Task 4 Flashcards
(44 cards)
What is bootstrapping?
using existing knowledge to facilitate acquisition of novel abilities
What is functional reorganization?
changes in perceptual sensitivity occurring in the first year of life. Refers to developing patterns of discrimination in accordance with functional categories in the native language, not necessarily a loss of perceptual ability.
What is genuine word?
the pairing between a phonetically specified sound pattern and a concept.
What are proto-words?
pairing of an underspecified sound pattern & a specific object.
Initial perceptual biases are present from birth.
Describe it in relation to language development.
Preference for mother’s voice & speech over acoustically matched non-speech, discrimination of lexical vs. grammatical words, sensitivity to phonetic cues indicating word boundaries.
When do perceptual-based object categorization develop?
4 months
When do language-specific reorganization and statistical input develop?
6-12 months
What are language spacific reorganization?
Decline in discrimination of non-native, sensitivity to native. Native language acts to reorganize perceptual sensitivity by selectively maximizing attention to phonetic features that distinguish native language categories.
When do conceptual categorization occur>
before 12 months
When do exhaustice categorization occur?
18 months
What are exhaustic categorization?
the ultimate development of perceptual categorization, the moment when infants realize that every object belongs to a category
When does naming on object categorization occur?
13 months
What are naming of object categorization?
Enhancements in categorization through naming.
this effect of naming might be limited to well-known object categories, and might not apply to the context of the acquisition of new words
What is segnmentation?
identifying words from sentence
Describe the development of segmentation.
Phonetically specified (7-8 monthss)
Prosodically specified (13.5 months)
Simultaneous learning of 2 words with differing phonetic feature (after 18 months)
What is statistical learning?
Infants are sensitive to freq, distribution, and other statistical properties of perceptual input speech.
Figure 1: changing frequency distribution of input can lead to modification in phonetic categories in infants aged 6-8 months.
Experience is said to play a role in language development.
Name 3 ways in which experience can influence language development
Hearing impairments
Second language learning
Second language learner -exposure effect
How can hearing impairments affect language development?
Language delay are more likely for infants with partial or total hearing loss
Moreover, infants born deaf and then fitted with cochlear implants at 17–24 months (and tested 2–18 months later) recover the ability to discriminate phonetic distinctions, but remain compromised in their ability to make word– object associations in comparison with infants who had implants from 7–15 months
What are the 4 categories of perceptual basis of word learning?
Word segmentation
Word forms
Pairing words and objects
Language specific reorganization-functional reorganization
Describe the development of word segmentation
Word segmentation
infants begin to segment words by 7–8 months of age; after being familiarized with words such as ‘cup’ and ‘dog’, infants listen longer to passages containing those words over passages containing other equally common words
At 7 months, English-learning infants pull out words that conform to the common English strong-weak stress pattern, like ‘DOCtor’, but do not segment weak strong words like ‘guiTAR’.
By 10 months, English learning infants can also segment weak-strong wo
‘transitional probability’, learning that syllables from within one word are more likely co-occur than syllables from separate words
Describe the development of word form
Word Forms
By 9–10 months of age infants show an increasing preference for word forms that conform to the phonological characteristics of the native language
In addition to language-specific constraints on word forms, infants also encode phonetic detail (e.g. ‘tup’ is not confused with ‘cup’) and indexical detail (such as speaker identity and emotional affect
By 10– 11 months, infants are able to recognize the word form across these indexical changes, as well as when syllabic stress changes
Infants of this age treat mispronounced words like real words, although only when these mispronunciations are perceptually confusable
Describe the development of pairing of words
Pairing words and objects
By 6 months of age, for example, infants associate highly frequent words, such as ‘Mommy’, and their referents
Over the next 8 months, infants develop cognitive and perceptual abilities that allow learning of new associations more quickly, and in increasingly unconstrained situations
8 months are able to link novel words to novel objects after only a few repetitions of the pairing, but require cross-modal synchrony between the presentation of the word and movement of the object
Learning associative links at 12 months still relies heavily on perceptual and social cues like visual salience and eye-gaze
The ability to form word–object links on the basis of cooccurrence alone, without facilitating social or temporal cues is evident by 13–15 months in laboratory tasks
At 14 months, infants’ ability to associate novel words with novel objects is still dependent on the contrastive saliency of the words themselves
17 months – regain access to phonetic sensitivity when learning novel pairings, mapping forms
Describe the functional reorganization
Native language acts to reorganize perceptual sensitivity by selectively maximizing attention to phonetic features that distinguish native language categories.
Phonological properties of native language are learned
Factors affective the reorganization: acoustic/articulatory characteristics of phonetic contrasts + similarity to those used in native language
What is word spurt?
the speeding up of vocabulary words around 18 months, with infants producing up to 9 new days a day.
