Week 9-Language Development 2

Question 1

What is segmentation and how do infants try to resolve this in word learning?

Answer 1

S=learning words from a continuous stream of speech with no gaps
*They use transitional probabilities to know when one word ends and another begins (Saffran, Aslin & Newport, 1996)
– prettybaby, prettydress, prettyflower
– Pri-tee is probably a word
– Tee-bay, tee-dress and tee-flow
probably aren’t

Question 2

How did Saffran, Aslin &
Newport (1996) investigate segmentation in infants?

Answer 2

-Used the Head-Turn Preference Procedure in 8-month-olds
-Infants exposed to continuous stream of syllables for 2 minutes
-Then given choice of whether to
listen to words or non-words
(Experiment 1) or words or part-
words (Experiment 2)

Question 3

What occured in Saffran, Aslin &
Newport’s (1996) first experiment + results?

Answer 3

-Aim:Can infants distinguish
words (e.g., golatu) and non-words
(e.g., lagotu)
*Words=Sequences where 1st syllable (e.g., go) always followed by 2nd syllable (e.g., la) always followed by 3rd syllable (e.g., tu)
-Transitional probabilities=1.00
*Non-words=Sequences where
syllables never followed each other (distorted/messed up version)
–Transitional probabilities=0.00
Results:Infants listened longer too (were more interested in) non-words

Question 4

What occured in Saffran, Aslin &
Newport’s (1996) second experiment + results?

Answer 4

*Aim:Can infants distinguish words (e.g., golatu) and part-words (e.g., latupa)
*Part-words = Sequences where 3rd syllable only followed 2nd syllable 1/3rd of the time (latupa/latuda/latuti)
–Transitional probability=0.33
-Results:Infants listened longer too (were more interested in) part-words

Question 5

What did Saffran, Aslin &
Newport (1996) find overall in their experiment on transitional probabilities/segmentation?

Answer 5

*8-month-olds can discriminate 3-
syllable sequences with high
transitional probabilities (Words=1.00 ) from:
*Sequences they have never heard
before (Non-words = 0)
*Sequences with lower transitional
probabilities (Part-words=0.33)
*Infants can use transitional
probabilities to find words in the
speech stream

Question 6

What did Fló, Brusini et al.
(2019) find how early infants are sensitive to transitional probabilities?

Answer 6

*Used functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to look at this in newborns
*Played newborns 3 mins of a stream of syllables
*Found that newborns showed different patterns of brain response to words and part-words

Question 7

How do infants move beyond transitional probabilities?

Answer 7

*Transitional probabilities are a good way to break into the speech signal
*Dominant stress pattern of English words is TROCHAIC (STRONG-weak, e.g., CAN-dle, DOC-tor)
*Infants soon learn to ignore
transitional probabilities in favour
of language-specific cues (e.g.,
stress)

Question 8

How did Jusczyk, Houston &
Newsome (1999) test trochaic stress pattern in infants?

Answer 8

*Played ‘English-speaking’ 7.5-
month-old infants passages
containing 2-syllable words
*Some words had the trochaic stress pattern typical of English (e.g., CAN-dle) but others had an iambic stress pattern (e.g., Gui-TAR)

Question 9

What did Jusczyk, Houston &
Newsome (1999) find in relation to infants and the trochaic stress pattern?

Answer 9

*Words then presented separately
* Infants listened longer to the words they had heard embedded in the longer passages than to isolated words (e.g., CAN-dle v DOC-tor)
*But only if the target words had the trochaic stress pattern

Question 10

What did Gerken (1994) suggest the trochaic stress pattern could explain?

Answer 10

*It can explain the kind of segmentation errors we see in children’s early speech:
– NA-na for ba-NA-na
– PU-ter for com-PU-ter
– RAFFE for gi-RAFFE

Question 11

When are infants sensitive to language-general/language-specific cues?

Answer 11

L-G(transitional probabilities):from birth
L-S(stress):from 7.5 months

Question 12

How is learning word order rules a challenge for infants?

Answer 12

*SVO in English=Big Bird daxes Cookie Monster
*VSO in Welsh=Daxes Big Bird Cookie Monster
*How do children know who is doing what to whom?
* When do they develop verb-general understanding?
SVO=Subject-Verb-Object

Question 13

Explain Tomasello’s (1992) Verb-Island Hypothesis:learning word order rules

Answer 13

*Use of new verbs started simple regardless of how complicated sentences with old verbs were e.g.,
Mummy cut bread vs Draw
*Travis did not have ‘joined-up’
knowledge of word order but instead had islands of knowledge about how to use and understand particular verbs such as cut
*2-year-olds do not have verb-general knowledge of word order

Question 14

How did Akhtar & Tomasello
(1997) test the verb-island hypothesis?:learning word order rules

Answer 14

*Taught children novel verbs without any info about word order
–This is wugging
*Asked children to act out sentences with novel verb in SVO word order
–Make Big Bird wug Cookie Monster

Question 15

What did Akhtar & Tomasello
(1997) find testing the verb-island hypothesis?:learning word order rules

Answer 15

*Children performed at chance
–Sometimes made Big Bird do the novel action to Cookie Monster
–Sometimes made Cookie Monster do the novel action to Big Bird
*Concluded that children did not have verb-general knowledge of word order

Question 16

How did Gertner, Fisher &
Eisengart (2006) simplify testing verb-general knowledge of word order in 2 year olds?

Answer 16

*Maybe Act-Out test is too
difficult for young children
*They used preferential-looking
technique to measure
looking time to the correct
v the incorrect alternative as a simpler technique

Question 17

What did Gertner, Fisher &
Eisengart (2006) find about knowledge of word order in infants?

