Lecture 3 - Lexical Development

Question 1

What are naturalistic observations?

Answer 1

• Children in their natural settings and what they are doing
• Via diaries or play sessions (can be structured)
• Can map children against each other off age

Question 2

What do you hear as infants age in naturalistic studies?

Answer 2

• 6 months: Babbling
• 1 Year: first words = referring to particular objects
• 18 months: Two-word utterances
• 2 years: Telegraphic speech: nouns present but verbs not

Question 3

What are the limitations of naturalistic studies?

Answer 3

• Are you capturing what the child actually knows (in 10 min playtime)
• Generalisable to all children?
• Observer bias
• Lack of control
• Subjectivity in coding behaviour

Question 4

What is CDI?

Answer 4

• Type of parental report
• Communicative Development Inventory
• Method that reports on receptive and expressive vocabulary
• List given, can child understand the word? Can they say the world and understand it?
• Expressive language (saying) is exponential

Question 5

When does language acquisition stop?

Answer 5

• Does not

Question 6

Describe preferential looking

Answer 6

• 2 pics on screen and label for one of them
• Does child orient themselves to referent word is placed
• Looking behaviour is a proxy measure
• Looking behaviour is consistent with association between label and picture

Question 7

Why is there a period before 0 when neither picture is there? (In preferential looking)

Answer 7

• Ensure they are not already preferential looking e.g kid could like bananas
• Gives baseline

Question 8

Describe vocabulary growth

Answer 8

• Gradual growth before a vocab spurt where they acquire vocab at a faster pace.

Question 9

What is the referential ambiguity problem? (Gavagai)

Answer 9

• Under-extensions: word under applied e.g kitten is only for your kitten, but not the neighbours or the strays
• Over-extensions: when word is over applied e.g any four legged things are dogs

Question 10

How do you solve the referential ambiguity problem?

Answer 10

• Joint attention: label everything

Question 11

What are constraints of the referential ambiguity problem?

Answer 11

• Tend to go for whole objects rather than bits of objects e.g rabbits rather than rabbit ears
• Mutual exclusivity: if you know something, the other thing must be the new word as you would not double-label a word.
• Taxonomy: thinking of concepts rather than specific things

Question 12

What are new areas of research?

Answer 12

• Development is active and embodied & tools to study this
• Developmental experience is structured e.g plotting where diff words are said in the house. Certain words = spaces/times/other words