Chapter 6: Language Development

Question 1

What are the components of language?

Answer 1

Phonology
Semantics
Pragmatics
Syntactic

Question 2

What is comprehension?

Answer 2

Understanding what others say (or sign or write)

Question 3

What is production?

Answer 3

The process of speaking (or signing or writing)

Question 4

What is a human language?

Answer 4

A symbolic, rule-governed system that is both abstract and productive

Question 5

What does it mean that a language is symbolic?

Answer 5

In fact that it is arbitrary since we use specific letters, most words do not sound like what they are referencing

Words and parts of words represent meaning

They represent things other than themselves
Symbols are arbitrary

Question 6

What does it mean that a language has rules?

Answer 6

Syntax and grammar
Each language has a set of rules that reflect the regularities of the language

Question 7

What does it mean that a language is productive/generative?

Answer 7

A finite number of linguistic units (phonemes) and a finite number of rules yield and infinite number of grammatical utterances

Question 8

What are the required competencies for learning a language?

Answer 8

Phonological development
Semantic development
Syntactic development
Pragmatic development

Question 9

What is phonological development?

Answer 9

The acquisition of knowledge about phonemes, the elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning

Question 10

What is a phoneme?

Answer 10

A set of sounds that are not physically identical but are treated by speakers of a language as identical

When different people say the phoneme ba, yet we hear them the same, even though technically they are different

English has about 44 phonemes

Phonemes don’t mean anything by themselves
It just distinguishes words

The smallest units of meaningful sound

Question 11

What is prosody?

Answer 11

The characteristic rhythm and intonational patterns with which a language is spoken

Question 12

What is voice onset time?

Answer 12

The length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating

Question 13

Categorical perception of speech by adults

Answer 13

When adults listen to a tape of artificial speech sounds that gradually change from one sound to another, such as /ba/ to /pa/ or vice versa, they suddenly switch from perceiving one sound to perceiving the other

Morphing gradually from one phoneme to another

Not seeing gradual change

See an abrupt change when they cross the boundary (categorical perception)

Question 14

Categorical perception of speech by infants Study

Answer 14

Measures the sucking rate of the infant
Uses the habituation method by exposing them to the phoneme /ba/ over and over
And then phonemen /pa/ and see dishabituation to novel phoneme
Clear evidence of discrimination

No discrimination in the phoneme voice onset time when they are in the same category
Babies are lumping sounds within a phoneme boundary, even though they differ physically by the same amount
Contrast shows categorical perception: tells us phonemes are not just acoustic facts - they are mental categories

Question 15

What is the idea that infants are born citizens of the world?

Answer 15

Infants are born with the ability to perceive all phonemes of different languages and lose this ability to hone in on the phonemes of the language they are learning

Perceptual narrowing

Question 16

Perceptual Narrowing Study

Answer 16

Six-month-olds from English-speaking families readily discriminate between syllables in Hindi and Nthlakapmx, but 10 to 12-month-olds do not (have lost the ability to perceive all phonemes and just be able to discriminate phonemes in their language)

The lack of experience with exposure to the other language and the frequent exposure to your own language leads to perceptual narrowing

Using the head-turn technique with operant conditioning (reward)

The infants learned that if they turned their head toward the sound source when they heard a change in the sounds they were listening to, they would be rewarded by an interesting visual display.

If the infants turned their heads immediately following a sound change, the researchers inferred that they had detected the change.

A change in phoneme is going to lead to the energized bunny appearing
And the baby learn this association

Question 17

What is word segmentation?

Answer 17

Discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech

Question 18

What are distributional properties?

Answer 18

In any language, certain sounds are more likely to occur together than are others

Question 19

What is semantic development?

Answer 19

Learning the system for expressing meaning in a language

Question 20

What are morphemes?

Answer 20

The smallest unit of meaning in a language

Question 21

Look while Listening Study

Answer 21

Procedures
An eye tracking study where the infant is looking when the audio is being played
Measures comprehension vocabulary in young babies
Parent’s recorded saying “Look at the apple”
Babies see either a complex scene with an apple or two objects one of which is an apple

Results:
Clear evidence of comprehension of 6-9 months: across this age range, infants looked more to the named referent
Parents often didn’t realize babies knew the words

Question 22

What is babbling?

Answer 22

Between 6 and 10 months of age babies make repetitive consonant-vowel sequences or hand movements

Question 23

What is holophrastic speech?

