Professor Greg Francis 8/15/12 PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1 Purdue University Language development PSY 200 Greg Francis Lecture 31 When should you learn a foreign language? Purdue University Language  Instinctive  your brain is wired to work with grammars, words, phrases  Learning  you do have to learn some specifics for your native tongue  rules  words Purdue University Learning  What is learned?  How does a child learn?  How much about language does a child know?  When have you mastered language?  How do you learn a second language?  What do babies do? Purdue University Babies and phonemes  Infants have linguistic skills as soon as they are born  babies are interested in new things  attach a tape player to a pacifier  each suck causes the player to play a sound  Repetition of the same sound leads to boredom and fewer sucks  ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, Purdue University Babies and phonemes  When the syllable changes  babies suck more often  ba, ba, …, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa,… BA"PA"Purdue University Babies and phonemes  Moreover, they hear things the way adults do  you can change the pronunciation (timing) of ba and still hear it as ba (CogLab data)  babies hear it the same way Identification task Same/different taskProfessor Greg Francis 8/15/12 PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2 Purdue University Babies  Babies hear all phonemes, even ones their parents cannot distinguish  Babies, even newborns, do show a preference for what will become their native tongue  occurs because they hear mother’s voice while in the womb  Mostly prefer the melody, stress, timing  French infants like French and Italian equally well  playing language backwards keeps many consonants but distorts melody (babies are not interested) Purdue University Language development  Between 5-7 months, babies start making sounds  clicks, hums, hisses, smacks,…  Between 7-8 months babies start babbling in syllables  ba-ba-ba-ba-ba  neh-neh-neh  da-da-da-da-da Purdue University Babbling  Babbling sounds are the same in all languages  patterns are common across languages  By the end of the first year babies combine syllables to sound like words  neh-nee  da-dee  meh-neh  Babbling is important  children who do not babble often show slower speech development  deaf children babble with hands, if parents use sign language Purdue University Babbling  Babbling teaches child how sequences of muscle combinations lead to different sounds  necessary to produce speech  By about 10 months babies learn the sounds of their native tongue  they can no longer distinguish phonemes that are not part of the language  Part of learning is forgetting! Purdue University Language stages  Nearly all children learn language in stages  1) Cooing (first several months)  2) Babbling (~6 months)  3) One word utterances (~1 year)  4) Two-word utterances and telegraphic speech (1-3 years)  5) Basic adult sequences with grammar (~4 years)  The rate of learning varies substantially Purdue University Learning words  Children learn words with ridiculous ease  An average 6 year old knows 13,000 words  learned one new word every two waking hours  this is without knowing how to read!  The average high school graduate knows about 60,000 different words (not counting compound words and such)  means that in 17 years of life (not counting the first one), they learned an average of 10 new words each day (one word every 90 waking minutes)Professor Greg Francis 8/15/12 PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3 Purdue University Around 18 months  Children learn simple rules of syntax  All dry. All messy. All wet.  I sit. I shut. No bed.  No pee. See baby. See pretty.  Content is similar for all languages  objects appear, disappear, move,…  people do things, see things,…  ask questions, who, what, where,... Purdue University All hell breaks loose  After mastering 2-word strings, toddlers go crazy on language  Consider changes in language (year;month)  (2;3) Play checkers. Big drum. I got horn.  (2;5) Now put boots on. Where wrench go? What that paper clip doing?  (2;7) Ursula has a boot on. Shadow has hat like that.  (2;9) Where Mommy keep her pocket book? Show you something funny.  (2;11) Why you mixing baby chocolate? I finishing drinking all up down my throat.  (3;1) You went to Boston University? Doggies like to climb up. Purdue University Errors  Three year olds make lots of grammatical errors  that is because there are lots of opportunities for errors  but pick any particular grammatical rule and you find most three year olds obey it most of the time  this is amazing because there lots of cases that you would expect would be difficult to learn Purdue University Expected errors  Consider a child hearing adults talk and how they might incorrectly apply what they learn  Out of 66,000 sentences, children never made these errors He seems happy. --> Does he seem happy? He is smiling. --> Does he be smiling? He did eat. --> He didn’t eat. He did a few things. --> He didn’t a few things. Purdue University Errors  Children do make errors, but the errors are consistent with rules of language  Children often over generalize a rule  -s to pluralize a noun » Mouses, leafs  -ed to make the past tense of a verb » My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them. » Hey, Horton heared a Who. » I finded Renee. » Once upon a time a alligator was eating a dinosaur and the dinosaur was eating the alligator and the dinosaur was eaten by the alligator and the alligator goed kerplunk. Purdue University Overgeneralization  These past tense forms sound wrong because English has around 180 irregular verbs  inherited from other languages  These past-tense forms are not derived from rules  Irregular forms have to be memorized, word by word  If a child cannot remember (in its lexicon)  s/he defaults to the rule  These errors are for the most difficult parts