Word Learning Flashcards
What is linguistic communication?
It is the language that comes natural to us (oral, written, sign) and is automatic and effortless in first language learning with most children being able to comprehend a word before they can produce it.
What is non-linguistic communication?
Things such as facial expressions and body movements
What is infant/child-directed speech?
Mothers/baby talk, louder voice, slower speech, accentuates boundaries between words and phrases, simpler words, repeat and expand on child’s utterances and recasting.
Why is child-directed speech preferred?
As it tends to attract their attention
What kind of cues/information can you use to segment words from a speech stream?
Pauses between words, stress patterns and transitional probability
Why is pauses between words not the best cue?
Not very reliable, often no pauses in between words but however can be used to segment first and last words in a sentence.
What did Jusczyk find out about stress patterns?
That 7.5 month old infants can segment words using predominant stress patterns of their native language such as kingdom.
Infants that were familiarised with these sort of words listened longer to passages containing these words compared to control passages.
What did Saffran find about stress patterns?
Infants can learn to use a different/new stress pattern in word segmentation.
Trochaic : emphasis on first syllable e.g DIti
Iambic : emphasis on last syllable e.g diTI
What is transitional probability?
The probability of one sound following another e.g in a word
When do one-word utterances tend to appear?
Emerge around 1 year and they tend to be simple words that the infant hears a lot in their everyday life e.g mummy
What is a holophrase in correlation to one word utterances ?
A single word standing in for a larger sentence e.g saying ‘up’ for ‘pick me up’
When does the two-word stage appear?
Emerges around 18 months
How is the two-word stage learned?
By rote (habitual repetition) and it is inflexible.
What is telegraphic speech texting speech?
For example when an infant says ‘man clean car’ meaning that a man is cleaning the car showing how they keep in the most important information and leave out the rest
What do early words usually consist of?
Concrete nouns and basic-level category names
What is fast mapping?
Quickly mapping a novel word to its meaning
When does pointing and gaze occur?
P - before 12 months
G - 15 months
Who was the 30 million word gap investigated by?
Hart and Risley
What was the participants of the 30 million word gap experiment?
42 families - 13 professional, 23 working class and 6 welfare
When were children and parent interactions recorded in the 30 mil experiment?
Monthly between 7 months and 3 years
What was the differences in affirmatives (encouraging words) and prohibitions?
Professional 32 v 5 (6:1)
Working class 12 v 7 (2:1)
Welfare 5 v 11 (1:2)
How was test performance differences in 3rd grade tested?
Through receptive vocabulary, language development and reading comprehension
Where do the substantial differences in language come from (Fernald)?
Genetics, physical conditions of everyday life, access to crucial resources, social and psychological support, stress level and stability in the family
Where did Casillas et al collect data from?
From a small scale, subsistence farming community in the highlands of Chiapas - southern Mexico
What did Casillas find about infant directed speech?
More used in urban areas compared to rural so it is to universal
What child behaviours did Baumwell et al look at when studying responsiveness?
- bidding to or looking to mother
- exploring an object
- vocalising
- playing with a ty
What were the 6 categories of responsiveness in Baumwell et al’s experiment?
- Affirmations of childs actions
- Imitations of a childs vocalisation
- Descriptions of an object, event or activity
- Questions about an object, event or activity
- Play prompts or demonstrations
- Exploratory prompts
What did Tamis-LeMonda et al found that maternal responsiveness predicts?
The timing of children’s achieving language milestones, first imitations, first words, 50 words in expressive language, combinatorial speech and the use of language to talk about the past
