Midterm

Question 1

nature

Answer 1

[nativism/innateness] idea that that language is encoded in our dna, we are predisposed to it

Question 2

nurture

Answer 2

[empiricism/environment] idea that we are born as a blank slate and language is learned

Question 3

nature vs nurture debate - what is present when learning begins?

Answer 3

nature says that we have everything needed precoded, nurture says nothing

Question 4

n vs n - what kinds of mechanisms or predispositions drive acquisition?

Answer 4

look on paper

Question 5

n vs n - what kind of input drives acquisition?

Answer 5

look on paper

Question 6

n vs n - what kind of evidence supports each position

Answer 6

Evidence of innateness – Lenneberg 1967 -[defined characteristics of biological system]
1. behavior is not the result of a conscious decision
2. not triggered by external events
3. direct teaching has little effecti on language acquisition
4. there is a set of milestones – even if deaf and stuff
5. there is a critical period for acquisition
learners go beyond input
pidgins and creoles – kids introducing own structure for language
kids who say things they haven’t heard before, going beyond the input

Evidence for experience
critical period
you learn your own language
once need to speak goes away can actually lose knowledge/ability to speak
once you learn one by the end of the critical period will be able to learn more

Question 7

poverty of the stimulus

Answer 7

poverty of the stimulus – kids hear few sentence tokens than they know and understand
can’t just be imitating or memorizing
Even as adults we can make up sentences we haven’t heard before

Question 8

learners who go beyond their input

Answer 8

learners go beyond input
pidgins and creoles – kids introducing own structure for language
kids who say things they haven’t heard before, going beyond the input

Question 9

critical period

Answer 9

idea that there is a certain amount of time when kids have to acquire language or lose the ability to learn language fluently

Question 10

Hart & Risley [1995]

Answer 10

link between amount of speech kids hear at home and school readiness, the more they heard at home

Question 11

CHILDES database

Answer 11

Child language data exchange system - a database so linguists can easily share and analyze data from experiments

Question 12

MLU

Answer 12

mean length of utterance, average length of phrases

Question 13

MLT

Answer 13

mean length of turn, how many phrases said per turn

Question 14

MLT ratio

Answer 14

ratio of kids mlt/mom mlt

Question 15

TTR

Answer 15

type-to-token ratio, ratio of type [different words]/ tokens [total numbers of words]

Question 16

what do kids have to learn about the sounds of their language and how?

Answer 16

• word/morpheme segmentation
• phonotactics of language - how able to combine sounds in a language [borrowings excluded]
• sounds/phonemes of the language and how to produce them
• intonation/stress

Question 17

vowels

Answer 17

nope

Question 18

consonants

Answer 18

nope

Question 19

IPA chart - places of articulation

Answer 19

labial

Question 20

IPA - manners of articulation

Answer 20

stop, nasal

Question 21

IPA - voicing + VOT

Answer 21

voiced/voiceless, vot = voiced onset time, amount of time from when stop is released to voicing begins

Question 22

IPA - natural classes

Answer 22

obstruents - obstructing air flow causing more air flow in vocal tract k, f, sonorants - continuous - n, s

Question 23

categorical perception: identification vs discrimination

Answer 23

the unconscious automatic grouping of continuous stimulus into categories. once you define category, your ability to discriminate within worses

Question 24

babbling, stages of

Answer 24

5 stages

1. reflexive crying and vegetative sounds - from birth
2. cooing and laughter - 6-8weeks
3. vocal play 16-30weeks, includes sounds that wont be relevant in language
4. reduplicated/cannonical babbling, 6-9 months
5. varigated babbling/ non reduplicated babbling, adding prosody/intonation - 9months

Question 25

markedness of speech sounds

Answer 25

unmarked sounds appear sooner and more often than more marked sounds, jakobsen 1968

Question 26

tuning of phonological system to sounds of the ambient/native language

Answer 26

from 9-12 months, start realizing what sounds are produced in their language, and their ability to distingush other sounds not found in their language diminshes

Question 27

infant-directed speech

Answer 27

higher pitch, clear long vowels, short utterances, slower, simple vocabulary, repeat stuff, variation in intonation, interactive, less grammar to parse, talk about things here and now, kids are shown to prefer it to non infant directed speech

Question 28

what do kids have to learn about the words of their language and how do they learn it?

