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By what age have most children mastered the basic structure of their native language or languages?

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5 years of age sentences are grammatically correct as those produced by an average college student.

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Benefit of Language: Generativity

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By using the finite set of words in our vocabulary, we can generate an infinite number of sentences, expressing an infinite number of ideas

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Phonemes

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the units of sound in speech; a change in phoneme changes the meaning of the words (rake & lake differ by one phoneme)

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Morphemes

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The smallest units of meaning in a language, composed of one or more phonemes (dog contains one morpheme, dogs contains two morphemes)

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Semantic Development

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The learning of the system for expressing meaning in a language, including word learning

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Syntax

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Rules in a language that specify how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on) can be combined

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Syntactic Development

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The learning of the syntax of a language (how word and morphemes are combined)

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Pragmatic Development

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Acquiring an understanding of how language is typically used

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Metalinguistic Knowledge

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An understanding of the properties and function of language- that is, an understanding of language as language

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First step in language learning

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Figuring out the sounds of one's native language

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Prosody

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The characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns, and so forth with which a language is spoken

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Speech Perception

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Involves... - Figuring out the sounds of one's native language - Distinguishing among the speech sounds that make a difference in a given language (Bat vs. Pat)

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Categorical Perception

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The perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories

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Voice Onset Time (VOT)

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The length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating (Shorter for b and p)

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Infant Study involving speech perception

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1 and 4 month olds sucked on a pacifier hooked up to a computer. The harder they sucked, the more often they'd hear repetitions a single speech sound. After hearing the same sound repeatedly, the babies gradually sucked less enthusiastically (habituation). Then a new sound was played. If the infants' sucking rate increased in response to the new sound, the researchers inferred that the infants discriminated the new sounds from the old one (dishabituation)

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Interesting finding from speech perception study

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Interesting Finding: Researchers have established that infants show categorical perception of numerous speech sounds. A fascinating outcome of this research is the discovery that young infants actually make more distinctions than adults do. Infants can distinguish between phonemic contrasts made in all the languages of the world

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Developmental changes in speech perception: What happens the last months of their first year? What have infants lost?

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Infants increasingly home in on the speech sounds of their native language, and by 12 months of age, they have "lost" the ability to perceive the speech sounds that are not part of it

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Developmental changes in speech perception: Study

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- At 6 to 8 months of age, English-learning infants readily discriminated between the sounds they heard; they could tell one Hindi syllable from another, and they could also distinguish between two sounds in Nthlakapmx - At 10 to 12 months of age, however, the infants no longer perceived the differences they had detected a few months before. Two Hindi syllables that had previously sounded different to them now sounded the same

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Study with ASL Signs

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4 month olds are able to discriminate between highly similar ASL signs that are differentiated by the shape of the hand. However, by 14 months of age, only infants who were learning ASL were able to detect the difference between the hand shapes; those who were not learning ASL had lost their ability to make the perceptual discrimination

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After the age of 8 months...

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Infants begin to specialize in their discrimination of speech sounds, retaining their sensitivity to sounds in the native language they hear every day, while becoming increasingly less sensitive to nonnative speech sounds

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Word Segmentation

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The process of discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech. They begin this process during the second half of their first year.

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Study: Using a head-turn procedure designed to asses infants' auditory preferences

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1. 7 months olds first listened to passages of speech in which a particular word was separated from sentence to sentence 2. After listening to these sentences several times, infants were tested using the head-turn preference procedure to see whether they recognized the words repeated in the sentences 3. In this method, flashing lights mounted near two loudspeakers located on either side of an infant are used to draw the infant's attention to one side or the other 4. As soon as the infant turns to look at the light, an auditory stimulus is played through the speaker, and it continues as long as the infant is looking in that direction 5. The length of time the infant spends looking at the light- and hence listening to the sound- provides a measure of the degree to which the infant is attracted to that sound 6. Researchers found that infants listened longer to words that they had heard in the passages of fluent speech, as compared with words that never occurred in the passages 7. This result indicates that the infants were able to pull the words out of the stream of speech

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Distributional Properties

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The phenomenon that in any language, certain sounds are more likely to appear together than are others

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Study: Distributional Properties

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-Infants listened to a 2-minute recording of four different three-syllable "words" repeated in random order with no pauses between the "words" - Babies were presented with the "words" they had heard and with sequences that were not words - - Researchers found that infants discriminated between the words and the sequences that were not words. To do so, babies must have registered that certain syllables often occurred together in the sample of speech they heard

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When to infants begin to coo (producing long, drawn-out vowel sounds, such as "oohh" or "aahhh")?

