Chapter 6

Question 1

Chomsky spoke about the language
acquisition device (LAD),

Answer 1

which he indicated that children have an innate ability to learn
a spoken language in whatever culture they are born. Every individual is born with
knowledge about the rules that exist within a grammar and with knowledge about possible
exceptions.

Question 2

Two things promote the language acquisition of a child:

Answer 2

(1) “motherese” or
infant-directed speech (IDS), and (2) a child’s innate tendency to social contact and
attachment.

Question 3

What is phonological development?

Answer 3

Phonological learning is about the sounds of a language. It consists of two aspects:
1) Learning about certain patterns of sound combinations that are allowed in a certain
language. This allows the brain to make phonological representations of the sound
structure of individual words.
2) Learning to produce these words yourself.

Question 4

At what age does categorical perception develop, where the sounds that are very similar are no longer heard as B but as P for example.

Answer 4

When children are one month old.

Question 5

snsitive peripd fpr learning language

Answer 5

The ability to distinguish phonemes in another language disappears after one year. then it is developed.

Question 6

Heschl’s gyrus

Answer 6

important for speech production in adults

Question 7

Broca’s area

Answer 7

is related to the production of speech, repetition in silence, and
short-term memory. This was the only area in children that was sensitive to repetition of
sentences

Question 8

As well as being
capable of categorical perception, speakers need to be able to recognize a given phoneme
independently of its surrounding phonemes, this is termed phonetic normalisation. Example,
the /d/ sound in the syllables /di/ and /du/ is different acoustically. Mersad and
Dehaene-Lambertz used the mismatch response (MMR) to measure whether infants could
recognize such differences.

Answer 8

They reported that the infants did indeed show a significant
MMR to the change of initial consonant.

Question 9

difference between monolingual and bilingual kids by looking at a head while talking

Answer 9

Monolingual infants
show an early attentional focus on the eyes when looking at a talking head, and later on
infants shift focus attention on the mouth (at around 8-10 months). The onset of babbling
may create a greater need for motor information about speech. Bilingual infants are beyond
the scope of this book, but are worth mentioning. They are learning two sets of sound
systems, two sets of rules for world order, and two lexicons. They show more attention to the
mouth of a talking face at an earlier age, perhaps this signals an increased need to use
visual cues to articulate in developing two different lexicons.

Question 10

allophones

Answer 10

Sounds that we would categorise as “B” or “P”, but that are relatively different from the
prototype

Question 11

The magnet effect

Answer 11

means that sounds that resemble each other are classified in the same
category, and sounds that do not resemble each other are not, even though there may be no
physical difference between these sounds

Question 12

At what age can children distinguish between two syllables?

Answer 12

10,5 months.

Question 13

head turn procedure and syllables, conclusion

Answer 13

children look longer at the flashlight when the words are known, but when the last letter differed, they didn’t spot a difference

Question 14

What are rise times and what happens if you take that out of the speech?

Answer 14

‘Rise times’ are increases in amplitude in the
speech envelope as syllables are produced and are critical cues to local amplitude variations
(which the brain is interested in). For example, if rise times associated with syllable-level
modulations are taken out of speech, adults can no longer comprehend what is being said
(Doelling, Arnal, Ghitza & Poeppel, 2014)

Question 15

The motor hypothesis
of babbling

Answer 15

states that the rhythm of babbling is determined by the physiological movements
of the jaw.

Question 16

The linguistic hypothesis of babbling

Answer 16

states that the production of structural rhythmic and
temporal patterns of language is a crucial part of language acquisition. this one ytended to be true!

Question 17

The lexical development

Answer 17

is building a vocabulary and learning what words mean

Question 18

Fenson et al. (1994) used the Child Language Checklist to investigate the vocabulary
development of children. Three key findings are:

Answer 18

(1) understanding words develops around
the age of eight to ten months, (2) producing words develops around the age of eleven to
thirteen months and (3) there is a wide variety in the lexical development between different
individuals. They also found that vocabulary development is gradual. in contrast with the vocabulary spurt
4. Another result of the research was that after the skill of word comprehension emerges, the
development of communication gestures and routines takes place. Tq

Question 19

When can inants also use top down processing?

Answer 19

Infants can also use top-down learning
mechanisms at the age of six months

Question 20

Complementary data comes from Bergelson and Swingley (2012), who investigated whether
six-month-olds could distinguish single lexical referents like ‘banana’ or ‘mouth’ when spoken
in isolation, conclusion

Answer 20

babies looked at targets, not at distractors. even tho the parents didn’t even know that their children knew those words.

Question 21

The study by Baldwin and Markman
(1989) assumed that children showed more attention to an object that was labeled, because

Answer 21

then they understood that the word (sound) produced by an adult belongs to an object. A
child was allowed to play with unknown objects (for example a snorkel) and if the name of
the object was told, infants of ten months old already showed more interest in these objects.
A follow-up study looked at the difference between just pointing to the unknown object or
pointing and labelling it. The infants showed more interest in the objects that were both
labelled and pointed to. The labelling of objects thus ensures a better understanding of the
word-object relationship.

Question 22

Waxman and Markov (1995) investigated the emergence of categories in the word-object
relationship. In one condition, they showed infants four objects from the same category (for
example, four different cars) and said, “Look, a car.” Nothing was labelled in the control
condition (“Look at this”). I

Answer 22

It was predicted that infants would be less interested in the stimuli
if they realised that the four things belonged to the same category. This hypothesis was true,
but only for more difficult names (for example if “Look, a vehicle” was mentioned). Xu (2002)
claims that labelling plays an important role in determining that objects differ from each
other. Waxman and Braun (1995) concluded from their research that assigning the same
name to a set of objects from the same category contributes to children categorising objects

Question 23

when doe sover extensios occur? and why?

Answer 23

2,5 years.
The hypothesis to explain this is that the
overextension proves that children have fewer differentiated conceptual categories than
adults. If more words are learned, the children must organise them into a group: for example,
long, thin objects.

Question 24

n400

Answer 24

The amplitude of
the N400 plays a role in the integration of a stimulus in the semantic context. If a sentence is
shown that is semantically incorrect (‘the storm is ironed’ instead of ‘the shirt is ironed’) an
increased negative activity occurs after 400 ms. This is the N400.

Question 25

Friedrich and Friederici
(2004) investigated the N400 in children. They showed familiar pictures and then labelled the
picture with a correct or incorrect label. In children aged 19 months, a non-congruent label
resulted in an increased negative activity at around 700 ms. An earlier negativity was also
measured (at 150 and 400 ms), but this negativity was greater with congruent words.
Friedrich and Friederici thought this was a priming effect..? what is the priming effect?

Answer 25

the children expected to hear a
word with certain phonemes.

For 12-month-old children, the negativity did not occur with non-congruent words, but the
previous activity with congruent words did. This result was explained by arguing that children
of this age do have lexical-semantic knowledge about the words used in this study. If
pseudowords were used, these children were also able to distinguish real words from
pseudowords

Question 26

mean length of
utterance (MLU)

Answer 26

The length of a statement is measured in morphemes (dog = 1, dogs = 2
and so on).