Developmental 5: Language

Question 1

What is phonology?

Answer 1

Sounds - how we distinguish and segment words

Question 2

What is semantics?

Answer 2

Meaning - meaning of words

Question 3

What is syntax?

Answer 3

Structure - how we learn grammar

Question 4

What is pragmatics?

Answer 4

Use of language - how is context-appropriate use of language learnt?

Question 5

Difference in what behaviour shows that newborns recognise their mother’s voice compared with a stranger’s?

Answer 5

Increased sucking behaviour

Question 6

Can infants recognise a speech passage they heard in utero after they are born?

Answer 6

Yes - when compared with a new passage

Question 7

How does fetal heart rate change when a mother vs stranger read the same poem? What is this evidence for?

Answer 7

Increase to mother

Evidence for very early sensitivity to speech and capacity for learning – may be based on speaker identity and/or intonation rather than processing parts of speech in a manner useful for comprehension

Question 8

What are phonemes?

Answer 8

Smallest meaningful units in a language

Question 9

What are perceptual challenges for the infant when learning phonemes?

Answer 9

• Phoneme discrimination (telling cat from mat)
  
  • Segmentation of the sound stream into phonemes (“the cat sat on the mat”)

Question 10

Can infants discriminate similar sounding phonemes at or soon after birth?

Answer 10

Yes

• Infants discriminate similar-sounding phonemes, e.g. /b/ vs. /p/,
• At 1-4 months evidence for categorical perception – better on either side of a boundary used by adults
• More attention to differences in phoneme than differences in voice of speaker

Question 11

What happens in the first year of life that means infants can no longer discriminate phonemes in different languages?

Answer 11

Perceptual narrowing

Question 12

What is an example of perceptual narrowing?

Answer 12

• English 6- to 8-month-olds discriminate two Hindi “d” sounds that adult English speakers cannot discriminate
• English 10- to 12- month olds no longer make the distinction, but Hindi infants do
• Now replicated many times with other languages and phoneme discriminations, both behavioural and ERP measures

Question 13

Early capabilities plus learning indicate an “experience-expectant” system for learning language - what is this?

Answer 13

One with an organisation that supports the learning of the phonetic categories in any particular language - capacity to learn any language

Question 14

What is the critical period for language learning?

Answer 14

Birth until 9/10 years - then synaptic pruning

Question 15

Why is speech segmentation difficult?

Answer 15

Sounds run into each other and not every word boundary has a pause

Question 16

What do infants pick up on in language to give them cues about segmentation?

Answer 16

Statistical patterns

Question 17

What are transitional probabilities and how are these used as cues to segmentation?

Answer 17

In continuous speech, some sound combinations are more frequent than others. Frequent combination -> likely to be within a word, infrequent combination -> likely to be between words.

There is evidence that infants also rapidly learn these probabilities in artificial languages

Question 18

When are stress patterns in specific languages learnt and used? (cues correlated with word boundaries)

Answer 18

7-9 months

Question 19

What do innate mechanisms for statistical learning indicate?

Answer 19

That infants come equipped to learn the meaningful patterns and distinctions in the language they are exposed to

Question 20

What comes first - speech perception or speech production?

Answer 20

Perception - infants know 100s of words before they can say more than 3 or 4

Question 21

What is canonical babbling and when does this start?

Answer 21

Repetitive vowel sounds
7-8 months

Question 22

How do kids learn meanings of words?

Answer 22

• Either just absorb information from association
  
  • OR as kids get older they point at something and ask what it is
  • Noun words very reinforced because of their simplicity and because they often come up in books

Question 23

How many words can be comprehended at 18 months, 2 years and 6 years

Answer 23

50-100 at 18 months
900 at 2 years
8000 at 6 years

Question 24

What is the associative/perceptual account of word learning?

Answer 24

Associative learning plus perceptual similarity
Picking up on statistics in the environment

Question 25

What is the social account of word learning?

Answer 25

Children need social cues such as pointing and eye gaze to learn words

Question 26

What is the Emergentist Coalition Model of word learning?

Answer 26

Children learn words using perceptual, social, and linguistic cues Their reliance on these cues changes over time: mostly associative in 1st year of life, then increasingly reliant on social and linguistic information

Question 27

The Emergentist Coalition Model of language learning incorporates and builds on previously documented constraints and biases, e.g. assumption of mutual exclusivity. What is this?

Answer 27

- Children expect that different words mean different things. Do not understand synonyms. Markman & Wachtel, 1988: - 3- to 4-year-olds assign newly introduced nonsense syllable to a novel object they don’t yet have a word for, not the familiar one - And when given new labels (e.g. trachea or pewter) for known objects, tend to interpret this as a part of the object, or the substance it is made of

Question 28

What is syntactic bootstrapping?

Answer 28

Using syntax (grammar) to infer word meaning e.g. made up word - gorping vs gorping with - indicates one thing doing something to another thing, or both things doing the thing Children know 'with' is a dual thing This shows that children use a grammatical distinction to help assign meanings to the words they hear (e.g. gorping seems to be a transitive verb, so the scene should be one where someone is doing something to someone else)

Question 29

What huge experiment did Roy et al (2009) conduct?

Answer 29

Longitudinal study of his child and his linguistic environment Hear son going from 'gaga' to 'water' - development of a word

Question 30

How do caregivers change their mean length of utterance to help infant learn a word?

Answer 30

Decreasing MLU - simplifying word until child learns it (matching what kid says on their level), then making it more complex along with the kid

Question 31

What do the rules of grammar allow us to do?

