Language Development stage 2

Question 1

What is statistical learning? Who do babies learn this with? What are babies likely to do implicitly? Do adults lose this ability?

Answer 1

Babies observe the statics of their language
Babies can only learn these statics from humans not audios from TV
They implicitly learn which sounds are more likely to occur (versus less) and in which combinations
Adults lose these statistics and are governed by their memory

Question 2

At 18 months, how many words should you expect them to say? What do they find difficult? What do they use a lot of? What can they understand?

Answer 2

Say around 20 single words e.g. dog, cup, to ask for things or point where they are.
Pronunciation is difficult
Use a lot of babble
Understand more words (receptive vocabulary) than they can say (expressive vocabulary)
Understand simple questions and instructions e.g. Where’s Teddy?

Question 3

Frank et al 2019. What did he find about word developmental trajectories across cultures?

Answer 3

Spanish, Mandarin, Russian, Danish, English, Swedish
Median production is the same across 10 to 20 months

Question 4

How is language processing speed defined in children?

Answer 4

The rate at which a child perceives, interprets, retrieves and produces language in real time

Question 5

Quine, 1960. What is the induction problem. Use the example of a dog and the woman

Answer 5

Eastern European woman calls a dog ‘kuri’
Babies are unsure if they mean the dogs ear, paw, stroke, bark

Question 6

What is the linguistic nativist theory? What is used for language? What is separate? Is input needed?

Answer 6

Linguistic nativist theories: innate word learning biases, certain mechanisms only used for language, word learning and syntax learning is separate, innate syntax representations (minimal input is needed)

Question 7

There are 2 biases. There are the mutual exclusivity bias and the whole object assumption. What are they?

Answer 7

Mutual exclusivity: Children expect an entity to have only 1 name.

Whole object assumption: Children assume that a novel word refers to a whole object, rather than parts or features of an object

Question 8

What is the evidence for the mutual exclusivity assumption? What age were the babies? There are 2 objects and 2 words.

Answer 8

18 months old
Present 2 objects (one familiar object which the baby has a name for, the second object is unfamiliar and the baby doesn’t have a name for it)
Present the child with a word the child doesn’t know
Experimenter asks the baby for an object with this unknown word
Baby will give the experimenter the unfamiliar object

Question 9

What is triadic interaction? What is joint attention? What age does joint attention occur?

Answer 9

a) child
b) adult
c) object or event
Triangle, abc at each point

Joint attention: the shared attention of two individuals on the same object or event

joint attention occurs at 9-12 months

e.g. adult points at something, baby follows the point, they both look at the same thing

Question 10

What is the evidence for gaze following and word learning? How old is the baby? Think about what toy the experimenter is looking at in contrast to the baby.

Answer 10

16-19 months
Novel toys - children had names for them
Experimenter and baby look at the babies toy and the experimenter will use a word
Then the baby will look at their toy, the experimenter will look at their own toy and use the same word
Baby maps the new word to where the experimenter is looking

Question 11

What study shows evidence for babies using social cues to determine what object the researcher was referring to? What age was the infant?

Answer 11

24 month olds understood that novel word = object the adult was looking for
Researcher looks disappointed at the novel object
Children would assume the new word was the object the experimenter was pleased to find

Question 12

Under what circumstances can a child learn words from the TV? And at what age does this happen?

Answer 12

Children between 2 and a half and 3 years can learn words from TV if someone ‘live’ is sitting beside them describing it

Question 13

What is parental contingent responding? How long is the time window for this?

Answer 13

Time window of contingent responsiveness (2-3 seconds)
e.g. when a baby looks at the ball, when the mother says ‘that’s a ball’ in this time window

Question 14

When parental contingent responding is practised, what can this predict in future development? What does contingent responding trump?

Answer 14

Turn taking between adults and children in infancy, predicts spoken language development longitudinally. This also trumps quantity (how much the adult talks)

Question 15

The centrality of conversation. In what order is phonemes, words and sentences and conversational turns?

