Communicative Development

Question 1

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Answer 1

language A communication system in which words

and their written symbols combine in rule-governed ways and enable speakers to produce an infinite number of messages.

Question 2

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Answer 2

productive language The production of speech.

Question 3

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Answer 3

receptive

language Understanding the speech of others.

Question 4

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Answer 4

phonology

The system of sounds that a language uses.

Question 5

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Answer 5

semantics The study of word meanings and word combinations.

Question 6

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Answer 6

grammar The structure of a language; consists of morphology and syntax.

Question 7

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Answer 7

morphology The study of morphemes, language’s smallest units of meaning.

Question 8

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Answer 8

syntax The part of grammar that prescribes how words may combine into phrases, clauses and sentences.

Question 9

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Answer 9

pragmatics A set of rules that specifies appropriate language for particular social contexts.

Question 10

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Answer 10

The debate between learning and nativist approaches

to language development corresponds to the nature versus nurture theme in developmental psychology,

Question 11

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Answer 11

Language acquisition device (LAD) Chomsky’s

proposed mental structure in the human nervous system that incorporates an innate concept of language.

Question 12

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Answer 12

infant-directed,or child-directed,speech - motherese

Question 13

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Answer 13

recast A technique adults use in speaking to young children in which they render a child’s incomplete sentence in a more complex grammatical form.

Question 14

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Answer 14

Expansion - A technique adults use in speaking to

young children in which they imitate and expand or add to a child’s statement.

Question 15

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Answer 15

Parents’ help with children’s language development is
one of the most important features of parental involvement from a young age. In Chapter 13 we discuss other ways in which parents play avital role in other aspects of development, too.

Question 16

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Answer 16

protoimperative A gesture
that either an infant or a
young child may use to get
someone to do something
she or he wants.

Question 17

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Answer 17

protodeclarative

a gesture that an infant uses to make some sort of statement about an object.

Question 18

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Answer 18

categorical speech perception The tendency to perceive as the same a range of sounds belonging to the same phonemic group.

Question 19

Intentional communication

Answer 19

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Question 20

From dyadic to triadic interactions

Answer 20

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Question 21

Infants’ use of gestures

Answer 21

culture-specific gestures

not always universal

reachign up
waving goodbye
sticking out tongue as greatings
pointing - fingers in west, lips elsewhere

Question 22

Pointing development in human infants

Answer 22

9 months - begin to follow points

developmental - closer objects first

12-15 months - begin to produce points

18 months can turn around to follow pointing

Question 23

pointing imperatices

proto impertaives

pointing to request

Answer 23

Goal-directed behaviour; blocked goal
trying to get apple

Attention-getting behaviour; tailored for attentional status of mother

Response- waiting

they may vocalise

Response- waiting - Gaze alternation

Referential/ directive (visual) gesture - Gaze alternation

Question 24

Pointing to Request (Proto-imperative)

Answer 24

Goal- Delivery of food/ object
Means- social partner
Reinforcer: Delivery of item
Cognitive prerequisites: Expectation that social partner will deliver requested items, based on past experience; means-ends reasoning.

Question 25

Pointing to comment (Proto-declarative)

Answer 25

Rich vs. lean interpretations

Question 26

Rich Interpretation (Tomasello)

Answer 26

Declarative pointing involves communicative intent For a pointer and recipient to understand a pointing gesture, they need to ‘‘know some things or are attending to some things together’’ (Tomasello et al., 2007, p 706)

Question 27

Communicative Intent

Answer 27

Common Knowledge/ Joint Attentional Frame

Question 28

Communicative intent needs…

Answer 28

I know things I want things I act to achieve goals My social partner knows things, wants things, and acts to achieve goals My social partner and I both want/ know the same thing/ want to achieve the same goal Concept of self and other as intentional agents Recognise that the intentions of self and other are the same

Question 29

Rich interpretation of proto-declaratives

Answer 29

Infants point to influence other’s intentional/ mental states Infants recognise that when others point, they intend the infant to attend to something

Question 30

Pointing to comment (Proto-declarative)- Rich Interpretation

Answer 30

Goal: Joint attention to distal object Reinforcer: Successful joint attention Cognitive prerequisite: Ability to represent others as beings with attentional foci; i.e., at least second-order representational thought

Question 31

Pointing to Comment (Proto-declarative)- Lean interpretation (e.g. Moore & Corkum, 1994)

Answer 31

Goal: Affective response from caregiver (e.g. smiling) Reinforcer = Emotional signal (e.g., smile) Cognitive prerequisites: Expectation that social partner will exhibit positive emotion, based on past experience; means-ends reasoning.