Answer 17

*Both 21- and 25-month-olds showed verb-general understanding of word order
*21-month-olds with Boys and Girls
*25-month-olds with Bunnies and Ducks
*Even 21-month-olds know that the first-mentioned Noun/subject (e.g., Boy is the Agent or Do-er of the Action)

Question 18

Toddlers have to learn how to mark for what verbs?

Answer 18

–Agreement (e.g., she play-s)
–Tense (e.g., she play-ed yesterday)

Question 19

What kind of mistakes do children make in verb marking and why? What did Brown (1973) find?

Answer 19

*Looked at early multi-word
speech of 3 children in Boston
*Early speech was ‘Telegraphic’
(only including the most important
words like in a telegram)
*Verb-marking was often absent too e.g., We go to the park yesterday
*Correct use of verb marking develops only gradually
*Adam started using s on verbs at around age 2.5but did not use it
in 90% of obligatory contexts until age 3.5

Question 20

What is Developmental
Language Disorder (DLD)?(previously called Specific language impairment (SLI))

Answer 20

*Defined as a language deficit (1.5+
SDs below the mean) in the absence of any known sensory or cognitive deficits
*Norbury et al. (2016) report
prevalence of around 7.5% (8% boys and 6% girls) in the UK (equivalent to 2 children in
every classroom)

Question 21

What particular language deficit
problem do English-speaking children with DLD tend to have?

Answer 21

verb marking:
*Rice, Wexler & Hershberger
(1998) report significant deficits
in the provision of 3sg –s (3rd singular) and past tense –ed relative to both age-matched and language-matched controls

Question 22

Why do chilren drop endings according to Bloom (1990)?

Answer 22

-They lack the processing capacity to include all they know in their speech
*But in other languages children
make errors where they add the wrong (infinitive) ending:
–German Kaffe trink-en
(Coffee to drink)
–French Poupée dorm-ir
(Dolly to sleep)
–Spanish Niños cant-ar
(Children to sing)

Question 23

What did Freudenthal, Pine,
& Gobet (2010) find on why infants make errors using a computer model called MOSAIC to simulate errors in English, Dutch, German, French and Spanish?

Answer 23

*MOSAIC learns slowly from transcripts of CDS building sentences from the right edge of the utterance (recency effect)
– Mummy likes to drink coffee
– Coffee
– Drink coffee etc.
*Errors because children learn from the right edge of the utterance (recency effect)
*More errors in Dutch and German because infinitives always come at the end (right edge)
*Could not simulate very high rate of errors in English (> Dutch)

Question 24

What did Rasanen, Ambridge
& Pine (2014) find when testing if English-speaking children replace verb forms they don’t know (well) with forms they do?

Answer 24

*See is much more common than sees in English child-directed speech (CDS)
*BUT fits is relatively frequent in English CDS NOT fit
*The more children heard the
–s (e.g. fits) vs bare (fit) form in the input the more often they correctly produced the –s vs bare form themselves

Question 25

What did Rasanen, Ambridge
& Pine (2014) suggest the high error rate in English is due to?

Answer 25

It’s due to learning from the right edge of the utterance AND misuse of most frequent form of verb

Question 26

What did Kueser, Leonard &
Deevy (2018) find on verb making errors in DLD children and a group of language-matched
controlled children?

Answer 26

*Children with DLD are sig. more likely to make errors than younger
language-matched TD children
*Both TD and children with DLD more likely to get –s forms correct if they were more frequent in the input

Question 27

Why do children with DLD make errors for longer?

Answer 27

*Because they have a problem with long-distance dependencies (something early in the sentence predicts something later in the sentence)
*I.e., takes longer to discriminate between contexts in which high and low-frequency forms are required
– The doggie goes woof
– Does the doggie go woof?

Question 28

Learning how to generalise
appropriately: How do infants struggle with past tense over-
generalisations?

Answer 28

*Children learn a “rule” e.g., Add –ed to make past-tense form
*But then they over-generalise this rule to irregular verbs e.g., Santa bringed me lots of presents
*However some irregulars common enough for children to re-learn them from the input
(Bring -> Brought) NOT bleed=bled

Question 29

How do children learn past tense low-frequency irregulars according to Blything, Ambridge
& Lieven (2018)? like bleed=bled

Answer 29

-Children learn low frequency irregulars by analogy with similar-
sounding higher frequency irregulars
-Tested using past tense forms of novel verbs (e.g., screed, blick) from 3-10-year-old children
(The duck/bear/frog/bunny likes to VERB. Look, there he is VERBing.)
-Children more likely to produce irregulars (e.g., screed  scread
vs screed  screaded) when made-up verbs sounded similar to
real, existing irregulars (e.g., readread)

Question 30

True or false: Bowerman (1982) reported similar over-generalisation errors with
sentence structures

Answer 30

True

Question 31

How did Ambridge, Pine,
Rowland & Young (2008) demonstrate that children learn what kind of verbs can and can’t go in certain sentence frames?

Answer 31

*Taught 5-6-year-olds + 9-10-year-olds and adults novel laughing, disappearing and falling verbs (e.g., tam)
*Then got them to rate sentences like “The funny man giggled Bart” and “Bart giggled” on a 5-point scale

Question 32

What did Ambridge et al. 2008 find?

Answer 32

*“The funny man laughed
Homer” rated much worse
than “Homer laughed”
(laugh is high frequency)
*“The funny man giggled
Bart” rated somewhat
worse than “Bart giggled”
(giggle is low frequency)
*“The funny man tammed
Lisa” rated significantly
worse than “Lisa tammed”
*Even 5-6-year-olds knew
there was something wrong
with “The funny man
tammed Lisa” compared to “Lisa tammed”
*Had built a semantic class of
expression verbs and knew that you can’t ‘expression’ someone