who led the behaviourist approach to learning language?
skinner
who led the nativist approach to language acquisition?
Chomsky
what is behaviourism re language acquisition?
language learning is the result of imitation, feedback, practice and habit formation
- language entirely based in experience
- operant conditioning
what is the nativist approach to language activism?
observation/imitation/reinforcement do not give a full account
- children know certain things already, must have an innate capacity for learning
outline the Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
programs childrens brains to analyse the language they hear and to figure out its rules
- but development of technology has shown that learning can take place before birth
what do we know about before birth language acquisition?
- fetal auditory systm functional at 20 weeks GA (Smith et al. 2003)
- discriminate sound changes at 28 weeks GA (Draganova et al. 2007)
- sensitive to properties of the language of the parents (Mehler et al. 1988)
what is magnetoencephalography (MEG) and why is it important for pregnant women?
a neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity - can be done to investigate the foetus
outline Draganova et al. (2007) - MEG study of fetal and newborn auditory discriminative evoked responses
- discriminative brain response to tone frequency change detected at 28 weeks
- ability of foetus to detect changes in sounds is a prerequisite to normal development of cognitive function
what did heart monitoring devices find in Kisilevsky et al. (2009) re fetal language abilities and a familiarization/novelty paradigm?
novelty response to the mother’s voice and a novel foreign language
what were the conclusions made from Kisilevsky et al. (2009) regarding talking while foetus is still inside the womb?
- evidence of fetal attention, memory and learning of voices and language
- suggests that neural pathways/networks are sensitive to properties of the mother’s voice and native language speech - and they are being formed
in what 3 ways do language sounds differ?
place of articulation
manner of articulation
voicing
what did Eimas et al. (1971) find regarding speech perception in infants?
young infants can discriminate and categorize speech sounds very much like adults
what is voice onset time (VOT)?
the time that passes between the release of a stop consonant adn the vibration of the vocal fold
outline sound discrimination in humans
- humans do not discriminate all sounds because the auditory system cannot transmit all the sounds - sound waves arrive to the brain distorted which prevents perception
- categorical perception does not seem to have been selected to give children the advantage in processing speech sounds
outline Jusczyk & Bertoncini’s 1988 innately guided learning hypothesis
- instinct to pay attention to specific aspects of the environment; speech sounds in particular
- prewired w/ broad categorical perception that can be developed in different directions
- they have not had the opportunity to learn them via exposure
outline the segmentation problem
fluent speech does not provide where words begin and end - places where people perceive boundaries do not correspond to silent parts of the speech signal
- speech does not have the equivalent to white spaces between words
- learning a language includes figuring out which sounds clump together to form basic units and how units can be combined
how do babies link to the segmentation problem?
parents rarely speak to their babies in single word utterances (10%) - babies have to figure out where the edges of words are
what 5 methods are hypothesised to solve the segmentation problem?
- isolated words hypothesis
- phonotactic constraints
- prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis
- infant directed speech/motherese
- statistical learning
outline the isolated words hypothesis
- start w/ very few highly familiar words and generate ‘hypotheses’ about which adjacent clumps of sound correspond to word units
- can break down streams of continuous sounds
- Bortfeld et al (2005) - babies around 6 m/o do this
outline phonotactic constraints
- ingrained word templates that have been implicitly learned and vary from language to language
- sensitivity to phonotactic properties between 7-9 months - but what if the infant does not know where the word begins and ends?
outline the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis
use of stress patterns to segment speech
- 90% trochaic stress patterns vs 10% iambic (stress at beginning vs end)
- sensitivity to stress patterns emerges over time
- babies can assume stressed syllables are important
- by 7 and a half the babies recognise words with trochaic stress patterns
outline infant directed speech/motherese
may help solve segmentation as it exaggerates prosody of speech
- but not all cultures have this
- not necessary but helps - Kaplan (2002) depressed mothers
can babies segment streams of sounds from an unfamiliar language?
yes after just two minutes of exposure, and without hearing a single word on its own and without the benefit of stress patterns or phonotactic constraints
outline statistical learning / transitional probabilities (Saffran et al. 1996)
- some syllables found to be more predictable than others
- infants use co-occurence of information and then high probability pairs become words and low pr. pairs are treated as separate speech entities