Question 32

Liszkowski et al. (2004)

Answer 32

75 babies (12 months old) 10 trials per subject Four conditions: Joint Attention (Looks to object + Positive Affect) Face (Positive affect but no look to object) Event (Look to object but no positive affect) Ignore (Look to own hands, no positive affect)

Question 33

Liszkowski et al. (2004) results

Answer 33

children expecting a postitive head turn and affect

Question 34

Liszkowski et al. (2004) interpretation

Answer 34

“…this study suggests that infants at 12 months of age do understand something about attention and the independent attentional perspective of others when sharing attention and interest” (Liszkowski et al., 2004, p. 306) suggesting sophicitcated cognitve abilities

Question 35

A leaner interpretation?

Answer 35

“the infant may understand that the point will tend to lead to an adult head turn and an interesting subsequent response from the adult” (Moore & Corkum, 1994, p. 362, emphasis added) Findings are consistent with both learning and representational accounts.

Question 36

The learning perspective

Answer 36

Babies exhibit declarative pointing because caregivers respond with intense positive emotion “…if the early motivations for babies' pointing behavior in both protoimperative and protodeclarative contexts is the manipulation of the behavior of their social partners (delivery of objects in protoimperative pointing and elicitation of emotional engagement in protodeclarative pointing), then there is no compelling logical basis to postulate fundamentally different psychological processes underlying the two kinds of pointing” (Leavens, Russell, & Hopkins, 2005, pp. 292-293; also Leavens, 2012a,b, 2018; Leavens & Clark, 2017; Leavens et al., 2008, 2009).

Question 37

Leavens and Todd (unpublished)

Answer 37

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Question 38

Putting the joy into joint attention

Answer 38

Babies (9-18 mos.) express positive emotion during joint object play with their mothers (Adamson & Bakeman, 1985) Babies (20 & 22 mos.) express more positive emotion during joint attention than when requesting objects (Kasari, Sigman, Mundy, & Yirmiya, 1990; Mundy, Kasari, Sigman, 1992) Babies’ (6-18 mos.) parents synchronise their own smiles with their own pointing gestures when they point for their babies (Leavens, Sansone, Burfield, Lightfoot, O’Hara, & Todd, 2014).

Question 39

Language Milestones

Answer 39

Start babbling around 6 mos. • Say first word at around 1 year • Experience a “vocabulary spurt” around 1.5 years • Combine words around 2 years (simple sentences)

Question 40

There is a lot to learn!

Answer 40

Phonology (phonemes are elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning, e.g., bear vs pear) • Grammar (Syntax is rules for combining words) • Morphology (morphemes are smallest unit of meaning in a language, e.g., car vs cars) • Pragmatics (conventions, social rules and cues, e.g., follow pointing and other gestures) • Semantics (word meanings)

Question 41

There is a lot to learn!

Answer 41

Phonology (phonemes are elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning, e.g., bear vs pear) * Grammar (Syntax is rules for combining words) * Morphology (morphemes are smallest unit of meaning in a language, e.g., car vs cars) * Pragmatics (conventions, social rules and cues, e.g., follow pointing and other gestures) * Semantics (word meanings)

Question 42

Using language

Answer 42

Comprehension: understanding what others say (or sign or write) * Production: actually (or signing or writing) speaking to others * Comprehension precedes production

Question 43

Nativist theory of language development

Answer 43

Nativist argument: Language is too complex to be learned so easily and quickly by cognitively unsophisticated children • If isn’t learned, how does it develop? • Chomsky: Language Acquisition Device Module in brain just for learning language Starts out with necessary parameters and your native language tunes them over development in the fifties - lots of experiments have overturned these theories

Question 44

Behaviourist theory of language development

Answer 44

Behaviourist argument: Language learned by standard processes of operant and classical conditioning • Skinner: correct usage is reinforced, incorrect usage is not. Challenged with arguments about: * poverty of the stimulus (come up with things we’ve never heard) * negative evidence (no examples of what is wrong)

Question 45

Interactionist theory of language development

Answer 45

Language is a product of the interaction of genes, environment, and experience Bates: basic perceptual and learning abilities are moulded by culture and society to become language specific

