Infant Toddler Language Development Phonology Bilingualism Segmentation ID Speech Semantics Frequency Grammar Recasting Pragmatics One on one Time Language Acquisition Sebastien s Story At twelve months Sebastien said his first word Eight months later he will be learning over nine new words a day and will be saying more than 50 words on a daily basis He will be stringing words together in ways that make sense The Challenge Finding clever ways to test infants who may understand much more than they say To explain how it is that we can learn a language at all What does it takes to learn a language Phonology Sounds of language Segmentation Finding units in fluent speech Semantics Connecting words to meaning Grammar The rules for combining units and expressing new meanings Pragmatics The ways we use language in practice to efficiently communicate Because we lacked methodologies to allow us to get into babies heads Several methods have made all the difference in what we know about babies linguistic capabilities under age two The sucking paradigm The headturn preference procedure The preferential looking paradigm Today I will show how these procedures help us to know what infants know What do infants know about Phonology They suck Literally Ba ba ba ba PA Or Ba ba ba ba Ba Even newborn get the diff They can even hear phonemes they will never use Infants hear sounds we can t Gone in 10 months NEWSFLASH Early exposure is better Children exposed to a foreign language when young learn it better have no accent learn two languages as fast as one Helping Phonology Nursery Rhymes Alliteration Exposure to foreign language What do infants know about Segmentation Another of the phonological tasks faced by an infant is to discover the words in the speech stream Speech is not punctuated with spaces commas or periods Less than 7 of the speech directed at infants consists of isolated words Headturn Preference Procedure Experimenter headphones Viewing Hole Videocamera Infant Speaker Speaker Caregiver headphones Sample Passage Feet The feet were all different sizes This girl has very big feet Even the toes on her feet are large The shoes gave the man red feet His feet get sore from standing all day The doctor wants your feet to be clean Can infants pull the word feet from this passage Results Jusczyk Aslin Target Words NonTarget Words 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 Moving Video Target vs NonTarget Speech Segmentation Ability to segment speech seems to be in place by 7 10 months of age How do they do this Multiple Ways Multiple Cues Stress cues Statistics Infant directed speech Stress Cues Different Languages say words differently We say Paris French say Pareee French say Beret we say Barry All about where we accent words A SW Jusczyk Houston and Newsome Hamlet Guitar Infants segmented out hamlet and taris Statistical Cues Certain sounds follow others certain other sounds stick together and others never appear in certain places Bonus scrabble word Phonotactics Infants are sensitive to these regularities Saffran Aslin and Newport made up a language Tu da ro pi go la bi ku ti bu do pa Infants recognized their words Tudaro pigola bikuti budopa Infant Directed Speech We talk funny to infants Infant find this utterly fasinatig and Infant directed speech helps children segment Theissen Hill Saffran 2005 Helping Segmentation Use Stress cues by speaking clearly and enunciating Use Statistical Cues through Theme and Variation Use Infant Directed Speech by Singing How do children learn words Frequency Social Cues Learned Heuristics And more Preferential Looking Tincoff Jusczyk 1999 Tincoff and Jusczyk When do babies know the words Mommy and Daddy When do they know they attach to their own Mommy and Daddy Where s Mommy 6 month olds looked longer at mommy when asked for mommy and longer at daddy when asked for daddy Although most children s first words aren t until 12 months What difference does Frequency make Hearing the same word used in many different contexts helps infant learn what words really mean more words more opportunity to learn Children s environments differ dramatically on how much language they hear Frequency of Words 50 40 Prof Wking Cls Welfare 30 20 10 0 12 24 36 48 What difference does it make Average IQ at age 3 Professional 117 Working Class 107 Welfare 79 Recorded vocabulary size Professional 1 116 Working Class 749 Welfare 525 What do they make of this Children could Overgeneralize Call a cat a dog Undergeneralize Fail to call Garfield a Cat Frequency gives them time and opportunity to figure this out Are social cues important Children of deaf parents do not learn spoken language by watching TV The more difficulty infants have following eye gaze aka Autism the harder it is to learn a spoken language Tomasello finds that infants only learn a word if speaker intended to label it Setup Video Display Board Parent Child Display Board Do you see the ball Look at the Ball Putting eye gaze in conflict with interest Procedure Part 1 Procedure Part 2 What were the results 4 0 Interesting Object Boring Object 3 5 3 0 2 5 2 0 1 5 1 0 0 5 0 Control 12 mo 12 mo Control 19 mo 19 mo Control 24 mo 24 mo Specific Conclusions Infants at different ages weight cues differently Only later in development do infants reliably know which factors to trust over others Word learning is an emergent process 12 month olds learn words only when enough factors are in alignment Constraints on Meaning Children develop heuristics rules to guess what new words might mean Words generally label objects and their shape not color New words label new objects Proper Names label one thing Nouns label nouns verbs verbs etc Blickish IfIf this this isis Blicking A Blick If this is Blick Which is also Blick Grammatical Morphology These are blickets OR These are blickish Helping Word Learning Talk to them alot Get their eye gaze Use every cue available Consider Signing Acredolo and Goodwyn 2000 found signing babies understood more words increased communication had larger vocabularies enriched parentinfant bonding more sophisticated play and increased interest in books decreased frustration still controversial Specific brain regions Species Specificity Neural mechanisms Your pets don t learn grammar neither did Washoe or NimChimpsky despite much training Although they might learn words and even phrases Critical periods Genie age 13 Second Language Acquisition past puberty Some aspects of grammar ARE Learned The fact of the matter is that while our house