Chapter 6 - Language Development Flashcards
(34 cards)
1
Q
what is language?
A
- Language is a symbol system
- Symbol systems represent and convey information
- 1 thing stands for something else (Eg. Numbers, maps, language)
- Words are social conventions (arbitrary relationships agreed upon by a social group)
2
Q
what makes something a language?
A
- Researchers agree that the human language is a language due to “generativity” - the ability to convey an infinite number of novel concepts
- Ex. “last night around 11:19pm I was sitting in the middle of the road eating chicken and watching a TV show about Santa Claus and aliens throwing a birthday party” -> even though I’ve never heard this exact sentence before, I understand the concept
- So things like stop lights, thermostats, crying babies, and bee dances aren’t a language -> can’t convey infinite concepts
3
Q
4 components of language
A
- Phonology
- Semantics
- Grammar
- Pragmatics
4
Q
phonology
A
Phonological development: learning about the sound system of a language (phonemes)
5
Q
Semantics
A
Semantic development: learning about expressing meaning (morphemes)
6
Q
Grammar
A
Syntactic Development: learning rules for combining sounds/words (syntax, grammar)
7
Q
Pragmatics
A
Pragmatic Development: learning how language is used (metalinguistic knowledge)
8
Q
Language comprehension vs. language production
A
- Language comprehension: understanding what others say (or certain aspects)
- Language production: actual speaking (or manually producing) those aspects
- Language comprehension precedes production
- Proof: infants recognize their own name at 4.5 months; can look at the correct person at 6 months when they hear “mommy” or “daddy”; 12-14 month olds listen longer to sentences with normal word order rather than scrambled order; 13-15 month olds appreciate word combinations carry meaning beyond the individual words (eg. “She’s kissing the keys” vs. Kissing a ball -> kids can look at the right image depicting the phrase)
9
Q
Language development stages
A
- cooing stage
- babbling stage
- holophrastic period
- telegraphic speech
10
Q
cooing stage
A
- starts 6-8 weeks
- Produce simple speech sounds (goo, ahh) and vocal gymnastics (smacks, clicks, bubbles)
- Improved motor control of vocalizations
- Imitate sounds of sounds of their partners, high pitched for mom and lower for dads
- Will imitates speech sounds they hear from a tape
11
Q
babbling stage
A
- starts 6-10 months
- Produce vowel consonant syllables in repetition (bababa)
- Babble only a limited set of sounds, some not in their native language
- Gradually it takes on the sounds, rhythm, and intonation patterns of the language they hear around them
- Adults can pick out the babbling of an infant from their own language from infants in other languages
- Deaf infants exposed to sign language manually babble
12
Q
holophrastic period
A
- starts 10-15 months
- One-word utterances that express a whole phrase/message in one word (ie. “drink”, “up”, etc.)
- First words include mostly nouns (ie. Mama, dada, ball), frequent events or routines (ie. Bye-bye, night-night), some modifiers (mine, all gone, uh-oh)
- Overextensions sometimes occur (ie. Dog for other animals, daddy for all men) - probably due to their limited vocabulary rather than lack of knowledge)
13
Q
telegraphic speech
A
- begins at end of 2nd year ~24 months
- Begin to combine words into simple “sentences”
- Only 2 word utterances (simplifying the message by only including essential elements - like in telegrams) ie. More juice, hurt knee, eat cookie
- Gradually child begins to add first person pronouns, verb endings, plurals, e.g. “I eating cookies” then
functions words etc. a, the, of, in… - Practice on their own “Crib-talk”
- Begin to combine words into simple sentences -> “internalization of grammatical rules”
14
Q
evidence for internalization of grammatical rules
A
- Consistent word order (ie. Never “cookie eat”)
- Overregularization errors (ie. Goed, foots, mans)
- Application of rules to novel words (eg. The Wug test)
15
Q
UG (Universal Grammar) and IGR (Internalized Grammatical Rules)
A
- UG: abstract concept that there are components that exist across all languages (ie. All languages have verbs)
- IGR: acquired, learned, and specific to the particular language you’re learning
16
Q
Parts of Brain relevant for language
A
- Wernicke’s area: language comprehension
- Broca’s area: language production
17
Q
Language learning facts
A
- We know 60,000+ words by the time we graduate high school. That’s ~10 words a day (or 100 1/10ths of a word)
- Recovering facts = slow, hard; but recovering words = fast, effortless
- Fast-mapping: Mapping words to its referent from brief single exposure or incidental exposures rather than direct teaching. The word can be used by contrasting familiar and unfamiliar but need not be
- Ex. Can learn words like “chromium” just by experiencing it once (ie. Study where there was a red and silver tray, kids could bring them the silver/chromium tray easily even if they didn’t know what the word meant, because they knew that the red tray was red)
18
Q
2 problems kids encounter when learning languages
A
- the word-segmentation problem (parsing problem)
2. the Quinean reference problem
19
Q
What is the word segmentation problem (parsing problem)?