Answer 23

One word utterances attempting to communicate more “whole phrase” with a single word

Trying to communicate more than can they really can and using a single word

Question 24

How do children come to learn the meaning of words?

Answer 24

Hard due to the way we speak, since we might not pause between words
Some words don’t have a physical reference for the babies to see

Inscrutability of reference
Even in the simplest situation
Indefinite number of possible meanings

Children follow bias/constraint to learn the meaning of words

Question 25

What are constraints do children use to learn the meaning of new words?

Answer 25

Whole object constraint Taxonomic constraint Mutual exclusivity bias Shape bias

Question 26

What is the whole object constraint?

Answer 26

The bias that words refer to whole objects When a young child hears a novel word paired with a novel object, they assume it labels the whole object, not just a part or the material

Question 27

What is the taxonomic constraint?

Answer 27

words refer to the basic level category

Question 28

What is overextension?

Answer 28

An overly broad interpretation of the meaning of a word

Question 29

What is underextension?

Answer 29

An overly narrow interpretation of the meaning of a word

Question 30

What is the mutual exclusivity bias?

Answer 30

Children assume each object has only one label If a child already knows cup, and you point to a cup and say dax, they assume dax refers to something else

Question 31

What is the shape bias?

Answer 31

When extending object names, children prioritize shape information over color, size, or texture

Question 32

What is pragmatic development?

Answer 32

Acquiring knowledge of how language is used, which includes understanding a variety of conversational conventions

Question 33

What are pragmatic cues?

Answer 33

Aspects of the social context used for word learning Joint attention, adult's expression

Question 34

Pragmatic cue Study

Answer 34

In a study establishing this fact, an adult announced her intention to “find the gazzer.” She then picked up one of the two objects and showed obvious disappointment with it. When she gleefully seized the second object, the infants inferred that it was a “gazzer.”

Question 35

What is cross-situational word learning?

Answer 35

Determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels and meanings across scenes and contexts

Question 36

What is syntax?

Answer 36

Refers to the set of rules that organize the structure of sentences in a given language Allows us to produce and understand new sentences based on these rules

Question 37

Syntactic development in children

Answer 37

By 17 months, children have grammatical understanding, even though they are only capable of one-word utterances Comprehension often precedes production

Question 38

What is telegraphic speech?

Answer 38

Short utterances that leave out nonessential words

Question 39

What is overregularization?

Answer 39

A speech error in which children treat irregular words as though they are regular Womans, sleeping, runned, foots They produce these errors because they are internalizing the rules and using for all words

Question 40

What is syntactic bootstrapping?

Answer 40

The idea that children use the syntactic structure of a sentence - especially word order and grammatical markers - to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words, particularly verbs. When something is ambiguous, what is being referred to (verbs) children use the syntactic structure to try to figure out the meaning

Question 41

Learning the rules of language Study

Answer 41

Procedures: Test This is a wug Now there is another one There are two of them There are two __? Findings: Even though they don't know the word, they know the rule for plural, so they say wugs Apply rules to nonsense words even though they have never heard of them

Question 42

What is the 30-million word gap?

Answer 42

When we record the speech of a family in the home, we see huge differences in the word in relation to child directed speech. Children living in poverty are experiencing very few words in relation to child-directed speech Children in professional families hear ~45 million words Working-class families heard ~ 26 million words Welfare families heard ~ 13 million words These early differences cascade into vocabulary size, reading readiness, and academic achievement

Question 43

What are the possible mechanisms for this word gap between families of different socioeconomic statuses?

Answer 43

Time and cognitive bandwidth Lower-SES parents are often juggling multiple jobs, unpredictable schedules, and limited time Stress physiology Chronic stress elevates cortisol, which can reduce parental responsiveness and impair children’s attention and learning Interaction quality It's not just hearing words - it's contingent, responsive interaction

Question 44

Cell Phones are disrupting language learning

Answer 44

Correlational studies: more parental phone use -> fewer conversational turns Reduced responsiveness to children Phones break Joint attention Timing of responses Emotional synchrony

Question 45

Experimental study: demonstrating cell phone usage interferes with word learning

Answer 45

2 years old with a parent Mothers are instructed to teach the child novel actions paired with a nonsense word Within-subject design Uninterrupted or cell-phone-interrupted condition Children were tested using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm Children learned the words better in the uninterrupted condition