Answer 31

Combine and modify words Without it - telegraphic speech, very basic communication e.g. Mummy apple vs Mummy I want an apple With grammar - express more complex relations e.g. “Mummy ate the apple” “Mummy ate the green apple” “Mummy ate the green apple that was on the table” “Mummy ate the green apple that was on the table because there were no oranges left”

Question 32

Are syntactical (grammar) rules language specific?

Answer 32

Yes e.g. English - order has to be subject, verb, object 'She loves him' but in Japanese order is subject, object, verb 'She him loves' As with sounds and word meanings, the infant has to work out which particular grammatical rules their own language uses

Question 33

One theory of how syntax is learnt is explicit corrections from parents - why is this unlikely to be the case?

Answer 33

Factual mistakes are corrected: Child: “Walt Disney comes on Tuesday”. Mum: “No, he does not”. But not grammatical errors: Child: “Mamma isn’t boy, he a girl”. Mum: “That’s right”. Mum rewards child for speaking even if grammar is bad

Question 34

What is Skinner's operant conditioning model of language learning? (1957)

Answer 34

Skinner proposed that like other abilities, language could be learnt through imitation, trial and error, and reinforcement. (Skinner, Verbal Behavior, 1957) “a child acquires verbal behavior when relatively unplanned vocalisations, selectively reinforced, assume forms which produce appropriate consequences in a given verbal community”

Question 35

What is Chomsky's criticism of Skinner's operant conditioning model of language learning?

Answer 35

- Behaviourism studies only observables, or “input and output” relations. Chomsky argued that to understand a high-level process like language, we need to posit internal representations, e.g. symbols. - i.e. to produce language we cannot just map inputs to outputs, we need an intermediate stage of mental representation that is not directly observable

Question 36

What is Chomsky's innate Language Acquisition Device? (1965)

Answer 36

- Speakers hear and use the surface structure, but they are really comprehending the deep structure. - The rules relating surface to deep structure are too complex to be learnt by associative learning - The fact that humans can learn them at all must mean that they have an innate capacity for grammar, i.e. arrive with some constraints/expectations for what kinds of grammars are possible in human language. e.g. there can be multiple surface structures that mean the same deep structure, OR one surface structure that can be interpreted in different ways with multiple deep structures

Question 37

How does Slobin (1985) propose that children learn grammatical rules?

Answer 37

At first memorise specific examples, whether regular or irregular Learn to apply the general rule Over-regularise the rule (go -> goed) Finally, learn to deal correctly with both regular and irregular cases

Question 38

What evidence is there that language learning mechanisms are specific to language?

Answer 38

Specific CRITICAL PERIODS in language acquisition have been taken as evidence that language is special. From very rare cases of children who had no exposure to language, and much more common cases of second language learning

Question 39

What evidence is there that language learning mechanisms are not specific to language?

Answer 39

- Infants also learn co-occurrence statistics of visual stimuli (as well as for word meanings) – broader learning rules may underlie some aspects of language acquisition. - A general-purpose model of statistical learning could explain errors that seemed to be specific to language (over-regularisation of the past tense)

Question 40

Are parts of the cortex already specialised for language in early life?

Answer 40

Yes - speech processing specifically in left temporal lobe at 3 months

Question 41

Are language areas always in the same place in all brains?

Answer 41

No - After early brain damage, different regions of cortex can support nearly normal language acquisition - In congenitally deaf participants, areas normally supporting oral language can take on other functions - Human infants arrive well equipped for language, but development itself is very flexible and plays a crucial role.

Question 42

Daniel Kish - when he uses echolocation, which brain area is active?

Answer 42

Visual cortex is completely active - brain area creates some kind of sonic space he can 'see' Is there a similar critical period for brain area development for echolocation as language?

Question 43

What does animal communication lack that human language has?

Answer 43

- Animal communication lacks the flexibility of human symbolic systems - Animals trained with symbolic systems have managed some impressive feats, but fall far short of the complexity of human language.

Question 44

What aspects of language do we share with animals?

Answer 44

- Some auditory mechanisms involved in early speech perception are shared with other species – e.g. phoneme perception in chinchillas - Like language, birdsong is learnt through experience, and like infants, birds have sensitive periods - Human language includes ancestral mechanisms shared with other species, and the nature of the overlap is yet to be fully understood

Question 45

When was estimated first proto-language used? When was earliest known writing? What does this mean about human development of reading and writing?

Answer 45

Language - from 100,000 years to 2 million years ago Writing - only 3,600 BC So humans’ impressive reading and writing skills are likely to be based around pre-existing perceptual and motor abilities (could not have evolved that quickly) Reading is a historically new skill, so there is little scope for evolution of specific written language mechanisms

Question 46

What is the neuronal recycling hypothesis?

Answer 46

Reading acquisition partially recycles a cortical territory evolved for object and face recognition

Question 47

How is neuronal activation different in literate vs illiterate people presented with words and faces?

Answer 47

Typically: When learning to read, representation of written words (partially) takes over the “visual word form area” (VFWA). Bilateral fusiform face area - right more active for actual faces, left more active for letter strings For illiterates, left is more active for faces than words For literates, left is more active for words than faces - has been recycled to recognise letter strings (right more active for faces)

Question 48

A known visual word area (VLOTC) has highest activation when viewing objects moving. What implications does this have for the cause of dyslexia?

Answer 48

Dyslexia - not word issue, object tracking issue People without dyslexia scan backwards and forwards as they read People with dyslexia cannot do this, object tracking gets lost which makes reading harder e.g. scanning forwards allows you to know that something was said by a person 'it is over there' said the boy - need to scan to know who is saying it