Answer 28

sound form - how to say it and correctly, what it means, what it doesn't mean, syntactic knowledge - how to use in sentence, part of speech/grammatical category, morphology

Question 29

phonological bootstrapping

Answer 29

theory that infants can find cues and properties of speech stream to find words and grammar

Question 30

prosodic bootstrapping

Answer 30

info from intonation, stress pattern [pauses in speech stream to help them segment]

Question 31

definition of a word

Answer 31

combination of sound and meaning, arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning that can be used to refer

Question 32

phonological processes that lead to systematic pronunciation errors, rule ordering

Answer 32

``` consonant cluster reduction [deletion of a consonant in cluster] substitution [replacing] harmony [match to another part of word] reduplication [repeating] final consonant deletion weak syllable deletion voicing/devoicing ```

Question 33

production vs comprehension

Answer 33

able to understand before able to actually produce sounds

Question 34

phonological and semantic properties of early words

Answer 34

easy sounds, more nouns than verbs

Question 35

overextensions/underextensions

Answer 35

overextension - 'goggie' can mean any animal, underextension, 'baba' - may mean their bottle and only their bottle

Question 36

Quine's problem

Answer 36

no 1:1 world/word mapping - the mapping between words and the world is ambiguous

Question 37

word-to-world mapping

Answer 37

applying words to things in the worlds

Question 38

fast mapping

Answer 38

children can form hypotheses about the meaning of a new word after only one exposure - carey & bartlett [1978]

Question 39

assumptions/constraints/cues/tools that guide word learning

Answer 39

whole object assumption, taxonomic assumption, mutual exclusivity

Question 40

Whole Object Assumptions

Answer 40

a novel label refers to an entire object, not to a properrty or a part of the object

Question 41

Taxonomic Assumption [superordinate, basic, and subordinate-level categories]

Answer 41

labels refer to things of the same kind, specifically, to things of the same basic level kind superordinate - animal basic - rabbit, dog, cat subordinate - golden retriever, collie, poodle

Question 42

Mutual Exclusivity

Answer 42

different words refer to different [categories of] things | allows us to categorize objects, override the whole-object assumption

Question 43

language-specific vs domain general processes or constraints

Answer 43

are these processes specific to language or applied to all human? learning

Question 44

social cues to word meaning

Answer 44

pointing at stuff, only talk about things that are there, eyegaze, gestures

Question 45

nouns vs verbs

Answer 45

nouns name physical items, verbs are more ambiguous, concept of imaging

Question 46

syntactic bootstrapping

Answer 46

children can use cues from the linguistic [syntactic] context in which a new word is used to help them figure out its meaning

Question 47

Naigles 1990 study - syntactic bootstrapping

Answer 47

-2yo [who are not yet producing very many verbs!) can use cues from syntax to figure out which of two simulationeous events is being labeled by a novel verb transitive frame = causative event intransitive frame = noncausative event -preferential looking task -kids familiarized to two simulationeous events, - causative and continuous event the duck is gorping the bunny! vs the duck and the bunny are gorping! - kids heard one of these when in realtion to picutre after familiarized, shown two videos, have to find gorping and what they think it means seem to find the sentence that matched to their sentence

Question 48

timeline of milestones in phonological and lexical development

Answer 48

look at paper

Question 49

experimental techniques - old diary studies

Answer 49

description and example

Question 50

new diary studies

Answer 50

recording everything they say

Question 51

corpus mining

Answer 51

trying to figure out what words kids know?

Question 52

habituation

Answer 52

exposed to a stimulus until they become habituated to it, see this habituation 4 different ways

Question 53

heart-rate monitoring

Answer 53

watching heart rate, faster for new, slower for habituated

Question 54

high-amplitude/non-nutritive sucking

Answer 54

measuring sucking rate, faster when interested in stimulus

Question 55

conditioned head-turn

Answer 55

conditioned to certain sound lighting up box

Question 56

head-turn preference paradigm

Answer 56

while child is looking at center, plays speakers and lights, english and russian playing from speaker, experiment will turn on one light and speaker then recenter him then play the other, and will keep doing until kid realizes which english comes from, next the kid gets to pick which they hear, head turn preference is which the kid turns to more often and how long they hear it

Question 57

preferential looking

Answer 57

see which they look at most, this is the one they are not habituated to

Question 58

object manipulation

Answer 58

holding up objects and asking questions

Question 59

human subjects paradigm

Answer 59

yeah i dont know

Question 60

Gleitman & Newport [1995]

