches word

Question 12

Production

Answer 12

Vocabulary spurt around 18 months
rate of growth of productive vocabulary accelerates
add 8-24 new words per week
Objects – especially things infants can manipulate
Relational words (refer to state/location of objects – e.g., under, here)
Verbs – conceptually more difficult – refer to relations between objects/people (e.g., bump)
Emotions/internal states – unobservable – require more advanced cognitive abilities (e.g., feel, sad)

Question 13

How do children map meanings of words

Answer 13

Based on the input, essentially an infinite number of hypotheses about word meaning = UNDERSPECIFICATION

Question 14

Fast Mapping

Answer 14

One solution to underspecification of word meanings
Make an initial ‘fast mapping’ between new word and likely meaning
Modify this guess as they receive further input
Learning by exclusion

Question 15

Under- and overextensions

Answer 15

Underextension
Children map words to an overly narrow class of referent
E.g., use truck only for a toy truck
Haven’t yet generalised the word to all ducks
(earlier in development)
Overextension
Overgeneralise words to overly broad class of referents
E.g., daddy for all men

(later in development)

Question 16

Cognitive Biases

Answer 16

A number of assumptions or cognitive biases guide children’s acquisitions of word meanings – also known as lexical constraints
Whole object assumption
New word refers to whole object, rather than part of it
Mutual Exclusivity assumption
New word meaning does not overlap with known word (can overcome whole-object assumption)

Question 17

Nature vs nurture

Answer 17

Empiricism (nurture)
Knowledge is gained through experience
Perceptual abilities, concepts are learned
There are no innate structures
Nativism (nature)
Knowledge, ability to perceive, concepts are present at birth
Innately ‘programmed’ to unfold via maturation

Question 18

Empiricism

Answer 18

Language is learned/derived via exposure e.g. Skinner (1957), Saffran et al. (1996)
Learning process driven by domain-general perceptual and cognitive processes
association, imitation, reinforcement
statistical learning – word segmentation

Question 19

Nativism

Answer 19

Infants are born with the capacity to acquire language (learning is not required) e.g. Chomsky (1959); cognitive biases for word learning
Innate language acquisition device (LAD): humans are born with a specific innate component in the brain for language
Poverty of the Stimulus: The speech children hear is unclear/contains errors, e.g. hesitations, slips of the tongue and contains insufficient information for them to be able to learn the grammar
Children make predictable grammatical errors would not be predicted by learning theory as adults do not make them

Question 20

Theories of language acquisition

Answer 20

Interactivist view – biologically prepared to acquire language through experience
Learning language is social!
Requires children to be part of a community in which people interact and talk with each other

Question 21

Infant Directed speech

Answer 21

Characteristic way in which adults modify their speech when addressing young children

Exaggerated intonation, higher pitch, elongated vowel sounds (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987)

Produced spontaneously and consistently across languages and cultures (Kuhl et al., 1997)

Analogous behaviour observed in deaf mothers using sign-language (Masataka, 1992)

Question 22

Benefits of infant directed speech

Answer 22

Measured amount of speech directed to infants in low-SES Spanish-speaking families
All-day recordings to parent-infant interactions in the home
29 infants at 19 months; language skills tested at 24 months
Large variation in amount of IDS between families

Children who heard more IDS at 19 months had larger expressive vocabularies & more efficient basic language processing at 24 months

Speech not directed at infant unrelated to child outcomes

Question 23

Social Contingency

Answer 23

Role of social contingency in word learning
38 mother-child dyads; children = 2 years
Mothers taught children 2 novel words in a within-participants design
Uninterrupted teaching
Teaching interrupted by mobile call
Children heard novel word the same number of times in each condition
Children learned the novel words in uninterrupted teaching condition only
Interruptions to socially contingent interactions disrupt learning

Question 24

Multilingual contexts

Answer 24

Multilinguals > Monolinguals – more than half the world’s population is bilingual
2/3 of children in the world are raised as bilingual
Immigration – e.g., to UK, US
Multi-ethnic societies – e.g., Singapore: Chinese, Malay, Tamil; English as common 2nd language

Simultaneous bilinguals (roughly from birth)
Parent speaks language different from community
Parents speak two different languages
Two language used by community

Sequential bilinguals (L1 then L2)
Changing family circumstances
New language when entering school

Question 25

Bilingual vocabulary growth

Answer 25

Does the language development of children learning 2 languages differ from that of children exposed to just 1 language?
When total vocabulary for both languages is considered, BL and ML vocab growth rates match, though growth in each language is slower