Week 1 - phonological perception and discrimination Flashcards
(33 cards)
Areas of language development
– Phonology: the study of sound as a linguistic system
– Prosody: the study of how our intonation affects language
– Lexicon: totality of the words in a language
– Morphemes: sounds combined to make units which are not full words e.g., ‘ment’ in ‘government’
– Morphology: morphemes are combined to make larger words, phrases or sentences e.g., ‘govern’ and ‘ment’ for ‘government’
– Syntax: the rules of language
– Pragmatics: social use of language
The “Cat in the Hat” study (DeCaspar and Spence, 1986)
- Mothers 7 ½ months pregnant read one story to their unborn babies
- Twice a day until birth (average of 67 times)
- Each mother read aloud 1 of 3 variations of the same story
- Story 1: first part of the original story
- Story 2: adaption – same rhythm, different words ‘The Dog in the Fog’
- Story 3: adaption – different rhythm, different words ‘The king, the mice and the cheese’
- Stories had similar length and shared 60-80% vocabulary
- At 3 days old the babies heard recordings of all three stories
- Strong preference shown for the story read to them before birth
Based on the findings DeCaspar and Spence believed that the babies were picking up prosodic aspects of their mothers’ speech (intonation) and could process, recall, and recognise these after birth.
The High Amplitude Sucking Paradigm (HAS Paradigm)
– Non-nutritive sucking: dummy connected to a computer via a tube – tube measures differences in pressure
– Pressure indicates sucking – changes in strength of pressure indicate changes in sucking rate
– The sucking rate is our dependent variable (what we are interested in measuring)
Rhythm-based language discrimination hypothesis
infants can discriminate between two foreign languages based on intonation
Vowel-based discrimination Hypothesis:
infants can discriminate between languages based on the rhythmic representation of the language:
Vowel-based discrimination Hypothesis:
infants can discriminate between languages based on the rhythmic representation of the language:
Evidence:
Infants can discriminate between:
• Stress-timed and syllable times languages (English/Catalan, English/Italian)
• Stress-timed vs mora-timed languages (English/Japanese)
Children do not discriminate languages within the same class e.g., English/Dutch
Bertoncini et al, 1998
Habituation a group of infants to a set of four syllables sharing the same vowel (bi, si, li, mi)
Habituation of another group of infants to a set of four syllables sharing the same consonant (bi ba, bo ,bƏ)
Experimental phase – same sequence plus a new syllable pairing:
• Either the vowel with the syllables used in the habituation phase (bi si li mi di)
• OR the consonant with the syllables used in the habituation phase (bi ba bo bƏ bu)
If the di/bu is perceived as a new stimulus infants sucking rate should increase
Findings:
• Infants detected the presence of a new syllable when the vowel of the new syllable differed e.g., bi ba bo bƏ bu
• Infants did not detect the new syllable when the consonant differed e.g., bi si li mi di
Werker and Tees (1984)
This indicates that we are born with the ability to differentiate between any sound contrasts even ones we have never heard before, but this ability is lost as we grow older.
Showed that 6–8-month-olds are ‘universal listeners’ as they can discriminate Hindi contrasts as well as Hindi-speaking adults.
Our ability to differentiate between phonemic contrasts outside of our native language diminishes at the end of the first year of life
But the ability to differentiate between phonemic contrasts within our native language is maintained at 100%
We become attuned to sound contrasts in our own language and our discrimination of native contrasts improves with age.
Pigdins and Creoles
- Pidgins – languages that are created from a mix of lexical items from one or more languages but with its own, primitive grammar.
- Hawaiian Pidgin English arose on sugarcane plantations in Hawaii during the early 20th century when immigrant workers from Japan, Korea, and the Philippines came together; they shared no language with one another (Bickerton, 1981, 1984)
- Creole: a language that used to be a Pidgin and subsequently became a native language for some speakers (Todd, 1974)
- Swahili may be the result of contact between Arabic and Bantu language (Todd, 1974)
• The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (Bickerton, 1984)
humans are endowed with an innate skeletal grammar that constitutes part or all of the human species-specific capacity for syntax.
Methods of neurolinguistic investigation
- Lesion method – correlate bits of missing brain with bits of missing psychological functioning (Damasio, 1988)
- Studying split-brain patients provides a unique window into how each hemisphere functions
- Dichotic listening task – presenting information to the right and left side of the brain to see if the person reports hearing the information presented in the right ear if the stimuli is presented to the left hemisphere.
- Functional brain imaging methods – present stimuli to patients and obtain data on where the brain is most active as it processes those stimuli
- EEG/ERP – measures electrical activity in the brain via electrodes on the scalp. The location of ERPs associated with different mental activities is taken as a clue to the area of the brain responsible for those activities (Caplan, 1987).
- Optical topography – light emitting and light detecting devices are placed on the scalp at particular landmarks and measures of light transmission are taken as evidence of oxygenation of the blood and thus neural activity occurring between the emitter and the detector (Pena, Maki, Kovacic et al., 2003).
The equipotentiality hypothesis – at birth the left and right hemispheres have equal potential for acquiring language (Bishop, 1983)
• Evidence: The degree of asymmetry in brain function increases with development and the ability of the right hemisphere to take over language functions for a damaged left hemisphere is greater in children than in adults
– at birth, the left and right hemispheres have equal potential for acquiring language (Bishop, 1983)
• Evidence: The degree of asymmetry in brain function increases with development and the ability of the right hemisphere to take over language functions for a damaged left hemisphere is greater in children than in adults
Invariance hypothesis
– left hemisphere has the adult specialisation for language from birth and that lateralization does not change with development
• Evidence
• Neuroimaging studies of intact children suggest some cortical specialisation from birth
• Developmental changes in which hemisphere handles language may also arise from changes in how children process language as they gain expertise. For example, experienced musicians showed a right hemisphere advantage for music whereas naïve listeners showed a left ear advantage.
