Language development

Question 1

Eimas et al (1971)

Answer 1

Developed at ba-pa continuum that varied in voice onset time in 20ms steps. tested infants aged 1 and 3 months. They repeatedly presented sound 1 then changed to sound 2. They measured infants sucking behaviours, when it changed signified the infant realising a change in the sound. There is a consistent point around 20-40 milliseconds that babies realise the sound has changed. The sound is a continuum but this implies there are discrete sections to it.

Question 2

Kuhl et al (1992) (2003)

Answer 2

By 6 months phonetic perception has been altered by linguistic experience. Sounds that are both similar to a prototypical sound are more likely to be heard as identical compared to two similarly spaced non-prototypical sounds. Which sounds are experienced as similar varies across languages dependent on linguistic experience.

9 month old American infants were given native mandarin Chinese adult playmates either in person or virtual/video. Babies who had a live interaction with their playmate learnt some perception of Mandarin. Babies who had the playmate on video didn’t learn to recognise as much Mandarin phonology. At this stage, only face to face is sufficient for learning.

Question 3

Werker and Tees (1984)

Answer 3

In English, we divide the acoustic continuum from d to t into 2 phonemes d and t. In Hindi, there are 2 phoneme divisions of the part of the d to t continuum for the t part. In Salish, they have 2 phoneme divisions for the k part of the g to k continuum. English babies should stop perceiving a distinction for both Salish and Hindi contrasts with language experience but both Hindi and Salish babies should retain their own contrasts. English babies were able to distinguish the sounds in the other languages but as they got older their ability to distinguish between them decreased with perceptual narrowing in the first year.

Question 4

Fernald and Mazzie (1991)

Answer 4

Infant directed speech (IDS) uses prosodic exaggeration to emphasise new information. Adults were asked to read a picture book about getting dressed with a new clothing item on each page. When speaking to infants there were exaggerated pitch peaks on the target words. Adults still highlight new information when talking to other adults but not nearly as much as when talking to infants.

Question 5

Fregmen and Fay (1980)

Answer 5

Two tasks:
1) they had to name the picture of an animal
2) they were asked to identify which picture was a certain animal
Children never over-extended comprehension, they didn’t stretch their limited vocabulary to communicate. So a child might refer to a dog as a horse but when shown a picture of a dog they can point it out correctly. This tells us they know what a dog is semantically but their vocabulary is limiting them. An issue with performance rather than competence. A problem with how they use language, not how they understand it.

Question 6

Chomsky (1957)

Answer 6

The theory that infants are born with a special ‘language acquisition device’, it is a special neural architecture. The neural architecture has innate knowledge of the general rules obeyed by all languages plus the variations permitted by some languages. This theory came about because the input was believed to be too impoverished for simple learning mechanisms to extract deep structure.

Question 7

Tomasello (2000)

Answer 7

Infants copy utterances they hear around them. The same pattern finding mechanisms of statistical probability, categorisation and inductive learning then help them to extract ‘grammar’. They use analogies to produce brand new constructions. Grammatical rules are essentially regularities in the input and these regularities are extracted by children.

Question 8

Berko (1958)

Answer 8

Used a picture task to ask about plural endings, past tense, possessives and adjective inflections. Used pictures of a ‘Wug’, a made up animal, to test children’s generalisations of rules as they would not have seen this before. Application of morphological rules can lead to over generalisations and over regularisations.

Question 9

Cameron-Faulkner et al (2003)

Answer 9

Middle class sample of toddlers hear 5000-7000 utterances a day. Around a third are questions and more than half begin with come construction e.g. look at… are you… here is…

Question 10

Hart and Risley (1995)

Answer 10

On average, high SES families children heard 487 utterances per hour compared to lower SES families children (on welfare) heard 178 utterances per hour. By the age of 4 they project high SES children will have heard 44 million utterances compared to 12 million utterances for lower SES children.

Question 11

Ramirez-Esparza et al (2014)

Answer 11

26 infants aged 11 and 14 months wore a recording device. All the speech they heard over 4 days was measured and coded. Their word production was measured at 24 months. Over 4 days infants heard on average 30,000 words. Significant predictor of later language abilities was not the total number of words heard but the percentage of words said in infant directed speech (IDS). Higher SES families were significantly more likely to use IDS in 1 on 1 conversations.