Language devlopment Flashcards
(22 cards)
What is language
Systematic and conventional use of sounds 9or signs or written symbols) for the purpose of communication.
rules
Pragmatic knowledge:
social and cultural rules of language
Prosody:
How sounds are produced influences the comprehension of that language
eg. sarcasm
How does language develop
Agreement: Nature and nurture contribute to language development
Disagreement: How much nature and nurture contributes to language development
Explaining language nature
Nature: Neurobiological and genetic capabilities
Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas
Language comprehension: Wernicke’s
Speech: Broca’s
Aphasia
Neural signatures associated with language processing, language learning, and language production
Genetic evidence
Explaining language- nature
Evidence for the nativist perspective
- Poverty of the stimulus (POS) and learnability factor: you can’t possibly have learnt everything knowing the types of languages children produced
- Wug Test and language inference: making up words. Argument children would take the structure for the language the have been exposed put in this universal grammar. brain is developing hypothesis about the rules structure of the language they have use
Universality of stages and errors
- Even in deaf children
- Universal aspects of development occur despite cultural differences
Second language acquisition: early on in development it is easier to learn language
Sensitive periods and turning into own language
Achhillies
- Doesn’t describe the how
underestimates environment
Langue theories
Nurture
Language development occurs through imitation and reinforcement
Evidence for nurture/learning perspective
Imitation: including” overhearing” contexts
Reinforcement: Direct and alternative
Social interaction: Turn-taking, scaffolding, zone of proximal development
Child-direct speech: expansion
Achillies
- Full nurture perspective cannot account for syntax and novelty (Wug test)
Exposure is not enough - children must be active in their language learning
Child/infant directed speech or motherese
Short, simple sentences
Slow
Exaggerated prosody
Repetition and emphasis
Expansion when children use familiar words
Explaining language
Both nature and nurture
Before the first words: Infant speech perception
Begins in the womb
- Evidence from categorical perception experiment demonstrates that newborns discriminate between/ba/ and /pa
- Evidence from preferential sucking palagis demonstrate that two day old infants prefer their own language over a foreign language
Before the first words: Turning into sounds of their native language
Development changes in speech persecution continue to occur throughout the first year of an infant’s postnatal life
- Infant start narrowing down their language of choice
Infant speech perception: Word segmentation
By 7.5 months, infants can segment the speech stream into word boundaries
Learning through statical regularities
The next step: foundations of speech production
Infant produce sounds:
- Exercise their vocal cords
- Learn how airflow and tongue/mouth affect sounds
- Cooing starts around 6-8 weeks
Babbling (4-6 months)
- babababa
- Signing infants babble
- Babbling with an accent
- Creates a “feedback loop”, parents respond infant respond loop
Building a lexicon
Infants can understand words before they can produce them
by 10 months:
comprehend 50 word
- Words primarily learning through attentional mechanisms
Around 12 months
babies use linguistic and social cues to learn word meanings
babies start producing their first true words
- Words are holophrastic to start (single word sentences)
Building a lexicon
18 - 24 months
- Vocab spurt (50-150 words in 2 months)
Huge variability in quantity and quality
2-5 years
Vocab comprehension and production show continues growth
General learning mechanisms
Infant will form an association between a word and an object with many exposures
Usually infants under 12 months are driven by perceptual salience
People in an infants social world often help general learning mechanisms work by
- Using infant directed talk
- Using joint attention
- Playing labelling games - someone sensitive to wear an infant is looking
But 30 - 50% of the new rods children hear when they are looking at something else… so what happens then?
Bias/ Constraints
Whole object bias
Mutual exclusivity
If you know the name of something already that object has one name, so you assume that new object has a new name
Shape bias : how children learn category of objects
Linguistic context
Grammatical form influences interpretation of new words
Social Pragmatics
Paying attention to social cues provided by speakers in the world (e.g. gaze, intentions, knowledge)
Useful in ambiguous situations
By 24 months of age infants will reliably use eye gaze over other cues (i.e. temporal synchrony)
Infants’ use intentions
Children reproduce actions in the intentional case but in the accidental case
There- Interictal
or
Whoops - Accidental
18 0 24 month old
