What is phonological development?
Acquisition of knowledge about phonemes, the elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning
What is Semantic development?
Learning the system for expressing meaning in a language, beginning with morphemes, the smallest unit of meaning in a language, and of course, words
What is syntactic development?
Learning the syntax or rules for combining words
What is Pragmatic development?
Acquiring knowledge of how language is used, which includes understanding a variety of conversational conventions. Non verbal ques, gesturing, body langauge etc.
What is infant directed talk? Is it universal?
Its the “baby voice” that adults use when talking to infants, high pitched, slow, exegerated facial expression etc. Not universal.
What is some evidence for babies having an incredilby strong impertive to learn language?
All that is needed is one person to communicate to and they can develop their own language. They invent languages!
You only need on person to communicate with and they will invent a language.
What are the kye pieces of evidence for language having critical periods?
Feral children (Like Genie)
Teaching languages at older ages is much harder.
There are different critical periods for different language development sequences. The success of each critical period contributes to the success of the next one too. (Like progressing through morphemes requires phoneme’s mastered first)
There is biological preparedness in many species for communication.
What are the major language production milestones? When does language comprehension begin?
Babbling by 8 months
First words by 10-12 months
Combining words by 18 months
Complex sentences and clauses by 2-3 years
Language comprehension begins much earlier, around 4 months babies respond to their names and recognize common words. They can even differentiate categories vs individual names by 6 months.
What is the evidence for perceptual narrowing in speech? Why is it important?
Babies are born with the ability to discriminate near identical language sounds from each other in any language. by around 10 months they can only discriminate near identical sounds in their own language and not others. (Hindi example)
Establishment of the phoneme repertoire in the first year of life later predicts better world learning in their language.
What is prosody?
Prosody: Includes spoken language characteristics above the phoneme: rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns
These characteristics are what infants are very good at catching onto in order to learn language but also what make learning new languages for older kids and adults so difficult. Rhythm helps with babies language learning a lot!
What age do kids master their native language?
By age 5 kids can make novel sentences that are correct grammatically. They can also make pragmatic inference.
Comprehension of language comes before the production of language however, so age 5 is when they can produce well but they can understand earlier.
What is the basic pattern of language acquisition / How do babies begin to segment words?
Starts with early word segmentation. This just means babies are learning when words start and stop.
- Statistical learning
- Phonotactics
Then infants recognize words first. Babies recognize new words rapidly, and know many more words than caregivers realize. They map words to objects but might not understand the word yet still.
Then comprehend them
- QRP
then begin to produce them in this order.
What is the main way which babies learn to segment words?
Statistical learning: babies are incredibly good at finding the statistical properties of when a word is likely to begin or end. By 7 months old babies can use statistical regularities to pull out individual words. They can even use stronger syllables and tone to find word boundaries.
What are Phonotactics? How do they help with word segmentation?
some sounds only occur at the start of words like BR and some only occur at the end like ng, so they pick up on this and can find boundaries. A type of statistical learning.
What is the Quinean reference problem?
When naming a new object, like rabbit, how would a baby figure out if they mean just the ears, the type of animal, the feet, etc. That’s why babies have biases for learning new words.
What are the QRP biases that babies have?
Whole object bias: Expectation that the word will refer to the whole object
Categorical scope: Expectation that the word will refer to the entire category of objects
Fast mapping: Rapidly learning a new word simply from the contrastive use of a familiar and unfamiliar word
- Show me blicket vs show me the blicket have a different connotation as to what blicket is.
Mutual exclusivity bias: they reject synonyms and assume there is only one label per category. The know that a given entity will only have one name
How do kids begin to produce words?
First words occur around 10-15 months.
- Names of people, objects and everyday events emerge first.
Overextension: Calling lions dogs, but kids do know the difference they just don’t have a word for lion. Important for starting conversations and correction.
Holophrastic period is when kids used one word utterances.
How does culture affect language acquisition?
Some research states: The rate of vocab infants learn is influenced by sheer amount and kind of talk they hear. What is a challenge to this idea?
Challenge to this: Some societies carry babies on their backs, even in societies where babies are not directly spoken to, pickup language as well as other kids.
How does SES affect language aquisition in kids?
The standard view is that parents of low SES don’t have as much time as other parents to talk to their babies, hence why we see correlations of lower language ability in low SES babies.
Recent studies argue it could be more structural, a study found that in low SES families babies don’t get talked to much at the end of the month but do get talked to at the start, reflective of the stress of running low on money and waiting for a paycheck. So rather lack of time being the problem it could be financial stress.
What are some strategic cues that babies use in early interactions to acquire language?
Turn taking
Intersubjectivity
joint attention
pointing
How do babies use pragmatics to learn language?
Intentionality example: When adults say they are looking for a “gazzer” kids can use facial cues to determine what a gazzer is based on when the adult finds it and their reaction. Another way kids identify objects.
They use gaze and intention to pick up new words.
How do children use linguistic contexts to figure out word meaning?
Syntactic bootstrapping:
children use grammatical
structure of whole sentences
to figure out meaning. This is a built in bias.
Using the grammatical structure to determine the meaning of words. The duck is “cradding” the rabbit, babies understand that must mean the duck is doing something to the rabbit.
When do kids start to form sentences? What are these early sentences called?
At the end of the second year of life, most kids begin to combine words for simple sentences.
Telegraphic speech: children’s first sentences in which nonessential elements are missing
What is Skinners Empiricist view of language?
Language is learned like anything else is, through behaviorist principles, using reinforcement, punishment, reward, imitation, conditioning and more. (Domain general)
Word meaning comes from associations, and word order is learned through imitation.