Answer 15

Conversational turns -> phonemes (sounds) -> words and sentences (together)

Question 16

Another factor for word learning is repetition. How does this work?

Answer 16

Experimenter put cameras around his house to monitor his son
Mapped what activities the child is engaged with and what the child hears at the same time
Word ‘water’ occurred a lot in the kitchen
Entrance to the house had the most ‘goodbyes’
Predicting what words his son will learn in order due to this repetition

Question 17

What age do children start to produce simple multi-word utterances such as ‘Daddy drink’ and ‘Coke all gone’?

Answer 17

18 - 22 months

Question 18

By 3 years, what will children talk about? What types of morphemes do they use? How many words do they put together to make a sentence? What do they do lots of?

Answer 18

Talk about themselves e.g. their likes and dislikes
Use many inflectional morphemes such as plurals ‘s’ e.g. cat to cats
Put 4 or 5 words together to make short sentences
Ask lots of questions such as ‘What’s that?’

Question 19

In syntax, what order do English speakers use of object subject verb? Do these vary?

Answer 19

In England, we use subject verb object
These rules vary depending on language
e.g. Irish uses verb subject object

Question 20

In the usage based theories, what are the 3 highlighted elements? What is the driving force? What plays an important role in grammar? Is input needed? What is syntax learning based on?

Answer 20

Usage based theories: socio cognition (joint attention, intention-reading, social engagement)
Social interaction is a driving force, statistical learning plays a crucial role for grammar, substantial input is needed, syntax learning is based on frequent words

Question 21

In the linguistic nativist theory, they focus on 2 terms: universal grammar and language acquisition device. What are these?

Answer 21

Universal grammar: An innate set of abstract grammatical rules shared by all human languages

Language acquisition device (LAD): An innate component in the brain claimed to explain the rapid acquisition of language, as posited by Chomsky

Question 22

What evidence is there to show an early preference for correct grammar? How old are the infants? Think of the Italian and Japanese infants and order preferences.

Answer 22

Very early preferences for word order
8 month old Japanese and Italian infants showed preference for opposite word orders in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the word orders of their respective native languages
Infants possess some unconscious understanding of the word order of their languages, before they have learnt the word

Question 23

We can have statistical development in our grammar development. What is the definition of this?

Answer 23

Ability to implicitly learn the probabilities with which particular contexts predict the occurrence of certain items.

Question 24

In grammatical development, what does the usage based approach believe? Why is frequency important? What do children pay attention to? What is abstraction? How does grammar emerge?

Answer 24

Usage based approach: children build grammar from patterns in repeated language input

Frequency: strengthens memory traces - familiar

Children notice recurring structures

Abstraction: children gradually abstract schemas from repeated utterances

Grammar emerges from usage - children learn structure through repeated, meaningful interactions

Question 25

What evidence is there that infants will prefer the ungrammatical word order? At what age does this occur?

Answer 25

Present children with scenarios e.g. bear and a duck, and baby hears someone saying bear duck pulling This is ungrammatical Depends on the verbs 2 years - babies are likely to use ungrammatical word orders for verbs which are less common

Question 26

Is there a correlation between social interaction and grammatical development? This result was found in another group of children, who were they?

Answer 26

Strong correlation between levels of shared attention and later sentences production Similar to those with autism

Question 27

For parents of 4-6 year olds, who were randomly assigned to the intervention or control group. What happened in the intervention group? What 3 things did they see children of the parents in the intervention group improve on?

Answer 27

Intervention group parents were taught about the importance of contingent learning Significant interaction between Time (pre vs post) and condition (intervention vs control) on Improved: - overall language scores - executive functioning - turn-taking changes positively correlated with cortical thickening in left inferior frontal and supramarginal gyri

Question 28

What is communicative accommodation?

Answer 28

The adjustments that caregivers make to language and behaviours when communicating with young infants

Question 29

In culture, we have the communication accommodation continuum. What is this? What communicative aspects are different between our culture and other cultures?