Question 46

Infant speech perception

Answer 46

``` DeCasper and Fifer (1980): How do we recognise speech sounds? Test: High Amplitude Sucking 24-hour infants Headphones, dummy connected to computer Measured sucking rate ```

Question 47

DeCasper and Fifer (1980)

Answer 47

Infants worked to produce mother’s voice Infants had a preference for their own mother’s voice Prenatal auditory experience helps shape voice preferences and parent-infant interactions after birth.

Question 48

Prenatal learning

Answer 48

DeCasper and Spence (1987): 3rd trimester, mum reads story aloud twice a day 3 groups: 2 test groups read different Dr Seuss passages, one control (no reading) 55-hour-old infants, HAS procedure Mum reading familiar or novel passage OR stranger reading familiar or novel passage Infants worked to produce the familiar story - recognised prosody Who read the story (own mother or another mother) had no effect The control group (no prenatal stories) had no preference between stories, but did prefer own mother (which replicates DeCasper and & Fifer, 80)

Question 49

More findings with HAS method

Answer 49

* Infants prefer mother’s voice filtered to approximate what it sounded like in the womb * Infants prefer mother’s voice over father’s voice * Infants prefer mother’s and father’s voices over other females and males, respectively * Infants generally prefer stranger’s speaking their parents’ language than another language

Question 50

Categorical Perception

Answer 50

Categorical perception: The classification of continuous stimuli into distinct categories with sharp boundaries One can discriminate stimuli between categories, but not within a category • Colour is another example of categorical perception /ba/ and /pa/ are the same sound except for when you start making the sound You start making a sound earlier when you say /ba/

Question 51

Universal Phonetic Sensitivity

Answer 51

All infants can discriminate all speech sounds (regardless of native language) Around 6-8 months, infants are able to distinguish contrasts that are not used in their native language. This ability declines over the first year • By 12 months infants only retain contrasts used in their native language, (they lose those that aren’t used)

Question 52

Phonetic sensitivity

Answer 52

Infants’ categories result from the distribution of phonemes in their environment * English adults can discriminate Hindi phonemes w/ practice * Japanese /r/ v. /l/: native speakers can learn to discriminate with (extensive) training

Question 53

Learning word meanings

Answer 53

Learning words is difficult The possibilities are (hypothetically endless) ``` Tiger = cake? Tiger = ribbon? Tiger = teapot? Tiger = tea party? Tiger = wild animal? ```

Question 54

Scaffolding

Answer 54

``` What adults do to help establish the referent: Scaffolding: Point Use voice inflections Use routines Refer to previous experiences Joint focus of attention ```

Question 55

Joint attention in word learning? (Baldwin, 1991)

Answer 55

Two novel toys, children play with them One toy in view, one in bucket Experimenter waits for child to focus on visible toy and then labels: • Visible toy (follow-in condition) • Bucket toy (mis-match condition) Novel label (toma or peri), repeated 4 times At test, presented both toys in a neutral location and asked children to “get the toma”

Question 56

Baldwin (1991) Results

Answer 56

Follow-in => easily learned words Mis-match => more labeling errors Children looked at Experimenter more in mis-match condition Mis-match between child’s focus of attention and direction of Experimenter’s voice Children are sensitive to Joint Attention

Question 57

Children as active learners

Answer 57

``` Things children do to help establish the referent: Follow adult’s direction of gaze Follow adult’s points Pick up objects and ask Point to objects Look at objects ```

Question 58

Retention of mutual exclusivity words?

Answer 58

5 min

Question 59

Illustrations (Flack & Horst, 2017

Answer 59

3.5-year-old children Shared storybook reading Children introduced to fewer illustrations learned significantly more words than children introduced to multiple illustrations

Question 60

Illustrations (Flack & Horst, 2017)

Answer 60

3.5-year-old children Shared storybook reading Children introduced to fewer illustrations learned significantly more words than children introduced to multiple illustrations

Question 61

Pointing to language?

Answer 61

Camaioni et al. (1991)- pointing gestures at 12 months predict speech production at 24 months. Colonnesi et al. (2010)- IJA and RJA predict current and later language abilities. Kishimoto et al. (2007)- pointing gestures provoke adults to comment.

Question 62

Pointing to language?

Answer 62

Camaioni et al. (1991)- pointing gestures at 12 months predict speech production at 24 months. Colonnesi et al. (2010)- IJA and RJA predict current and later language abilities. Kishimoto et al. (2007)- pointing gestures provoke adults to comment. IJA - initiating joint attention RJA - respsonding to joint attention