Word Learning

Question 1

Describe prenatal hearing

Answer 1

• Prenatal hearing is hearing before birth
• the foetus is responsive to sound (gross movement, heart rate changes).
• Can be habituated/dishabituated to specific sounds.
• Prefer music played in Usero between 30 and 36 weeks
• prefer to listen to a story read to them in uterine vs a novel story between 34 and 40 weeks

-there is evidence of learning and memory, though recognition may be based on rhythm.

Question 2

Describe hearing in the first few months (infancy)

Answer 2

-early functioning of auditory system, hearing is not adult like.

• hearing is fairly good but not as good as adults :
• infants are more sensitive to higher frequencies early on but sensitivity to lower frequency sounds develops later.

-they are also most responsive to sounds in the frequency range of human speech (1000 - 3000Hz)

Question 3

what type of sounds and speech do infants like to hear?

Answer 3

2 days old prefer infant directed speech (IDS)

Question 4

What is IDS

Answer 4

Higher pitch, wider pitch range, more rising contours

Simplify -slower shorter utterances, more repetitive

Question 5

Does IDS vary across languages and cultures?

Answer 5

Yes but is quite pervasive

Question 6

Describe infant speech perception

Answer 6

Within first 2 months, infants can distinguish between sounds from different phoneme categories (or speech sounds that make meaningful distinctions)

-Such as rake and lake or big and pig

Question 7

How is it displayed that infants can distinguish sounds from different phoneme categories?

Answer 7

They can distinguish it from different languages they have never heard before.

Question 8

Can infants start to identify words in continuous fluent speech?

Answer 8

Yes

Question 9

Decried vocabulary development of a child 10-15 months old

Answer 9

First words at least in production:

• Effortful, hard to understand
• slow growth, followed by vocabulary burst around 18 months

Question 10

How many words on average do 6 year olds know?

Answer 10

Vocabulary consists of about 10,000 words

Question 11

How many words do high school graduates know ?

Answer 11

Around 60,000 words twice as many for big readers

Question 12

How can we measure vocabulary size in infants?

Answer 12

Ask parents

Question 13

Are some words during infancy learned before others and which one is learned first across cultures?

Answer 13

Yes and Mummy

Question 14

Do first words across languages variable?

Answer 14

Yes

Question 15

Which variables are strongest when predicting first words learned?

Answer 15

Frequency and babiness

Question 16

How did Bergelson and Swingley test comprehension in infants

Answer 16

Track eyes of children when sound is presented on screen with two images and one of the images is the word, measure the reaction time they take to look at correct image on screen when word is presented.

Question 17

What did bergelson and Swingley find about comprehension infants?

Answer 17

• comprehension for concrete words such as food and body parts starts at 6-9 months
• not much eveidnce of strong comprehension until 14-16 months of age.

Question 18

What is a problem infants come across when learning new words?

Answer 18

Referential ambiguity

Question 19

What is referential ambiguity?

Answer 19

A.K.A mapping problem

it refers to how do infants attach the forms of language to the things they experience in the world.

Question 20

What did Markman suggest is a solution to referential ambiguity?

Answer 20

Children are innately (biologically) constrained to consider only some possible word meanings.

Question 21

What two biological constraints aid infants with overcoming referential ambiguity?

Answer 21

Mutual exclusivity/principle contrast

Whole object constraint

Question 22

What is mutual exclusivity/principle contrast?

Answer 22

Bias to accept one name per object.

-if children have attached a word to an object and another word is presented to them that is new they will not associate that word with the object that already has an attached word.

Question 23

When does mutual exclusivity and principle contrast start manifesting itself in children?

Answer 23

1.5 and consistent use increases after that.

Question 24

What is whole object constraint?

When does it start?

Answer 24

• map a novel word to a whole object rather than object properties and parts.
  1. 5 years of age.

Question 25

What group of researchers thought innate word learning biases was not specific to humans?

Answer 25

Keminski, call and Fisher

Question 26

How did Keminski, Call and Fisher Find out mutual exclusivity wasn’t only applied to humans?

Answer 26

They conducted an experiment on A dog called Rico

• They presented a novel word to a dog, and found that they would pick a new object
• they conducted the same experiment 4 weeks later and it remembered the novel word and the object it was associated with.

Question 27

What did Keminski, Call and Fisher argue about the innate learning bias of mutual exclusivity?

Answer 27

Learning by exclusion may rely on simple biases even dogs possess.

-having learned many 1 to 1 mappings, learners may develop a 1 to 1 mapping bias.

Question 28

What did smith et al argue about whole object bias.

Answer 28

Hypothesised that word learning biases are built up from experience with initial word meaning associations.

-they associate shape with words even if physical properties are different.

Question 29

What is the limitations of innate constraints account?

Answer 29

• these constraints appear to exist, at least in some cases.
• but not until children or dogs have already learned a fair number of words
• this suggests that these constraints may be a product of learning not a precondition for it.

Question 30

What is another solution that is not innate for referential ambiguity?

Answer 30

Children use social/communicative cues to solve referential ambiguity

The child’s view point is different than ours.

Question 31

Describe how infants use social communicative cues to solve referential ambiguity.

Answer 31

By 12 months, infants are starting to be able to identify others communicative and referential intentions (following gaze, points, joint attention.)

Infants can use these cues to guide word learning from as young as 13 months.

Question 32

What did Tomasello and Baldwin find about social communicative cues with regards to referential ambiguity?

Answer 32

By 18-20 months infants are skilled at determining what an adult is referring to with a label even when they cant directly see it.

Question 33

What are limitation of the social communicative account with regards to referential ambiguity?

Answer 33

Infants begin saying words around 12 months, soon after they start showing evidence of understanding others intentions (following their gaze and their points).

But infants start to understand words before they are good at following gaze pointing gestures (bergelson and swingley)

So how are those words learned, if not through using referential understanding and social communicative cues.

Question 34

how does a child perspective solve the problem of referential ambiguity?

Answer 34

Short arms means infants visual field is mostly made up of an object they are holding.

• studies showing if the picture is made up of an object taking up most of the pixels they are more likely to learn the word for the object. (Smith & Yu)
• they also found that self held objects provide unambiguous cues so Quine was wrong

Question 35

What is the conclusion on how infants solve referential ambiguity?

Answer 35

Many solutions have been proposed and infants appear to be able to use them at some point.

None of them fully solves the problem

Infants may need to combine them to determine reference and may be wrong some of the time.