Week 7

Question 1

What is the psychology of language?

Answer 1

• Concerned with the neurological element of language
  
  • Draws on fields of psychology and linguistics
  • Seeks to understand the psychological and neurobiological processes that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language

Question 2

Why do SP need to know the psychology of language?

Answer 2

• To understand how language works requires reference to neurobiological mechanisms or what is happening in the brain
  Allows us to make sense of the difficulties our clients may be experiencing and develop effective and appropriate interventions and assessments

Question 3

Overview of language development:

Answer 3

• First word between 10-18 months
  
  • Able to comprehend sentence level grammar by 12 months
  • First multi-word utterances between 14-245 months and sentences by age 3
  • Perspective taking and coherent discourse by age 4-7
    Metalinguistics skills by school age

Question 4

Language acquisition: Subsystems of language

Answer 4

• Pragmatics: Meaning in context of discourse
  
  • Semantics: Literal meaning of phrases and sentences
  • Syntax: Phrases and sentences
  • Morphology: Words
  • Phonology: Phonemes
    Phonetics: Speech sounds

Question 5

Phonetics and Phonology:

Answer 5

• If children want to say a word with difficult sounds, they substitute it for a simpler sound
  
  • These substitutions are rule-governed ; for example, children tend to reduce consonant clusters (snake-nake) removal of final consonants (cat-ca) or reduplicate syllables (banana-nana)
  • Children are mostly unaware of the differences between their speech and the adult version

Question 6

What can children do from birth?

Answer 6

• Born with the ability to discriminate speech sounds and speech form non-speech
  
  • Able to identify mothers voice from other
  • Can differentiate manner and place of articulation
    Can discriminate speech sounds language across the world, around 8-10 months they lose this ability and only tune into speech sounds in native culture

Question 7

Languages and psycholinguistics:

Answer 7

• Not exposed- forget speech sounds
  
  • Reasons why people in other cultures find it hard to produce speech sounds as they are not in their own language
    In most languages, mama and dada end with a vowel and use labiodental, alveolar stops or dentals, nasal sounds

Question 8

Complex child language:

Answer 8

• Once children have these open syllable sounds, they start to add complexity in other places and manners of articulation and produce closed syllables (ends with a consonant)
  
  • Children use substitutions harder sounds (velars are later developing sounds) for others e.g. dat instead of cat. Rule governed so they do consistent patterns of errors e.g. reduce consonant clusters e.g. spoon such as poon or drop a consonant
  • Early ages are often open syllables
  • Children may think they say something when they don’t, but they may have not developed the phonological system of language yet
    Mastering full phonology takes 6 years or we can expect sound error In children up to 6 years of age

Question 9

Grammar (morphology and syntax): First words

Answer 9

• Children make connections between sounds and meaning at approx. age 1
  
  • Early words denote meaning and references something in the immediate environment (e.g. nana, cat)
  • Learn sounds denote meaning
    Holophrasic
  • Speak in one word utterances to convey a sentence level of meaning
    displaced words e.g. biccy (not in the here and now) age 1+ to reference things that are not here and now
    Need adults to interpret meaning

Question 10

Morphology and Syntax: 2+ words

Answer 10

• Children start to use 2-word utterances at approx. age 2
  
  • Telegraphic speech: children omit functional words and morphemes (e.g. determiners, auxiliary verbs, tense)
  • Children experience explosion of language between 2.5-3.5 years. They first begin to add additional content words
  • Rate of acquisition vary from children but often occur in a similar sequence/order of syntactic skills

Question 11

Meaning: Children language acquisition

Answer 11

• Acquisition of word meanings involve the ongoing refinement of semantic knowledge
  
  • When learning words, children often overextend a words meaning e.g. using circle to refer to all round objects
  • Early acquisition of meaning also involves underextending a words meaning e.g. circle only refers to the moon
  • Children use approximately 50 words within the first 6 months of speaking which grows to 200 words in the next 6 months
  • Children then begin to add thousands of words per year, and typically have a vocabulary size of 30,000 words by teenage years
  • Children understand more words than they use, especially in the early years (receptive-expressive gap)
  • After a few times hearing a word they can pick it up
  • Process involves overextension in a wider range of context
  • Underextend: Using circle only to a ball
    Children understand 4x the amount of words they are using