Answer 29

Communication accommodation continuum One end: child centred e.g. infants likes and dislikes, USA families Other end: situation centred e.g. on the fields, cooking, relevant to the current tasks Cultural communities have different channels of communication This can include gaze, language, touch and gestures e.g. In other cultures the baby is on the adults back

Question 30

What are pragmatics?

Answer 30

How language forms are used in relation to audience and context

Question 31

What 5 skills do we develop from developing pragmatics? What do they do in conversations? What do we need to use accurately? Why are registers important? What do we need to understand? Why is narrative important?

Answer 31

-Turn taking -Using the right expression to refer to something e.g. choosing between he vs the dog -Being able to talk in different registers e.g. talking to a friend vs talking in an interview -Understanding implicatures (implied meaning e.g. I ate some of the biscuits to a 4 year old could mean I ate them all, but to an adult it means there are some left) -Narrative skills (talking about the things that are not in the here and now)

Question 32

What 5 things do pragmatics require you to learn? Do you need to think about your conversational partner? What do you need to understand? What do you make inferences on? What multiple moves do you make in a sequence? What do you need to find a balance between?

Answer 32

-Thinking about the conversation's partners mental states/emotional and physical context -Understanding communicative intentions -Making inferences about what someone meant given what they said -Making multiple communicative moves in sequence as a conversation unfolds over time -Finding the balance between efficiency and clarity in conversation

Question 33

Piaget. What did he believe children were? When children explain stories, what did they do incorrectly? What did Piaget claim of the listeners? At what age did he believe we gained the ability to argue one's thoughts objectively?

Answer 33

Children are egocentric Children called story characters 'it' or 'she' without explaining to whom they were referring to, left out important information, and is not present the events in the correct order. Piaget claims they assumed that their listeners already understood what they were talking about Piaget argues the ability to argue one's thought objectively doesn't appear until 7 - 7 1/2 years

Question 34

Children behave differently depending on whether the child saw where the hidden toy went. How do children behave at 2 years and 3 months, and how do 2 year 7 month year olds behave?

Answer 34

At 2 years and 3 months, children can choose whether to gesture to the location of a hidden toy depending on whether their parent saw the hiding event At 2 years and 7 months, they more often named the toy when the parent had been absent at hiding

Question 35

Refer to something in a way which is ambiguous from their addressee's perspective. For example, using pronouns 'he' or 'it' even though the addressee doesn't know who it is. At what age does this happen?

Answer 35

At 5 to 7 years

Question 36

Research in 1960 and Piaget's research in the 1920's differ slightly. What did research between these two time periods argue children could do in conversations?

Answer 36

Piaget in 1926- prior to age 4, children do not really contribute to conversation topics Research in 1980: young children can maintain conversations

Question 37

To master pragmatics, children not only need to relate to events but needs to do what 3 things? Who do they need to set off at a good starting point? How do you move the conversation? Who has to keep track of what's going on?

Answer 37

1) set the listener off at a good starting point 2) move from there to adding information that is connected to the overarching set of goals for the narrative 3) do all of this in a way that allows the listener to keep track of what's going on

Question 38

At 5-6 years old, can they understand that a phrase is sarcastic? When do they understand the humour function? What are the 3 things you need to understand sarcasm? Are norms, common ground and beliefs important?

Answer 38

5-6 year olds understand that sarcasm is less mean than literal criticism, but are unable to detect the humorous function right up until middle childhood To understand sarcasm, you need to understand a wide variety of norms or other forms of past common ground as well as grasping higher order beliefs

Question 39

Children struggle with simple irony until middle childhood and often make mistakes. What are the 2 mistakes? Is irony an early or late acquired skill?

Answer 39

Irony is a late skill. -early on assuming the speaker is sincere but mistaken -later assuming that they are lying -finally realising that they are being ironic

Question 40

Language development can influence later school success. How does impact how students do in school? And what can positive language experiences help buffer the risk of?

Answer 40

Infants and toddlers who have enriching language experiences 'have an edge' in both school readiness and academic performance. Positive language experiences help buffer the risks associated with poverty