week 4 - language acquisition Flashcards
What is the main transformation that occurs in children between birth and 5 years of age regarding language?
Children transform into linguistically competent individuals who have mastered the basic structure of their native language
What two main processes are involved in acquiring a language?
- comprehending what others communicate
- producing language
What are the four main areas of language competence?
- phonology
- semantics
- syntax
- pragmatics
Define phonology
Phonology is learning the sounds and combinations of sounds used in the native language
Provide an example of how phonemes can vary between languages
In English, ‘l’ and ‘r’ are separate phonemes, while in Japanese they are a single phoneme
Define semantics
Semantics is learning the meanings encoded in words and sentences, including how utterances refer to objects, people, and events. It also includes the words we know, called the lexicon
What preferences do infants show in relation to language even before their first productions?
Infants show a preference for their mother’s voice and can discriminate between familiar and unfamiliar languages, preferring the familiar one
What happens to infants’ ability to discriminate between accents over time?
Infants initially discriminate between different accents, but later they are able to ignore these differences
Think perceptual narrowing
How does infants’ perception of speech sounds change as they get older?
- Infants are born able to distinguish speech sounds from all the world’s languages, but with experience, they focus on the sounds of their native language.
- This leads to enhanced processing of their native language and a reduced ability to distinguish sounds of foreign languages, which is known as perceptual narrowing
What is the challenge of word segmentation?
Word segmentation is the challenge children face in picking words out of the continuous speech stream and figuring out which sounds to put together to form a word
- how do they figure out which sounds to put together to form a word?
- most word boundaries not marked by pauses
- words do not typically appear in isolation
What is statistical learning?
Statistical learning is the ability to perceive and track regularities (patterns) in language. This mechanism helps infants identify potential words in speech
What did the Saffran et al. (1996) study demonstrate about infants and statistical learning?
The study showed that 8-month-old infants are sensitive to the statistical regularities of speech sounds, listening longer to non-words than to familiar “words” from a made-up language
- had a novelty preference for non words
At what age to children typically comprehend their own name?
around 4.5 months
When do children typically start to comprehend their first nouns?
around 6 months, typically common objects, body parts, and people
When do children start to comprehend verbs?
between 10 and 13 months
think reading
What is the importance of social experience on language skills? (Reese, 2019)
The amount of time caregivers read to 2-year-olds is positively related to their language skills at 4 years
Around what age do children typically say their first words?
around 10 to 15 months
What are the median vocabulary sizes at 16, 23, and 30 months?
- 16 months: 55 words
- 23 months: 225 words
- 30 months: 573 words
What is the median vocabulary size of a six year old?
a 6 year old knows around 6000 words and can comprehend approx 14,000
How is the comprehension of word meaning tested in the intermodal preferential looking paradigm (IPLP)?
In IPLP, two images are presented, and when a child hears a word matching one of the images, they will look longer at the image that matches
What is a “vocabulary spurt” and when does it typically occur?
A vocabulary spurt is an acceleration in the rate of growth of productive vocabulary that occurs around 18 months, adding 8-24 new words to their vocabulary each week
What types of words do infants tend to learn first during the vocabulary spurt?
- objects (especially those they can manipulate)
- relational words (referring to the state/location of objects)
- verbs
What is “fast mapping” in word learning?
fast mapping is making an initial, quick guess about a new word’s meaning, which is then refined with more input. learning by exclusion
Define underextension
underextension is when children use a word for an overly narrow class of referents, such as using “truck” only for a toy truck
- they havent yet generalised the word to all trucks
- earlier in development
Define overextension
overextention is when children use a word for an overly broad class of referents such as calling all men “dad”
- later in development
How do cognitive biases guide children’s acquisition of meaning?
assumptions or cognitive biases guide children’s acquisition of word meanings - also known as lexical constraints
What is the Whole Object Assumption?
the whole object assumption is the idea that a new word refers to a whole object, rather than a part of it
What is the Mutual Exclusivity Assumption?
the mutual exclusivity assumption is the idea that a new word’s meaning does not overlap with the meaning of a known word (can overcome whole-object assumption)
- e.g. known = cup, handle = some part of the cup
Nurture
What does the empiricist view argue about the nature of cognitive development?
- believes that knowledge is gained through experience
- perceptual abilities, concepts are learned
- there are no innate structures
- believe children are blank slates, with similar mental processes to adults, but less experience of the world, so less knowledge
What does the nativist view argue about the nature of cognitive development?
- knowledge and the ability to perceive are present at birth and innately “programmed” to unfold via maturation
- believes children are little adults: norn with knowledge structures that unfold via maturation
What does empiricism propose about language learning? (Skinner, 1957) (Saffron et al., 1996)
- language is learned through exposure and processes like association, imitation, and reinforcement and statistical learning, driven by domain-general perceptual and cognitive processes
- e.g. adult holds bottle and says “bottle”, creates association, child imitates word
What does Nativism propose about language development?
- Nativism suggests that infants are born with an innate capacity to acquire language
- Chomsky (1959) says language learning is not rquired, children have cognitive biases for word learning
-nativism proposes an innate language acquisition device (LAD) in the brain, meaning humans are born with a specific innate component in the brain for language
what is “poverty of stimulus” and how does it relate to the nativist view of language development?
- poverty of stimulus: refers to the idea that te speech children hear is unclear, contains errors, and lacks sufficient information for them to learn grammar, which supports the nativist view of innate language capacity
- children make predictable grammatical error which would not be predicted by learning theory as adults do not make them
What is the interactivist view of language acquisition?
proposes that children are biologically prepared to acquire language through experience
How is language learning a social process?
learning language requires children to be part of a community where people interact and talk to eachother.
- amound of Infant directed speech (IDS) heard is related to later language skills
- social cues and a responsive social partner are important for word learning
Is Infant directed speech (IDS) universal?
Yes, IDS is produced spontaneously and consistently across languages and cultures
- 1615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed speech produced by 410 people in 21 urban, rural, and small-scale societies
- IDS shares common acoustic features across cultures
- Played recordings of IDS or ADS to 51,065 people from 187 countries, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed
- Cross-cultural recognition of IDS
What is Infant directed speech (IDS)?
The characteristic way in which adults modify their speech when addressing young children
- exaggerated intonation, higher pitch, elongated vowel sounds (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987)
What are some of the developmental benefits of IDS?
- IDS draws childrens attention to speech (Fernald & Kuhl, 1987)
- emphasises prosodic cues to facilitate speech segmentation
- makes speech sounds easier to distinguish and learn (Kuhl et al.m 1997)
Explain the study measuring amount of speech directed to infants in low-SES Spanish speaking families
- all day recordings of 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 and more efficient basic language processing at 24 months
- speech not directed at infants unrelated to child outcomes
What is social contingency and how does it influence word learning?
social contingency is a reciprocal exchange between two people (e.g. adult and child)
- 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
What is a simultaneous bilingual?
a child who learns two languages roughly from birth
What is a sequential bilingual?
a child who learns a second language after they have already learnt a first
Does language developemnt of children learning 2 languages differ from that of children only exposed to 1?
when total vocabulary for both languages is considered, bilingual and monolingual vocab growth rates match, though growth in each language is slower
