Language Flashcards

Question

Advantages of social interaction

Answer 1

Joint attention - baby follows gaze of adult towards object Focusing on same object provides referential information Adults provides cues to attract attention and motivate learning Social interaction has the purpose of communication

Answer 2

Imitation is crucial – deaf babies don't babble sound. Babies exposed to signing of deaf parents engage in 'silent babbling' Their movements differ from infants exposed to spoken language - slower rhythm corresponds to the rhythmic patterning of adult sign

Answer 3

the process of rapidly learning a new word simply from the contrastive use of a familiar and unfamiliar word

Answer 4

The whole-object assumption - leads children to expect a new word to refer to a whole object, not part The mutual exclusivity assumption (novel name–nameless category principle) - leads children to expect that a given entity will have only one name.

Answer 5

Using a single label for many referents e.g. daddy for any man Found before 2.5 years of age.

Answer 6

Participants: children 1-2 years Task: Name and choose a picture Results: Words overextended in naming were not confused when choosing e.g. child asked for dog didn’t pick lion. Conclusion: children aren't semantically confused

Answer 7

If an adult pretends to find a 'gazzer' and smiles at one bucket and looks sad at the other, a child will infer that the object that elicited the smile is a “gazzer.”

Answer 8

Put cameras around house. Found child went back and forth on the production of correct words. Said water then ‘gaaaaa’ and took 6 months to finally produce the word consistently. Shows that children are very slow in learning new words as they learn to produce the correct sounds with their mouth etc.

Answer 9

Studied mother-infant interactions (middle-class sample of 12 English-speaking mother-child dyads). Results: • Babies hear an average of 5,000-7,000 utterances a day • 1/3 of the utterances are questions • More than half of the utterances began with one of 52 highly frequent constructions e.g 'look at x'

Answer 10

Showed that socioeconomic background provided different experience to the babies. Results: • High SES families: 487 utterances per hour • Lower SES families: 178 utterances per hour 4yo: • High SES families: 44 million utterances • Lower SES families: 12 million utterances High SES children had been exposed to more language and were more fluent and able to express themselves. They had more capacity to learn new words and were more social.

Answer 11

Children innately born with the predisposition and capacity to learn language (but disagree with Chomsky innate knowledge' Children learn grammar as they learn everything else - perceptual and cognitive skills: * Memorise words and phrases, e.g. where daddy? – see it as just one word not two. * Use memorised phrases in specific situations. * Progressively builds a set of similar phrases e.g. where dog * From this they derives the template “Where X” and realise it is more than one word and begin to generalise it.

Answer 12

Early speech is constructed around verb forms, e.g. "drinking”; ”doggy drinking” * This allows the child to form longer, more complex sentences. * Adults language also constructed from these building blocks * Learning is through the same pattern-finding mechanisms of statistical probability, categorisation and inductive learning.

Answer 13

Strengths: • Good account of actual child’s language • Integrates development of language with cognitive processes • Social aspects of language are important • Shows how child can develop language without innate mechanisms Weaknesses: • Not fully tested empirically