Question 12

Nativist theory and universal grammar:

Answer 12

• Noam Chomsky is the leading theorist associated with Nativist theory
  
  • Language and grammar is too complex and children learn language and grammar with such pace and ease, that the human brain must have specific capacity for grammar and learning theory
  • Theory of universal grammar: All languages share universal grammar (e.g. the same basic elements of nouns, verbs and other word classes)

Question 13

Behavioralist theory:

Answer 13

• Children acquire language similarly to other learnt skills: They acquire through environmental influence
  
  • There is no specific brain mechanism responsible for language, but rather language learning occurs via more general cognitive processes and structures
  • Caregivers provide reinforcements (smile. Hug) creating a stimuli-response model
  • Language is acquires through a more gradual developmental process; language knowledge is refined and developed over time
  • Associated with American psychologist and behavioralist BF skinner

Question 14

What is the Wug test:

Answer 14

• Illustrate grammar
  
  • Show children apply how rules of the language to nonsense words they have never seen before
    e.g. she said this is a wug, what is it ? The child answer wug and if they were shown two wugs they would add a plural ‘s’ to show that they knew there were two of the object they had never seen before

Question 15

How long does it take to master phonology?

Answer 15

Mastering the full phonology of English takes typically developing children about 6 years. In other words, we expect phonological errors until at 6

Question 16

Production of language

Answer 16

• Production of language lags use of language: can say them before they can use them e.g. images showing a child a dog, they can comprehend the sentence before they can say it themselves

Question 17

Issues with Behavioralist theory on language

Answer 17

• Issues: Fails to explain how children can produce entirely novel sentences that aren’t imply parroted-back versions of adult talk
  
  • Reject idea we are born with a brain segment for language learning
  • e.g. associating by pointing and the parent saying juice, and the parent reinforcing the behaviour
  • If a child says mum they may clap and reinforce them to do it again

Question 18

The poverty of the stimulus hypothesis and language acquisition device

Answer 18

• The poverty of the stimulus hypothesis: That children would be unable to learn language as quickly as they do, given the absence of explicit instruction
  
  • Language acquisition device: Biological capacities of human brain for language and grammar, separate to general intelligence
    Genie was deprived of human interaction for the first decade of their life and was unable to use basic language

Question 19

What is Holophrasic

Answer 19

Meaning of sentence-equivalent is conveyed through just one word (e.g. nana to indicate I want a banana on the table)

Question 20

What occurs at age 3

Answer 20

• Once longer utterances emerge, typically by approx. age 3, children begin to use functional words and inflectional morphemes signifying the beginnings of more complex sentences (syntactic structures) e.g. ing, plurals, tense
  
  • Minimal use of morphemes
  • Use additional content words, build length of utterance age 3
  • Ing is and plural s is usually first
  • Use compound sentences

Question 21

Speech timeline:

Answer 21

Babbling: 7 Months
One word (holophrasic): 1-1.5
Two word stage: 1.5-2 years
Telegraphic: 2-2.5 years
The after telegraphic stage: 2.6 years +
Formalized language learning: 5+

Question 22

Stages of morphological development:

Answer 22

• Stages of morphological development
• 2. 28-36 months: 2.25 MLU: Progressive ing verbs, prepositions ‘in and on’, ‘s’ plurals
• 3. 36-42 months: 2.75 MLU: Irregular past tense, possessive ‘s’, copula
• 4. 40-46 months: 3.5 MLU: Articles, regular past tense, third person singular
• 5. 42-52+ Months: 4 MLU: Third person singular, auxiliary, contractible copula, contractible auxiliary

Question 23

Nativist theory:

Answer 23

• Nativist theory: Children are born with an instinct or drive for language learning as long as they grow in a normal environment, they will still devise a system of verbal communication. Language acquisition device (LAD) must be located somewhere in the brain, serving to encode and understand grammatical structure and it contains knowledge of universal grammar