Language Development Flashcards
Week 6 (32 cards)
What is language?
Arbitrary system of symbols and rules that encode meaning for the purposes of communication
How do critical periods apply to language development? What is the evidence for these theories?
Children learn 2nd language better than adults
* less is more hypothesis: less knowledge means easier to make new associations between languages
* more difficult to learn a 2nd language as we become experts in the first language
Evidence
* immigrants at various ages, the younger the age of immigration and learning of 2nd language the better for acquisition of it
* census study confirms increase of difficulty as we age
What are the 3 key aspects of the preverbal period of language development? Explain each and how they’re studied.
Speech perception
* preference for native language prosody
* children born w/ ability to perceive and produce every possible phoneme used in world’s languages
* perceptual narrowing occurs to native language around 9MO
* Indian head turning study
Categorical speech perception
* ability to discriminate between categories of different phonemes and recognise when two sounds belong to the same phonemic category
* infants perceive phonemes as categories like adults
* speech synthesiser used to play 2 sounds and gradually change between each
Speech segmentation
* how can children segment continuous speech stream to learn words and phrases?
* lexical stress: language specific regularities for stress patterns
* statistical properties of speech stream (probability of syllable transition, hearing syllables together)
* habituation-dishabituation paradigm showed children attend to statistical properties and listen to non-words for longer than real words
How do early sounds influence language development?
reduplicated babbling = vocal play allowing exploration of production processes and exercise of vocal motor control
FEEDBACK IMPORTANT COMPONENT OF THIS
What are examples of pre-linguistic communication? How does this vary across cultures?
Gesturing
* Deictic: imperatives and declaratives (pointing to something, showing, giving)
* Iconic: representational (pantomiming)
* Emblematic: culturally-specific gestures (waving)
Cross-cultural research: varying levels of gesture and word form vocabulary across cultures in children
What are holophrases?
single words used to express the ideas of a complete phrase or sentence
What is telegraphic speech?
speech characterised by the use of short sentences and phrases that omit function words
What is fast mapping?
the process whereby children begin to understand the meaning of a new word after only hearing it once
What are constraints and how do they impact language development in children?
Definition, 2 constraints, issues
general rules or heuristics that simplify the process of word learning by ruling out inappropriate meanings and pointing children in the direction of the correct meaning
* Whole-object assumption: leads children to expect a novel word to most likely refer to a whole object not something to do with an object (e.g. part, action)
* Mutual exclusivity: assumption that object will only have one name
Issues
* Constraints supposed to be rule of thumb but don’t apply to all labelling situations
* Constraints are not rigid
How does word learning develop in infants?
first words, up to 18MO, 18MO
First words
* often from immediate surroundings
* non-symbolic
up to 18MO
* categorised by overextension of labels
* due to perceptual and functional similarity
18MO
* vocab spurt
* non-linear increase
* coincides w/ first evidence of grammatical knowledge and understanding that language is combinatorial
How does verb acquisition develop over childhood?
conservative language users when they learn new verbs and unlikely to use them across different constructions until ~3YO
What is syntactic bootstrapping and how does it influence verb acquisition? How does evidence support this concept?
- Children could never learn the meaning of verbs from observation alone
- Reliable grammatical cues to verb mearning
- Biases to interpret verb meaning on the basis of syntactic information
Evidence
Causative vs non-causative study
* Ernie is meeking Bert (causative)
* Ernie is meeking (non-causative)
* use of fake word/verb to teach contextual nature of syntactic bootstrapping
Comprehension experiment
* 21MO show knowledge of structure
What is the words and rules model and what are the 2 key theories surrounding it?
Productive knowledge: know something about past tense of one word enables you to work out/know a new word in the past tense
Stages of development (Cazden)
* Stage 1: sporadic use of irregulars, no regulars (e.g. went)
* Stage 2: intermittent use of ed on regular verbs
* Stage 3: general use of ed on both regular and irregular verbs (e.g. jumped, walked, buyed, goed) - U shaped development
* Stage 4: correct use of both categories
Dual-route model (Pinker)
* 2 separate memory systems
* Children acquire symbolic rules, which are applied in a majority of cases (procedural memory)
* Exceptions (irregulars) are learnt by rote (associative memory) and stored in memory
How does the words and rules model perform cross-culturally?