• Children who suffer early brain damage also subsequently experience seizures, so it is difficult to untangle the effects of the initial brain damage from the effects of the seizures (Rowe, Levine, Fisher and Goldin-Meadow, 2009)
The critical period hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1967)
- Lenneberg – language acquisition is an ‘age-limited potential’
- A biologically determined period during which language acquisition must occur
- Critical periods within other species e.g., imprinting in birds
- Some environmental input is necessary for normal development, but biology determines when the organism is responsive to that input
Evidence
- Wild Child (Victor of Averyon) suffered early isolation and was not successful in acquiring normal language
- Isabelle – lived in a dark room with her deaf-mute mother. Was able to acquire language with training. At 8 she was described as having a normal IQ and not easily distinguished from ordinary children of her age (Brown, 1958)
- Genie – social isolation until 13, no language. At 17 she scored in the range of a normal 5-year-old on standardised language tests. Vocabulary and semantic skills exceeded her syntactic skills. Deficient grammar in production and comprehension. Dichotic listening tests showed that language was a right hemisphere activity for Genie.
- Suggests that at age 13 a left hemisphere that has never been used for language has lost that capacity
how heritable are different types of language development?
Who are the KE family?
- Heritability of grammatical development was 39% and 25% for lexical development (Dale et al., 2000)
- Genetic factors account for 26% of the variance in syntax and 5% of the variance in vocabulary among normally developing twins (Stromsworld, 2006)
- Larger environment effects on lexical development than on grammatical development (Arriaga et al., 1998)
- Individual differences in children’s language skills are to a degree genetically based
- The importance of genetic factors differs depending on the age of the child and the aspect of language
- Some areas of language development are likely to rely more on environment e.g., vocab while others more on genetics e.g., grammar
- Different genes relevant to language may be activated at different points in development and schooling
- KE family 16/30 family members were seriously language impaired (Gopnik and Crago,1991)
- A mutation that effects the encoding of a particular protein known as FOXP2 which affects the formation of neural structures that are important for speech and language
- No one gene for language development
- Evidence suggests that in most cases of language impairment the cause is multiple genes in interaction with the environment (Stromswold, 1998)
Universal Grammar
Chomsky/generativist/nativist - human beings are innately endowed with a system of richly structured linguistic knowledge.
― New-borns come into the world with a genetically determined left lateralised cortical organisation, like that recruited by adults, which responds specifically to continuous speech
Evidence
― This anatomical organisation is present in preterm infants as early as 28 weeks gestation – unlikely to be influenced by the environment
― UG specifies that all languages have lexical categories and functional categories. Constraints hold across languages suggests that languages are set up in a way that human biology expects them to be (Gleitman and Liberman, 1995)
― Structure dependency hypothesis - the linguistic principle that grammatical processes function primarily on structures in sentences, not on single words or sequences of words
Musso et al., (2003) asked participants to judge legal or illegal sentences
The more accurate the participants were in judging sentences obeying legal rules, the more Broca’s area increased in activity. For illegal rules Broca’s area activation decreased as accuracy increased
This indicates that an area of the cortex is dedicated to processing hierarchical linguistic structures and recognises in linguistic material those rules that are structure dependent
This evidence comes from adults, that does not prove that children are born with the same ability
― Principles and parameters model (Chomsky)
– the model of human language endorsed in UG
― Principles encode those invariant properties of language; parameters encode the properties that vary from one language another
― They can be thought of as switches that must be turned on or off
Evidence for nature debate
― Children achieve linguistic milestones in parallel fashion and in a similar sequence regardless of the specific language they are exposed to
― At 6-8 months all children start to babble, at 10-12 months they speak their first words, at 20-24 months they begin to put words together
― Children exposed to sign language acquire language much as children exposed to oral language do, following a similar sequence of acquisition
― Deaf children born to late learners of American sign language (ASL) receive rudimentary linguistic input because their parents avoid complex structures and often omit functional morphemes. Despite this, these children achieve a more refined competence than their parents do
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Nicaraguan sign language – children took the raw material provided by the previous generation and structured it in a language like way and introduced consistency
― This language exhibited new grammatical structures and a morphological system of verbal inflection and spatial modulation, and the second cohort were more fluent in using NSL than the first (Senghas, 2003)
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Even when the language input is degenerate or absent e.g., some deaf children born to hearing families and therefore without access to a conventional sign language, have been reported to invent a home sign system so they can communicate with other deaf peers
― The invented gesture words are stable, can be decomposed into morphemes, and have an arbitrary relation with their referent
Evidence for the nurture debate
― Knowledge of language consists of knowledge of constructions used to perform communicative or socio-pragmatic functions
― Assumes that infants are born with a predisposition to learn language however, they are not born with a specific capacity dedicated to language. Language is learned based on general innate mechanisms e.g., the ability to read other human beings’ intentions, and to extract patterns (Tomasello, 2003)
― These enable children to understand the meaning and function of words and utterances and to perform a functionally motivated distributional analysis of the input
Critical period hypothesis
― Critical – the relevant ability can no longer be acquired once the optimal period is past
