week 4- INPUT EFFECTS THE IMPORTANCE OF WORDS Flashcards
what does salient mean
noticeable, stands out
What might impact the salience of speech?
Repetition: words/sounds/constructions that are most frequent are learned earlier
Stress: words/syllables/constructions that are stressed are learned earlier
Pitch: words produced with a higher pitch or wider pitch range are learned earlier
Isolation: words produced in isolation are learned earlier
Hyperarticulation- exaggerating phonological features to make them more distinct.
Which features of IDS do infants prefer?
Fernald & Kuhl (1987)
Three experiments designed to test this:
1) Fundamental frequency (perceived pitch) of IDS vs. ADS
2) Amplitude of IDS vs. ADS
3) Duration of IDS vs. ADS
Synthesised speech was used to omit all lexical content
IDS and ADS samples were created for each condition
20 American 4-month-olds were tested using a HPP design
ADS: lower pitch, narrower pitch range
IDS: higher pitch, wider pitch range
Infants attended longer to IDS sample in fundamental frequency trial
how does IDS supports word segmentation
Thiessen, Hill & Saffran, 2010
40 infants age 0;6-0;7, half participated in IDS condition, half in ADS condition
In the familiarization phase, infants heard an artificial language played in either IDS or ADS
All infants were tested on the same stimuli using HPP:
◦ Part-words heard in familiarization
◦ Full-words heard in familiarization
- Infants in the IDS condition attended longer to the stimuli overall
- Infants in the IDS condition attended longer to the whole words → this suggests that they segmented the artificial language accurately
- Infants in the ADS condition showed no difference → at 6-7 months, IDS might be particularly important in word learning and segmentation
what did Ma et al discover about how IDS supports word learning?
48 infants age 1;9
Trained on novel word-novel object pairs, presented in IDS and ADS
Tested using the preferential looking paradigm (eye tracking): how long did they attend to the target object?
16 infants age 2;3 tested on ADS speech only
- Presented with two objects, one that they were familiar with and one that was not common.
- They know what a spoon is, so when presented with a ‘blick’ they should look towards the other object.
Younger infants learned the words in the IDS condition only
Older infants learned words in ADS condition
discuss the IDS feedback loop
mother–IDS–infant–response–mother…
• IDS is important in language development
• But for some populations it is less relevant; some atypically developing infants are not as sensitive to acoustic features of the speech stream
- Deaf children: no use of IDS
- Children with autism: not as sensitive to input
- Dyslexic children: can’t receive full acoustic info
• Infants mediate caregiver IDS via a ‘feedback loop’
- Caregivers can recalibrate to create a learning environment that is tailored to that individual
• Infants who are not sensitive to IDS do not send positive feedback to their mothers
→ mothers do not exaggerate their speech in the same way.
discuss a study based around Cultural Interpretations
Cristia et al., 2017
Speech to forager-farmer children in Belize (forager community):
Tsimane villagers in Bolivia recorded in parent-child interactions
Comparisons across children aged between 0 and 11 years
Some cultures e.g.Tzeltal Mayan,do not use typical features of IDS and their children still learn to speak
Some families opt to avoid using ‘babytalk’ and their children still learn to speak
IDS is not a prerequisite to language use
It supports learning, and may be beneficial to some children in some contexts
Added benefits of bonding supported by maternal sensitivity
what are some language specific effects?
→ Finnish infants’ early words contain geminates (long consonants) while English infants’ (usually) don’t.
→ Polish infants produce more complex clusters
→ By the 25-word-point, French, English and Welsh infants have acquired language-specific stress patterns
what does truncate mean
to cut short, to chop off a syllable
How does the ambient language affect children’s speech errors?
Infants frequently truncate early polysyllables
Language-specific trends can be observed in line with the stress pattern of the ambient language
what is the WEIRD problem?
Populations from societies that are: • Western • Educated • Industrialized • Rich • Democratic
which types of children learn quicker than others?
◦ Males vs. females
◦ Low SES vs. high SES (SES= social economic status)
◦ African American infants vs. white American infants
◦ North American vs. Mayan or Asian infants
◦ Infants of older vs. younger mothers
◦ First-born vs. later-born infants
◦ Infants of depressed mothers
discuss a study around Variability in Lexical Development
Eriksson et al., (2012)
• 13,783 European children from 10 non-English-speaking countries
• Data taken from CDIs
• Age 0;8 to 2;6
- Girls produced more word types than boys
- The extent of this difference varied by language
what is CDI
communicative development inventory
discuss a study based around SES differences in language development
Fernald, Marchman & Weisleder, (2012)
• 48 English-learning infants
• Studied longitudinally, from 1;6-2;0
• Low-SES and high-SES families compared
• CDI results used to show productive vocabularies
• Looking-while-listening paradigm used to show language processing
• Higher-SES infants did better in both measures at both time-points
- faster reaction time = faster processing