Answer 60

1. general issue being addressed and why it matters 2. methodology used 3. what they found and what the implications of that finding are - concepts not numbers

Question 61

Kisilevsky et al. [2003]

Answer 61

Kisilevsky et all 2003 Q: while in utero, can foetuses distinguish theirmother's voice from the voice of a different female? Methods: 2 min recording, spliced with silence 2 min before and 2 min after, 30 kids heard their own mother's voice and 30 other woman's voice, placed speaker 10cm above abdomen played the voices measures to tell how kid can tell if recognize voice or noticeable fetal body movement – didnt find really correlation fetal heart rate – found some, gave silence at first to make sure they all started with the same heart rate children = post foetuses

Question 62

Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk & Vigorito [1971]

Answer 62

looking at morpheme boundaries and how kids perceive them, habituation study with nonnutritive sucking, recognized stimulus as separate phoneme, but within VOT did not recognize stimulus as different, kids can distinguish voiced from voiceless stop consonants even at such a young age, and additionally they are capable of perceiving stops with VOT within the same phonemic range as belonging to the same category, is evidence that humans are wired on some level to acquire this distinction, strong evidence to innateness theories.

Question 63

Werker & Tees [1984]

Answer 63

me and delana - sets out timeline of language development, shows that children can distinguish contrasts that dont appear in their language, head turn paradigm, testing thompson contrast, then testing hindi and thompson and english contrast, adults can tell difference in own language, children can usually tell in both, between 8-12 lose ability to distinguish sounds not heard/contrasted in this language, may help them focus on a particular language

Question 64

Maye [2003]

Answer 64

commentary of werker and tees, helped elucidate a timeline of language development, still had a lot of questions, especially about second language development

Question 65

Saffran, Aslin & Newport [1996]

Answer 65

strings of syllables within random syllables, dishabituation studies with head turn preference, transitional probability, where the syllable boundary most likely is depending on language

Question 66

Aslin, Saffran & Newport [1998]

Answer 66

different made up syllables with real words interspersed, habituation study with head turn preference, hypothesis was that they would be more attentive to the part words than the words in their language, hypothesis was confirmed, provides evidence that one of the methods used by infants to segment speech is conditional probability.

Question 67

Bergelson & Swingley [2012]

Answer 67

since many kids dont say their first word until about a year of age, it is believed that kids dont understand words until that age either, helps set a timeline for infant language development, [conditioned head turn/head-turn preference paradigm?] 'language-guided looking', or 'looking-while-listening', infants were shown a number of pictures while their parents said the name of one/sentence, majority of the kids got most of the words, at 6-9 months, infants have already begun to link words with their referants over a range of food and body-part terms, were better at extremely stripped down context could also understand related alternatives, and have some idea of how language generally works.

Question 68

Waxman & Markow [1995]

Answer 68

linking of noun categories; hypo - 12 to 13 month old infants are capable of linking words to meaning and they expect that a new word applied to an object will refer to that object, familiarization phase of objects, kids familiarized quicker when its part of a category, understand categories, especially at superordinate level, categorization behavior is not evident in unrelated groups of words, in higher vocab group the novel word and novel adj helped them recognize categories at superordinate level, in low vocab group neither helped , 12 month olds do not distinguish between nouns and adjectives, link between infants vocabulary and their ability to connect words with object categories, start to be able to apply words to larger category

Question 69

Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman & Lederer [1999]

Answer 69

testing adults on vocabulary learning, showed silent videos with beep, students were supposed to identify what word was, did better when had context, nouns easier because of imageability

Question 70

Hoff chapters 1, 4, 5

Answer 70

a

Question 71

Videos - An interview with Brian MacWhinney of CHILDES [dilara kiran 9-8]

Answer 71

sharin stuff with peeps, wanted to collect data woot

Question 72

The Human Language, part 2

Answer 72

how do kids learn language, mimicing vs innateness

Question 73

Deb Roy TED talk

Answer 73

set up cameras in his house, gaga -> wawa

Question 74

Patricia Kuhl TED talk

Answer 74

statistics on language, japanese vs american infants, video and audio no learning, social part of brain controls statistic taking

Question 75

phonotactics

Answer 75

The set of allowed arrangements or sequences of speech sounds in a given language.