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6 to 8 weeks of age

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When does babbling begin?

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Between 6 to 10 months of age, but on average at around 7 months

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Babbling

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Producing syllables made up of a consonant followed by a vowel that are repeated in strings

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What is a key component in the development of babbling? Deaf babies?

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Native language exposure - Deaf baby's babbling occurs very late and is quite limited - Infants exposed to ASL babble manually. The produce repetitive hand movements that are components of full ASL signs

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What is the first indication of communicative competence?

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Turn-taking - Example: Caregiver and baby take turns giving and receiving objects (peekaboo) - Alternate between active and passive role

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Intersubjectivity? Foundation

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- Two interacting partners share a mutual understanding - Foundation: Joint Attention- Established by parent's following the baby's lead, looking at and commenting on whatever the infant is looking at

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What age do infants understand the communicative nature of pointing?

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12 months

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When do infants exhibit early word recognition?

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6-month-olds hear either "Mommy" or "Daddy" and look toward the appropriate person.

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Study: Early Word Recognition

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- Using a computer monitor, they showed infants pairs of pictures of common foods and body parts and tracked the infants' eye gaze when one of the pictures was named. - They found that even 6 months olds looked to the correct picture significantly more often than would be expected by chance, demonstrating that they recognized the names of these items. - Researchers also found that 15 month olds waited until they had heard the whole word to look at the target objects. 24 month olds looked at the correct object after hearing only the first part of its label, just like adults do.

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What do most infants produce their first word?

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Between 10 to 15 months of age

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Productive Vocabulary

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The words a child is able to say are referred to as the child's productive vocabulary (parents, siblings, pets, cookies, juice, balls, night-night, hot) Usually nouns.

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Holophrastic Period

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The period when children begin using the words in their small productive vocabulary one word at a time (Using "Drink!" to express the desire for a glass of juice)

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Overextension

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The use of a given word in a broader context than is appropriate (When children use the word dog for any four-legged animal)

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When do infants reach a productive vocabulary of 50 or so words (vocabulary spurt)?

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18 months of age

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How do adults influence word learning?

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- Adults use IDS to make learning words easier for infants - Adults highlight new words (stress them or put them at the end of the sentence) - Repetition - Naming games where they ask a child to point to a series of named items (Where's your nose? Where's your ear?)

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Fast mapping

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The process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of a familiar and the unfamiliar word

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Pragmatic Cues

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Aspects of the social context used for learning (Example: Children use an adult's focus of attention as a cue to word meaning

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Study: Pragmatic Cues (Intentionality)

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2 year olds heard an experimenter announce, "Let's dax Mickey Mouse." The experimenter then performed two actions on a Mickey Mouse doll, one carried out in a coordinated and apparently intentional way, followed by a pleased comment ("There!"), and the other carried out in a clumsy and apparently accidental way, followed by an exclamation of surprise ("Oops!"). The children interpreted the novel verb dax as referring to the action the adult apparently intended to perform

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Study: Grammatical form of a novel word influences children's interpretation of it

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He showed preschool children a picture of a pair of hands kneading a mass of material in a container. The picture was described to one group of children as "sibbing," to another as "a sib," and to a third as "some sib." The children subsequently interpreted sib as referring to the action, the container, or the material, depending on which grammatical form of the word they had heard (2 and 3 year olds do this)

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Syntactic Bootstrapping

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The strategy of using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning

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Study: Syntactic Bootsrapping

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- Showed 2 year olds a videotape of a duck using its left hand to push a rabbit down into a squatting position while both animals waved their right arms in circles. - As they watched, some children were told "The duck is kradding the rabbit"; others were told "The rabbit and the duck are kradding." - All the children then saw tow videos side by side, one showing the duck pushing on the rabbit and the other showing both animals waving their arms in the air. - Instructed to "Find Kradding," the two groups looked at the event that matched the syntax they had heard while watching the initial video. - The children had arrived at different interpretations based on the structure of the sentence in which it was embedded

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What does it mean for language to be species- specific?

