components of language
phonology: comprised of small units that are combined
semantics: conveys meaning
what is “syntax”?
- rules about how words go together
e.g., english: subject - verb - object
preference studies
with no training, what do infants want to listen (or look) to
habituation/familiarisation studies
first, we train infants and then measure what they prefer
change detection studies
we train infants to respond to a change (can infants tell the difference between 2 things)
prosody
- the pattern of stress and intonation in a language
- languages have different prosodic patterns
phonemes
- the perceptually distinct units of sound in a language that distinguish one word from another (p, b, d, t)
- pat, bat, bad
- languages differ in the sounds they use as phonemes
prosody development: foetus
the foetal auditory system is fully functioning during the last trimester
Prosody development - newborns
newborns:
- prefer their own mother’s voice
- discriminate languages with different prosody but not languages of similar prosody
- prefer their native language compared to a foreign language
- cry with an “accent”
Children’s babble
initially wide range of sounds. In first year move towards producing only sounds of target language
Phoneme development: 1-2 months
at 1-2 months infants can discriminate between all sounds, even foreign ones. Adults only discriminate those in their language
Phoneme development: 7-11 months
systemic decline in ability to distinguish sounds from non-target language and increase for target language
- study on English and Japanese learning infants
Kuhl et al, 2006
At what age can infants segment words from their language? + study
they gain this ability at 7.5 months
- but not at 6 months
- done with a repetitive familiarisation phase: cup cup cup …
- then a test phase incorporating the word into sentences
Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995
How do infants gain the ability to “find words”?
- track the co-occurrence of syllables
- syllables that co-occur often are likely part of the same word
Study: finding the words
(Saffran et al., 1996)
- experiment with 8-month-olds using highly controlled made up language
- few minutes of listening to words in randomized order
- infants listen longer to ‘part-words’, suggesting they found the words in the stream
‘part words’ = fusions of the original set of words they listened to
Infant directed speech - Christia, 2013
- higher pitched
- slower speaking rate
- important words are generally at the end and exaggerated more
- boundaries between phrases are enhanced, easier to segment speech
- infants prefer to listen to IDS and are more attentive to those who use it
proved: IDS > ADS, Theissen, Hill and Saffran
“anchor” words for learning language
- highly frequent salient words (e.g., Mummy)
- highly frequent linguistic words (e.g., the, he)
if you can identify a word in the speech stream you can identify one boundary of the adjacent words
finding the words: 6-month-olds
highly familiar words help 6-month-olds segment words
(Bortfeld et al., 2005)
recall that 6-month-olds fail in the Jusczyk & Aslin study (prompt - 7.5 months)
segmenting words: 8-month-olds
- some linguistic categories of words are highly frequent
- infants can use “the” to segment nouns at 8 months
- at test, infants listened longer to an isolated word that was taught with a real function word
(Shi & Lepage, 2008)
syntax sensitivity: 8-month-olds
- In Japanese the syntax order is switched (relative to English)
- by 8-months infants are sensitive to this
Gervain et al., 2008
frequent-first vs. frequent-final study
- Italian is a frequent-first
language; Japanese is a frequent-final language (syntax) - 8-month olds from each country listen longer to the corresponding type (frequent-first etc..)
- by 8 months, infants have started to learn some of the ordering rules for their language
rule-learning: 6-month-olds
- 6-month olds could learn an abstract rule with linguistic stimuli
(Marcus et al., 1999)
