What is language?
Language is a defining human characteristic that allows us to share information. It makes the complexities of human culture possible.
What are the features of language?
- Symbolic Units
- Structure and meaning
- Displacement: you can talk about different times and space.
- Generativity: you can come up with anything about any idea
What are the 5 elements of language?
Phonology: Sounds phonemes
Morphology: Rules of meaning morpheme (free, bound)
Semantics: Words and meaning
Syntax: Rules of sentences
Pragmatics: How people use language to communicate
What is the sucking-paradigm experiment that demonstrates how 1 month olds can distinguish different phonemes?
Experimenters put a presser gage on a pacifier to measure the rate of an infant’s sucking.
The sucking behaviour was paired with different phoneme audio stimuli and they found that once babies habituated they suck less in response to the same phoneme.
If a new phoneme is played, they will increase sucking to continue hearing it.
What were the results of the study on the ability for English infants at 6-8 months vs 10-12 months to distinguish phonemes in English and Hindi?
English infants start out with the sensitivity to different phonemes in various languages but by 10-12 months they have trouble differentiating two different phonemes that were not present in the language they have been exposed to in the first year.
What were the results of the study on the neural activity of monolingual and bilingual babies.
What do they suggest about language specialization in 11 month olds?
At 11 months of age, monolingual babies were specialized to English and bilingual babies were sensitive to both phonemes. Therefore language specialization occurs after 11 months.
Which brain areas responded more strongly in bilingual babies? What is the function/role of these areas?
Bilingual babies showed greater functions in the prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function and normally interactive during code-switching.
What patterns help infants learn words?
Repetition
Stressed syllables help identify beginnings of words
Words in more salient positions in sentences are noticed more
Using articles to break up a stream of phonemes
Noticing syllables and phonemes that often go together
What are the stages of language development in
the first year?
Phonation Stage (0-2 months): differentiated crying because they know they have different needs.
Goo Stage (2-3 months): cooing and gooing
Expansion stage (4-6 months): Squeals, growls, yells, raspberries
Canonical stage (7-10 months): babbling and understanding words,
Varigated stage (11-12 months): babbling with rhythm and sounds of conversation
What do Infants understand by 12 months?
Words are symbols that stand for something else
Gesture
Speaking = communication
Everything except displacement and generability
What is Fast mapping?
When children learn word meanings so rapidly that they use heuristics to infer word meanings because they can’t be considering all possible meanings.
Joint attention
When caregivers label objects that their children are interacting with. Through the joint attention, infants grasp information.
Why do children’s vocabulary differ greatly across income groups?
Opportunity and access
How do Constraints/Biases support Word Name Learning?
- Unfamiliar words refer to objects that do not yet have a name
- If an object has a name already and a new name is given, then the new name denotes a subcategory (EX: dinosaur, T-Rex)
- Given many similar category members, a word applied consistently to only one of them is a proper noun
How do sentence cues support Word Name Learning?
The ordering helps them learn the new word by a process of elimination in sentences with
words they already know.
How do Common Errors support Word Name Learning?
UNDEREXTENSION: defining a word too narrowly
- E.g., using “ball” to refer to only a favourite ball
OVEREXTENSION: defining a word too broadly
- E.g., using “dog” to refer to all four-legged animals
When do infants exhibit telegraphic speech?
At 18-24 months toddlers can combine simple sentences that lack perfect grammar with only relevant, specific, narrow meanings
As children start to form sentences, when do they show over-regularization?
When children fail to use language in accordance with exceptions to grammar rules.
EX: “Grandma took me” vs “Grandma taked me”
Children master grammar by learning grammatical rules and successfully complete the wug test.
What are some examples of the errors children make when:
(a) trying to pronounce words that include sounds that are difficult to articulate
(b) applying grammatical morphemes?
a) Replacing sounds, avoiding difficult parts –> “pasgetti”
b) Over-regularization –> “we drived home”
How Do Children Acquire Grammar according to the Behaviourist Perspective?
Aspects of language are learned via imitation and reinforcement.
How Do Children Acquire Grammar according to the Linguistic Perspective?
Processes that guide grammar learning are built into the nervous system.
Chomsky’s Semantic Bootstrapping Theory – humans are born with innate knowledge to infer grammatical rules.
How Do Children Acquire Grammar according to the Social-Interaction Perspective?
How Do Children Acquire Grammar according to the Cognitive Perspective?
Information is obtained from language exposure like a dataset.
Children detect recurring patterns to infer grammatical rules.
Implies a central role for memory.
What neuroanatomy evidence support’s Chomsky Bootstrapping Theory?
Broca’s area appears to be
specialized neural region for
processing of grammar. Injuries cause issues in producing grammatically correct sentences.
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Chapter 1: Introduction18
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Chapter 213
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Chapter 3: Prenatal Development, Birth, and the Newborn33
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Chapter 4 -- Human Growth22
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Chapter 5 -- Perceptual and Motor Development35
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Chapter 6 -- Theories of Cognitive Development26
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Chapter 7 -- Memory28
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Chapter 8: Intelligence and Individual Differences in Cognition19
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Chapter 9 --28
