Language Development Flashcards

Question

Explain a case of severe deprivation in language acquisition.

Answer 1

– Genie – Severely neglected – Very limited language input, punished if she tried to speak – Discovered at 13 – 3-word utterances, but lacking grammatical skills The extent of her isolation prevented her from being exposed to any significant amount of speech, and as a result she did not acquire language during her childhood.

Answer 2

Johnson & Newport (1989) – 46 Chinese- and Korean-American immigrants (3 - 39 years of age) – Strong linear relation between age of exposure and mastery of grammar – Significant deficits after puberty – Not explained by identification with local culture or motivation to learn – Also applies to deaf individuals who learn ASL late in life

Answer 3

Brain basis – Areas in left hemisphere (Broca’s, Wernicke’s) selectively involved in language production and processing – Newborns’ left-hemisphere more sensitive to speech sounds

Answer 4

Innate grammar: – Lack of specificity (i.e., what is the scope of experience?) – Grammar is limited in deaf children not exposed to ASL – Complexity of grammar is related to complexity of input (e.g., multi-clause sentences) - Culture influences neural structure and cognition - Mechanisms unclear

Answer 5

Language develops from the interaction of biological, cognitive and environmental influences – Biological predispositions – Cognitive apparatus (+constraints) – Social-environmental influences

Answer 6

Terms used to indicate the particular voice register observed in the majority of parents in interaction with their infants. – Caregivers and other adults spontaneously produce rhythmic speech with accentuated pitch, intonation and melodic contours, repetitions – Infants prefer this type of speech over regular speech and non-speech sounds – IDS may facilitate language learning (e.g., help word segmentation)

Answer 7

* reduplicated syllables * diminutive endings * sometimes these words are based on old forms (e.g. "choo-choo train“) * parents often use nouns rather than first or second person pronouns; e.g., "mummy" instead of "I“ * they base their speech on the here and now * it is heavily contextualized

Answer 8

The ability of children to learn new words very quickly and easily around age two. New words are learned based on a minimum of exposure – 2.5 year old infants learn an average of 10 new words per day.

Answer 9

Whole object assumption Taxonomic assumption – similarity; same label for like objects (e.g., real duck, plastic duck, etc.) Mutual exclusivity assumption – objects only have one label novel object label = novel word (e.g., if a child learns the word ‘hammer’, she will assume that unfamiliar objects have different names) Bootstrapping

Answer 10

– Using one aspect of language knowledge to facilitate another aspect of language knowledge – Syntactic bootstrapping: use grammar to determine semantic knowledge

Answer 11

Joint attention.

Answer 12

– Focus of attention with that of another person. Language requires a shared ‘referential framework’ – Early on, infants are sensitive to social stimuli such as eye gaze – Through gaze-following, joint attention can be established. – This knowledge is brought to bear in the language learning context

Answer 13

– Infants will follow the gaze of caregivers – However, 9-10 month olds will follow when the caregivers eyes are closed – By contrast, 11-12 month olds will only follow if the eyes are open. – The behaviour precedes social cognition

Answer 14

– Infants use an actor’s eye gaze to map objects to their referents – Consider intentionality when mapping verbs to actions – Use another’s emotional expression to infer the target of her referent – Much more frequent in urban settings compared to hunter-gather groups and subsistence farming communities

Answer 15

✓ Infants and toddlers acquire language regardless of background, social, economic, linguistic, etc. ✓ Children of deaf parents learn language. ✓ Born deaf children of hearing parent learn language and organise the grammar of that language (Senghas & Coppola 2001). ✓ The process of language acquisition [and learning] is fast and relatively accurate, despite the poor input. ✓ Children try out hypotheses about language, and make predictions; first, decisions on word learning; then, decisions on the use of grammar. ✓ Children do not parrot: their language is original and creative

Answer 16

Teaching apes how to communicate with humans and each other using sign language, physical tokens, lexigrams, and imitative human speech.

Language Development Flashcards

(40 cards)