Fairly accurate for English language due to irregular rules but not applicable to other languages
What are the testable predictions of the words and rules model? What were the findings of these predictions?
When a child does not know a verb they will inflect it using the default
* (Kidd & Kirjavainen, 2011): Finnish speaking children overgeneralise both past tense suffixes
Acquisition and production of irregular verbs but not regular if affected by frequency
* Lum & Kidd (2012): English speaking kids perform better on high-freq regular verbs (than low-freq)
* Matthews & Theakston (2006): same findings for noun plurals
What is the usage-based approach? What does it explain that the words and rules model can’t?
Children aren’t learning rules but instead learning generalisations of groups of words once they have acquire a critical mass
* schemas formed out of these reliable categories
* single route theory
* Explains why regular and irregular words are affected by frequency – same process
How does sensitivity to word order vary across the theories in terms of grammar learning?
Nativists vs interactionists
Nativists argue this grasp is due to innate ability in language
Interactionists argue due to attempts to imitate adult word order they hear
What are the 4 theoretcial mechanisms of syntactic development?
4 different theoretical approaches
LAD and universal grammar
* Innate understanding of broad principles underlying human language
* Principles contain parameters that differ across languages
* Support comes from similar rate of grammar acquisition across all cultures
Semantic bootstrapping
* Children analyse the syntactic structure of a sentence according to basic concepts derived from prior knowledge
* Important in early development
* Unlikely to allow for complex syntax acquisition
Statistical learning
* Argued to be general property of children’s learning systems (not specific to language)
* Supported by evidence that same statistical regularities can be learned for symbol sequences
Environmental approaches
Feedback from parents regarding grammar comes in 3 forms
* Expansion: repeating child’s sentence in a more correct/complete form
* Recast: rephrasing and repeating the content of a child’s sentence but with a slightly different structure
* Clarification questions: questions that signal that the listener did not understand the child’s utterance and request that they have another try at speaking the message
What are the 3 skills of pragmatic development and how are they shown in children’s language development?
Conversational skills
* Collective monologues (Piaget): the way young children often begin to converse with their peers, taking turns to speak but each focusing on different themes and topics taking little notice of the listener’s responses or actions
Speaker skills
* adjusting speech to audience e.g. adults vs younger children etc
Listener skills
* Comprehension monitoring: evaluating the clarity and quality of a spoken message and knowing when it is appropriate to ask for clarification if a spoken message is unclear
What is the Whorfian hypothesis and how does it relate to language development? How is the hypothesis supported?
Whorfian hypothesis: language determines way we perceive and think about the world (Whorf, 1956)
* Strong version not supported as children often learn concepts before they have labels for them
* Weak version more supported, conceptual development not dependent entirely on previous language learning but vocabulary that allows you to express concepts can assist early learning
What are the 2 overarching approaches to grammar acquisition? What are the core beliefs of each?
Nativist (domain specific) approach:
* language is too complex to be learnt
* children are born with an innate knowledge of language
Interactionist (domain general) approach:
* language is learnable
* children acquire language by analysing their input using general learning principles
What are 2 theories under the Nativist approach? What is the support and criticism for these theories?
Skinner - learn through imitation of parents
Chomsky – innate language acquisition device
Support
* All children exposed to adult speech acquire language
* Unique to humans
* Complexity of language acquisition isn’t specific to culture/surroundings
* Children learning ASL impose own grammatical rules without being exposed to them (rules independent from any language spoken by parents or grammar rules exhibited in teaching ASL)
Criticism
* Narrow focus on grammar rule acquisition
* Receptive/comprehension side of speech focused on by can’t explain productive speech development
* Learning mechanisms for language are common to other cognitive systems
What are the cognitive and social learning mechanisms according to the interactionist approach to grammar acquisition
Cognitive processes: statistical learning, working memory
Social processes: joint attention, imitation (social learning)
How to Nativist and Interactionist approaches differ regarding the acquisition of passive vs active language?
Nativist
* know it but don’t show it (full competence & continuity assumption)
* complex grammatical processes required to form these sentences doesn’t mature until ~6YO (partial competence & discontinuity)
Interactionist
* late acquisition due to several factors relating to frequency of speech structure
* showed skills increased with increased exposure frequency to passive structure