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Only humans acquire language in the normal course of development Example: Couple raised a chimpanzee (Vicki) with their own children. Although Vicki learned to comprehend some words and phrases, she produced virtually no recognizable words.

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What does it mean for language to be species-universal?

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Language learning is achieved by typically every developing infant across the globe

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Brain-Language Relationship (Right Hemisphere)

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- In 90% of people who are right-handed, language is represented and controlled by the left hemisphere - Detection of pitch

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Left-Hemisphere Specialization

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- Emerges very early in life - Newborns and 3-month-olds show greater activity in the left hemisphere when exposed to normal speech than when exposed to reversed speech or silence - Infants exhibit greater left-hemisphere activity when listening to speech but greater right-hemisphere activity when listening to non-speech sounds

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Critical Period for Language Development

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The early years constitute a critical period during which language develops readily. After this period (which ends sometime between age 5 and puberty), language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful

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Newport's hypothesis about why children are better language learners

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- "Less is more" hypothesis- perceptual and memory limitations cause young children to extract and store smaller chunks of the language than adults do - Because the crucial building blocks of language (the meaning-carrying morphemes) tend to be quite small, young learners' cognitive abilities may actually facilitate the task of analyzing and learning language

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When do children begin to combine words into simple sentences?

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Be the end of their second year

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Telegraphic Speech

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The term describing children's first sentences that are generally two-word utterances (More juice, read me, ride daddy, andrew sleep)

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When two children begin to produce complex sentences containing more than one clause?

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Once children are capable of producing four-word sentences (typically at around 2.5 years of age)

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How do parents play a role in their child's grammatical development?

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- They provide a model of grammatically correct speech - They frequently fill in missing parts of their children's incomplete utterance, as when a parent responds to "No bed" by saying, "You really don't want to go to bed right now, do you? - Parents generally ignore even widely ungrammatical mistakes, accepting sentences such as "I magicked it" or "Me no want go"

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Where is most of children's speech directed?

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As much as half of young children's speech in the company of other children or adults is addressed to themselves

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Collective Monologues

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Conversation between children that involved a series of non sequiturs, the content of each child's turn having little or nothing to do with what the other child has just said

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What aspect of children's conversations changes dramatically in the preschool period?

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The extent to which they talk about the past. - 3-year-olds' conversations include occasional brief references to past events •In contrast, 5-year-olds produce narratives- descriptions of past event that have the form of a story

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What is a consequence of schoolchildren's more reflective language skills?

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Their increasing appreciation of the multiple meanings of words, which is responsible for the emergence of the endless series of puns, riddles, and jokes with which they delight themselves and torture their parents

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Two key prerequisites for language acquisition are...

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1. A human brain 2. Experience with a human language

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What do behaviorists think about development?

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Behaviorists believed that development is a function of learning through reinforcement and punishment of overt behavior (Skinner)

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Chomsky and Nativist View (Countered Skinner)

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Language cannot be learned through the processes of reinforcement and punishment - We can understand and produce sentences that we have never heard before (generativity)

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Chomsky and Universal Grammar

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A hard-wired set of principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages (The underlying structures of the world's languages are fundamentally similar)

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Ongoing debates in language development (Nature vs. Nurture)

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Dimension 1: The degree to which these explanations lie with the child (nature) versus within the environment (nurture) - Theorists have countered Chomsky's argument about the universality of language structure by pointing out that there are also universals in children's environments

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Ongoing debates in language development (Domain general vs. Domain specific)

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Dimension 2: Did the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language learning evolve solely to support language learning (domain-specific), or are they used for learning many different kinds of things (domain-general)? - According to the nativist view, the cognitive abilities that support language development are highly specific to language - This claim is taken one step further by the modularity hypothesis, which proposes that the human brain contains an innate, self-contained language module that is separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning - An alternative view suggests that the learning mechanisms underlying language development are actually quite general. Although these learning abilities might be innate, their evolutionary development was not restricted to language learning

Developmental Psych: Chapter 6 – Flashcards

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