Prelinguistic Development and Word Learning

Question 1

Why study language development?

Answer 1

Speech allows the communication of ideas

Enables humans to work together to build the impossible

Question 2

Hockett’s Design Features of Language

Answer 2

Semanticity 
Arbitrariness 
Displacement 
Productivity 
Duality of patterning 
Discreteness 
Vocal auditory channel 
Broadcast transmission 
Rapid fading 
Interchangeability 
Total feedback 
Specialisation 
Traditional transition

Question 3

Arbitrariness

Answer 3

No necessary connection between the sounds used and the message being sent

Question 4

Displacement

Answer 4

The ability to communicate things that are not currently present

Question 5

Productivity

Answer 5

The ability to create new utterances from previously existing utterances

Question 6

Duality of patterning

Answer 6

Meaningless phonic segments (phonemes) are combined to make meaningful words, which in turn are combined again to make sentences

Question 7

Aspects of language

Answer 7

Phonology
Syntax/morphology
Semantics
Pragmatics

Question 8

Phonology

Answer 8

The sounds of language

Question 9

Syntax/morphology

Answer 9

The rules that control sentence formation and word endings (plural/past tense)

Question 10

Semantics

Answer 10

The meaning of individual words

Question 11

Pragmatics

Answer 11

The social use of language in context and social exchanges

Question 12

Phones

Answer 12

The different sounds in language

Question 13

Phonemes

Answer 13

The smallest segmental units of sound employed in a language to form meaningful contrasts between words

Question 14

Tonal phonemes

Answer 14

Using different tones of the same phoneme to mean different things

Question 15

Infants are born being able to perceive ______ used in world languages

Answer 15

All the sounds

Approximately 600 consonants and 200 vowels, plus tones

Question 16

What happens to the ability to perceive sounds in language?

Answer 16

Over the first year of life they tune into phonemic contrasts which are used in their language and tune out to the ones that aren’t

Question 17

Japanese _____ distinguish [ra] and [la], whereas Japanese ______ find this difficult as ________

Answer 17

8 month olds
1 year olds and adults
There is only one /r/ phoneme in Japanese

Question 18

Language ability from birth

Answer 18

Crying, involuntary sounds of bodily functions

Question 19

Language ability 2-4 months

Answer 19

Cooing and later laughing

Question 20

Language ability 4-7 months

Answer 20

Squeals, yells, raspberries, vowels, marginal babbling

Question 21

Language ability ~ 7 months

Answer 21

Sudden onset of reduplicated or canonical babbling eg. dada, guhguh

Question 22

Language ability ~ 10 months

Answer 22

Babbling comes to reflect frequent sounds in the ambient language

Question 23

Language ability ~ 1st birthday

Answer 23

Increase in rate of variegated babbling, eg. bag and production of longer strings of sounds with varied intonation and stress patterns

Question 24

McGillion et al (2017)

Answer 24

The age at which children begin to produce canonical babble predicts when they will produce words
And how many words they will be able to produce at 18 months

Question 25

Donnellan et al (in prep)

Answer 25

Caregivers’ responses to infant’s babble also predict word learning

Question 26

Range of infants vocalisation is limited due to….

Answer 26

Size and placement of tongue in relation to the vocal cavity
Neuromuscular limits on the movements of the tongue, which is adapted at birth for sucking and swallowing but not so able to produce fine articulatory movements

Question 27

Gaze following

Answer 27

Early in infancy infants begin to follow other people’s line of regard

Question 28

Gaze following at 18 months

Answer 28

Children can use gaze following to check where someone is looking in order to figure out the meaning of a new word
(Baldwin, 1991)

Question 29

When do infants become able to engage in joint attention

Answer 29

Around 9 months

Question 30

What is joint attention

Answer 30

Occurs when two (or more) people are attending to something and they are mutually aware that they are attending to it together

Question 31

Carpenter (1998)

Answer 31

Times spent in joint attention predicts later word learning

Question 32

When do infants begin to point?

Answer 32

Between 9 and 14 months

Question 33

What types of pointing do they do?

Answer 33

Imperatively - to tell someone to do something

Declaratively - to inform someone about something

Question 34

What does index finger pointing predict?

Answer 34

Later vocabulary learning

Colonnesi et al (2010

Question 35

When do babies start to produce their first word?

Answer 35

Around 10-15 months

Question 36

By the age of 6, children have something in the region of ______ words in their lexicon

Answer 36

10 - 14000

Question 37

The learning rate continues to accelerate until about ______ when children learn something like ____ new words a day

Answer 37

8 - 10 year

12

Question 38

Malapropisms

Answer 38

The mistaken use of a word in place of a similar sounding one

Question 39

Spoonerisms

Answer 39

Verbal error in which the speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words

Question 40

_____ is often ahead of their _______

Answer 40

Comprehension

Production

Question 41

Inability to produce certain sounds

Answer 41

Some children struggle to produce certain sounds such as ‘r’ and may end up saying something like “wabbit’ rather than “rabbit”

Question 42

Errors of scope

Answer 42

Underextension - car only means the family car

Overextension - daddy means any adult male, dog means any four legged animal

Question 43

Quine’s (1960) Indeterminacy of Translation Problem

Answer 43

The problem of determining which of a large number of possible meanings a word is used to convey

Question 44

The Gavagai Problem

Answer 44

Argument that word learning needs to be constrained so that children don’t run into Quine’s (1960) indeterminacy of translation problem

Question 45

Solutions to Gavagai Problem

Answer 45

Children have constraints on what words will refer to
Children use associative learning across contexts
Children use social cues to meaning
Children use linguistic cues to meaning

Question 46

There are _____ individual differences in rate of word learning

Answer 46

Enormous

Question 47

Lower SES children tend to start school with _____ language skills, and this predicts later outcomes

Answer 47

Weaker

Question 48

Contingent talk

Answer 48

Child directed speech that is contingent on infant’s focus on attention both semantically (about what the infant is attending to) and temporally (in response to infant vocalisation)