Language Development in Childhood Flashcards
(23 cards)
Language Acquisition
Rules vs Creativity
Learning language involves rule learning but also productivity
* Children have to learn the rules of their language to communicate successfully
- To express new ideas, children have to learn how to combine sounds, words, and phrases creatively
Language Acquisition
Comprehension Vs Production
Children tend to understand more than they can say themselves
Production tends to lag behind comprehension
* Possibly because of difficulty of articulation
- Possibly because of memory difficulties
Vocabulary and Semantics
Reference Problem in Acquiring Words
Children have to realise that words represent / refer to objects and that words can be used to label things and events
- 6-9 months: Recognise familiar words
- 2 years: Typically solved
- Children experience naming insight
- Once they solve this problem, vocabulary rapidly grows (Vocabulary Spurt)
Vocabulary and Semantics
Extention Problem in Acquiring Words
Children have to learn the limits of mapping and the semantics
Typical Errors:
* Under-extension errors → Child says dog to refer to spot the pet
- Over-extension errors → Child says dog to refer to all dogs, other 4 legged animals, all soft toys, pictures of animals, etc.
- Overlap errors → Child says dog to refer to pet dog, cats, cows, and bears but not toy dogs
- Mismatch errors → Child says dog to refer to their teddy bear
Vocabulary and Semantics
Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis
Children use their knowledge of language to learn language
- Direct correspondence between the structure of events and syntactic structure that expresses events
Vocabulary and Semantics
Messenger et al. (2015)
Learning verb syntax via listening
* Consistent with syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis
- Children can use language to learn basic meanings for new words
* Further implications: By 2 years, children must be able to make sense of basic syntax (How words are combined in sentences)
Vocabulary and Semantics
Combining Words in Sentences
12-24 months: One word stage
* One word utterances = holophrases (Mean more than one word)
- “Cat”, “Up”, etc.
24 months +: Two-word stage
* Telegraphic speech → function words and morphemes omitted`
~30 months +: Three-four word + stage
* Children beginning to use morphology to signal number and tense
* Children make over-regularisation errors
- “These my cars”, “Nana goed home”, etc.
- Learning rules and trying to apply
3-4 years +: Increasingly long and complex sentences
Theories of Language Development
Nature vs Nurture
Nature: Language specific areas of the brain
* How much is hard-wired is subject to debate
Nurture: Early exposure to language is critical
* How much and what type of language is subject to debate
Theories of Language Development
Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device
Nativist Theory
Learning and experience cannot account for all aspects of language learning, there must be an innate knowledge (universal grammar)
Two Key Arguments:
* Speed and Uniformity of Development
- Children acquire language quickly
- Early comprehension suggests early knowledge
- Children’s early language follows rules
- Universal stages of development, despite input differing between individuals
- Poverty of the Stimulus
- Input of language is not always grammatical
- Input language does not provide sufficient information to extract grammatical rules
- Parents do not correct errors or explain language
Must be an innate driving since everyone seems to acquire language as quickly as they do
Theories of Language Development
Evidence-Based Language Development
Empiricist Theory
Language is a behvaiour learned entirely from the environment and there is no innate knowledge
* Interaction-Based: Learning from social interactions (learning closely matched the input)
* Statistical-Based: Language is learnt by tracking the nature of the input (finding the patterns in the language)
Language is learned through cognitive and social processes
* Statistical learning
* Infant-directed speech
* Interaction and implicit correction
- Parents rarely correct their children’s errors, but correction is rarely successful
- Recasting: Parents provide indirect feedback to correct errors (more effective)
Syntax and Morphology
How do Children Learn to Combine Words?
Tree Diagram
* Speakers acquire and store representations of structure based on abstract categories
* Syntax: Structures have rules
Syntax and Morphology
Different Hypotheses to How Children Learn to Acquire Words
Children are born with innate knowledge of basic language rules or basic processes to support language acquistion
* Allows them to acquire syntax rules very easily
Children have to learn the language rules from their experience with language
* Takes time and is a gradual process
* Have to find the words first and then gradually extend to abstract rules
Syntax and Morphology
Golinkoff et al. (1987)
Combining Words in Comprehension
Preferential looking method
* 28 months: Watch two videos of different events and hear sentences that match only one
- Have to use sentence structure to understand which video is being referred to
- Toddlers look reliably longer at the matching video
- 17 month olds also passed
Could they have already knew about the word “tickle”?
Syntax and Morphology
Naigles (1990)
Children use syntax to learn verb meaning
* 25 month old toddlers looked longer at the matching video even when the sentence had a made up word
* 19 month olds pass the same kind of test too
Syntax and Morphology
Akhtar (1999)
Combining Words in Production
2-4 year olds taught a new verb in a “Weird Word Order” task
* 4 years: Used English word order
* 2&3 years: Copied weird word order with the new word but not familiar words
Syntax and Morphology
Syntactic Priming
Unconscious repetition of syntactic structure, but not lexical content, across successive utterances
* Related to activation of abstract representations of syntactic structures
If children use this, suggests they have acquired that representation
Syntax and Morphology
Brannigan & Messenger (2016)
Syntactic Priming
3-4 year olds on syntactic priming picture description tasks
* Children produced more passive structure when they heard passive primes than when they heard active primes
Bilingualism
Kinds of Bilingualism
- Simultaneous Bilingualism: Acquire 2 languages at the same time
- Sequential Bilingualism: Acqurire one language first, second one added later
- Balance Bilingualism: Equal competence in both
- Heritage Language Speaker: Heritage (minority) language is first language; Societal (majority) language as a second language
Bilingualism
Unitary Language Hypothesis
One System or Two?
Bilingual children do not distinguish their two languages at early stages of development
* Starts with one language system, then two lexicons but one syntax system, then two separate lexicons and two separate syntax systems
Bilingualism
Language Mixing
Evidence for Unitary Language Hypothesis
Bilingual children mix languages
* Some studies suggest it decreases with age
Not evidence for confusion
* Mix languages because they are still acquiring the vocabulary in both languages
* Common amongst bilinguals, including adults (Code Switching)
* Children do it because adults do and it serves important communicative functions
Bilingualism
Autonomous Systems Theory
One System or Two?
Separate development hypothesis
* Children learn two languages independently
* The two languages have little influence on each other
Bilingualism
Interdependent Systems Theory
One System or Two?
Children’s development of one language influences the development of the other
* The two languages interact
Bilingualism
Cross-Linguistic Influence
Where language differs in some way and children’s language production in language A resembles elements of language B
* Italian is a pro-drop language so bilingual Italian children produce more pronouns in Italian than monolingual children
