What's required for language (CH 6) Flashcards
What do we use symbols for?
- Represent our thoughts, feelings & knowledge
- To communicate our thoughts feelings & knowledge to other people
When is the age when kids master their native language?
-5 years old
What 2 things does language require?
- Comprehension (Understanding what others say)
- Production (Actually speaking/ communicating)
What are Phonemes?
-Units of sound in speech so if a change of phoneme changes the meaning of a word
(rake & lake= 1 phoneme)
What are the steps in language learning?
- Phonological Development
- Semantic development
- Syntactic development
- Pragmatic development
What is Phonological Development?
- 1st step in language learning
- The mastery of sound system in their language
What are Morphemes?
-The smallest units of meaning
-Morphemes alone or in a combo constitute words
(dog=1 dog(s)=2 bc of the added “s”)
-Building blocks of language
What is Semantic Development?
- 2nd step of language learning
- Learning the system for expressing meaning in a language, including words & morphemes
What is Syntax?
-Permissible combinations of words from different categories
What is Syntactic Development?
- 3rd step of language learning
- Entails learning how words and morphemes are combined
What is Pragmatic Development?
- 4th step in language learning
- Acquiring an understanding of how language is typically used
What is CRUCIAL for language development?
-Hearing or seeing the language
What are the characteristics of language?
- Species-Specific= only humans acquire language over normal course of development
- Species-Universal= achieved by typically developing infants across the globe
Why are animals that are taught words not on the same levels as children?
- The linguistic achievements of animals come after a great deal of concentrated human effort, they also communicate via symbols= little syntactic structure
- Whereas children master the rudiments of their language w/ little explicit teaching
What does language processing involve?
- Primarily left hemisphere specialization
- Left hemisphere auditory cortex is tuned to detect small differences in timing
When does Left-Hemisphere specialization emerge?
- Very early in life
- Newborns & 3 month olds show greater activity in left hemisphere when exposed to normal speech
When would the Right-Hemisphere become involved in language?
- In the detection of pitch in speech
- Auditory Cortex in right hemisphere is tuned to detecting small differences in pitch
What and when is the Critical Period for Language?
- Its the time period where languages are learned easily
- The time ends between ages 5 to puberty
- Neural circuitry supporting language learning operates differently & better during the early years
Why are kids better than adults at learning a new language?
- Their perceptual & memory limitations cause them to extract & store smaller chunks of the language
- Because crucial building blocks of language are small, their minds can easily facilitate the task of analyzing & learning language
How are infant’s auditory preferences fine-tuned?
-Through experience with the human language during their earliest months
What is Infant-Directed Speech? (IDS)
- AKA motherese
- Distinctive mode of speech when talking to infants
- NOT UNIVERSAL (although extremely common)
What are the 3 characteristics of Infant-Directed Speech?
- Emotional tone= filled w/ affection
- Exaggeration=Slower & higher pitched, swoop from high to low pitches
- Facial Expressions
Why is Infant-Directed Speech important?
- Variation of pitch patterns help convey message to baby (sharp pitch= mad parent)
- Aids in language development bc it draws baby’s attention to speech itself= they can learn & recognize words better
What do babies come into this world equipped with for acquiring language?
- Human brain
- Human environment
What is Propsody?
- The characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns, etc with which language is spoken
- Preference starts in mother’s womb
What is Categorical Perception?
-Perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories
When do infants home in onto their native speech sounds?
- Last months of their 1st year= by those 12 months, they have lost the ability to percieve other speech sounds that aren’t part of their native language
- By 8 months infants begin to specialize in their discrimmination of of speech sounds= becoming more sensitive to the sounds of their native language
What is Word Segmentation?
-Process of discovering where words end & begin in speech
When does the process of Word Segmentation begin?
-during the 2nd half of their 1st year
How do infants find words in pause-free speech?
- Pick up regularities in their native language that helps them to find word boundries
- By use of Distributional Properties= fish out words in the passing streams of speech
What is Distributional Properties?
-Phenomenon that in any language, certain sounds are more likley to appear in others
At what age can infants pick out their own name?
- As young as 4.5 months bc its repeated to them very often
- Greater liklihood of learning a new word if it comes after their name
When do infants show early signs of communication efforts?
- 6 to 8 weeks of age
- They begin to produce drawn out vowel sounds (oooohhh, aahhh)
- Switch from low grunts to high-pitched cries, soft murmurs, loud shouts
- Click, smack, blow raspberries= gaining control over their vocalizations
When do babies begin to babble?
-From 6-10 months w/ 7 months being the average
What is Babbling?
- Producing syllables made up of a consonant followed by a vowel
- Infants babble a fairly limited set of sounds, some of which are not part of their native language
Whats the difference between babbling infants who are deaf & those that are not?
- Deaf infants generally produce the same vocalizations of hearing infants until 5-6 months which is when their vocal babbling occurs very late & quite limited
- Deaf infants exposed to ASL babble manually
What are the steps/milestones of Language Production?
- Babbling
- Uttering recognizable words
- Putting words together to form sentences
What is the first step of communicative competence?
-Turn-taking= being able to alternate between speaking & listening
What is the first step for infants when acquiring the meanings of words?
-Reference= start to associate words with their meanings
When do infants begin to associate words with their referents?
-At around 6 months bc when they say mommy or daddy, they look to the appropiate person
When do infants being to produce words?
-Between 10-15 months of age
What is Productive Vocabulary?
-Words a child is able to say
How to infants make it easier on themselves when trying to say a word?