A
- No way to use silences in the speech stream to mark boundaries of words
- We need to actually know what the word is
20
Q
how do infants solve the parsing problem?
A
- infants pick up on statistical regularities (eg. Co-occurrences)
- Ex. In the word “pretty”, the sound “pre” often co-occurs with “tty”, so infants can pick up on this pair once they hear it enough and associate it with one word: “pretty”
- Prosody
- Infant directed speech (IDS)
- Scaffolding: conversation and narrative schemes
21
Q
prosody
A
the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonation pattern, stress, etc. With which language is spoken
22
Q
infant-directed speech (IDS)
A
- characterized by emotional tone, slow and clear, exaggerated speech, exaggerated facial expressions
- Infants like IDS better than regular speech, perhaps because they learn more words in IDS
- IDS is not universal, but is very common
23
Q
what is the Quinean reference problem?
A
- Figuring out what words refer to
- When we hear a word in an unknown language, it could refer to pretty much anything (ex. “Gavagai”)
24
Q
how to infants solve the Quinean reference problem?
A
- behaviourist/associationist account
- whole object bias
- basic level bias
- shape bias
- function bias
- linguistic context
- syntactic bootstrapping
- mutual exclusivity bias
- theory of mind and pragmatics
25
behaviourist/associationist account
- one theory as to how kids solve quinean reference problem
- Parents label objects for the child
- Child begins to associate the word it hears with the object it sees at the time the word is uttered
- Parents give positive or negative reinforcement or feedback (smiling, correcting, etc.)
- Ex. Child toddles after dog and mom says "Dog – that's the dog. You're chasing the dog", and kid says "Daw", and mom smiles and praises him
26
arguments against behaviourist/associationist account
- 30% of the time a word is uttered the object it refers to isn't present
- When parents do label things, it's mostly nouns, not verbs
- They have to learn abstract terms and "non-nouns" with no word-world mappings (ie. Personal pronouns -> "I" means Bre when I say it, but "I" means Emma when she says it)
- Parents rarely give feedback, and it's often ineffective
- Children learn language in cultures when parents don't even speak to them
27
whole object bias
- one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
- when kids learn new words, they are likely to think that it refers to the whole object, not a property or a part of it (ex. If you point at a truck and say "truck", kids will assume you mean the entire truck. If you point at a truck and say "tire", they'll assume that the truck is called a "tire" unless they already have a label for truck)
28
basic level bias
- one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
| - they learn basic level (eg. Dog) before subordinate (eg. Poodle, hound) or superordinate (e.g., pet, mammal, animal)
29
shape bias
- one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
- when you present a kid with an object and a name (ex. "Modi"), they'll assume that anything else with that shape (regardless of size or texture) is also a "Modi"
30
function bias
- one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
- shape is a good cue to function. When shape and function are pitted against each other function usually wins -> ex. If you tell kids "this is a Fendel and you sit on it, you can sit on these things too. Are these fendels?" Kids will say yes because they share the same function, even if the chairs themselves are different shapes.
31
linguistic context
- one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
- using the context of the sentence they're presented with to figure out the meaning of the words. Ex. the meaning of "sib" changes depending on the syntactic context (ex. Sibbing (verb) vs. Some sib (plural) vs. The sib (singular))
32
syntactic bootstrapping
- one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
- children can figure out what "gorping" means by using the syntactic structure of the sentence. Ex. They know that "gorping" is the action Cookie Monster is doing, not what Big Bird is doing
33
mutual exclusivity bias
- one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
- if you give them a choice of objects where they already have a label for one object and then ask them to get you the "Blicket", they won't bring you the object they already have a label for because they understand that it probably won't have another name. Bilingual kids don't show this bias as much.
34
theory of mind and pragmatics
- one way kids solve the quinean reference problem
- Joint attention (eye gaze and intention reading)
- selective social learning/attributing knowledge (ex. Deciding who is the most knowledgeable source – ex. Ben and Jenny experiment)
- Tomasello's bucket study (kids can read non-verbal cues like facial expressions to figure out when Tomasello achieved his goal of finding his "fep" in the bucket)
- intention reading explanation of Mutual Exclusivity Bias (ex. Jop and Bem example alternative explanations -> "the speaker wants 1 of the 2 objects. If she wanted me to give her the one she called jop, she would have asked me to give her the jop to make sure that I understood and gave her the right one, so I'll give her the other one", same thing goes for factual information (ex. Can you give me the one I keep in the kitchen?)