- Leaving out the harder bits
- Substituting harder to pronounce words for easier to pronounce ones
- Reordering parts of the word so that an easy sound is put in the beginning
- Idiosyncratic “Cagoshin”
What to do kids talk about when they start talking?
- Naming their family members (including pets)
- Naming personally important objects
- Frequent events & routines
- They use important modifiers (hot, mine)
When do kids hit the vocabulary spurt?
-Between 18 to 25 months of age
What is the Holophrastic Period?
- Phase when infants say the words in their small productive vocabulary only one word at a time
- Expressing whole idea/ “whole phrase” with a single word (drink to request a glass of juice)
What is Overextension?
- The use of a given word in broader context than is appropriate (dog for any 4 legged animal)
- Represent effort to communicate NOT lack of knowledge
When do infants acquire a productive vocabulary?
- At 18 months
- Vocabulary consists of 50 words or so
- This is when vocab learning accelerates (vocabulary spurt)
How else do adults facilitate new word learning?
- Highlighting the new word by saying it slowly, repeating them, placing them at the end of sentances
- Naming games
- Choosing effective moments to provide new words for their children (object is in visual field)
- Maintaining spatial consistency w/ objects they are labeling (object always in same place when labeled)
How can early word learning be influenced?
-By the contexts in which the words are used (new words in distcinct context is produced earlier than words that can be used in a variety of contexts)
How can kids contribute to their word learning?
- Fast mapping
- Guided by assumptions
- Exploit pragmatic cues
- Taking cues from the linguistic context in which the words are used
- 2 to 3 year olds use grammatical category of novel words
What is Fast Mapping?
- Process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of a familiar & the unfamilar word (contrasting between red tray & chromium tray)
- Also used by toddlers to learn facts about objects
What is Mutual Exclusivity?
-The expectation that a given entity will only have one name
What is Whole-Object Assumption?
-Expectation that a novel word refers to whole object rather than a part/property/action of the object
What are Pragmatic Cues?
-Aspect of the social context used for word learning
(an adult’s focus of attention as a cue for word meaning)
-Intentionality
How are interpretations of novel words applied to objects?
- Application is guided by the object’s shape= good cue for category membership= Extending a novel noun to objects of the same shape
- Correspondance between the words the child hears & the objects that the child sees in the world= cross-situational word learning
- Syntactic Bootstrapping
What is Syntactic Bootstrapping?
-Strategy of using grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning
At what age to kids being to combine words into simple sentences?
- End of their 2nd year
- BUT they know a lot about word combination before they produce any words
How are first sentences structured?
-They’re 2 word combinations (more juice)
What is Telegraphic Speech?
- Refers to 2 word combinations bc essential elements are missing (like a telegraph)
- Lacks function words (a, the), auxillary verbs (it,was, will), word endings (plurals)
What is Overregularization?
- Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of the word as if they’re regular (mans goed)
- Parents ignore this bc they’re more likely to correct factual errors
What is Private Speech?
- Children talking to themselves
- Is a strategy to organize their actions
What are Collective Monologues?
- When young children talk to their peers
- Even when they are taking turns, they contribute egocentric point of view
When do kids start talking about the past?
- At around 3 years old= occasional brief references to the past
- But they start producing narratives at 5 years old
What are Narratives?
-Descriptions of past events that have the basic structure of a story
How do parents help their kids produce a stronger narrative?
-Via Scaffolding= asking them elaborative questions so that their kids will think about the event more
What is Pragmatic Development?
- Allows children to understand how language is used to communicate
- Develops over the course of their preschool years facilitating communication w/ peers & adults= learning to take perspective of their conversational partner
What is the Development of conversational perspective-taking abilities related to?
- Children’s level of executive function
- As kids are more able to control their tendency to assume their own perspective= easier for them to take perspective of conversational partner
What else influences their ability to take the other person’s perspective?
- Children’s own experience with language
- Living in diverse linguistic environment may attune kids to the challenges of communication= taking the other person’s perspective into account
What are the effects of kids more reflexive language skills?
- Increasing appreciation of multiple meaning of words
- Ability to learn the meaning of new words simply by hearing them defined= helps vocabulary increase
How many words does an average 6-year old know?
-10,000 words!
What do behaviorists believe about language development?
- Development is a function of learning through reinforcement & punishment of overt behavior
- Parents used same techniques that were used to train animals
What is Generativity?
-Understanding & producing sentences that we’ve never heard before
What is Universal Grammar?
- Proposed by Chomsky
- It is a hard-wired set of principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages
- Based on the idea that the underlying structures of the world’s languages are fundamentally similar
What are the 2 key dimensions to develop linguistic theories?
- The degree to which these explanations lie within the child (nature) vs. the environment (nurture)
- The contributions of the child
What principles of linguistic development are similar across the globe?
- Similarities in language structure
- Similarities in children’s environments
How do children discover the underlying regularities in language?
-By playing close attention to the multitude of clues available in the language they speak,hear, Social context in which the language is used , Intentions of the speaker
How does the Nativists view language development?
-Cognitive abilities that support language development are specific to language
What is the Modularity Hypothesis?
- Idea that the human brain contains an innate, self contained language module that is SEPARATE from other aspects of cognitive functioning
- Also applied to variety of other functions= spatial skills, social understanding, perception
What is the alternative view of learning mechanisms?
-Innate Learning mechanisms underlying language development are general
How does Distributional Learning Mechanisms help infants?
-Helps them track sequences of musical notes, visual shapes, human actions
What is Connectionism?
- Type of information-processing approach that emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units
- Successful at modeling specific aspects of language development
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