PSYC 307 1st Edition Lecture 14 Overview of Previous Lecture How do we study babies Types of knowledge o Cognitive o Social emotional o Physical What do babies think Research at A M Overview of Current Lecture Critical periods in language development Humans and language Bilingual children Precursors to language development Semantic knowledge Types of words October 28 Development of Language cont A Critical Periods in Language Development a Now considered a sensitive period the best time but not necessarily the only time b Children must be exposed to other people using language spoken signed in order for them to learn language c Between age 5 and puberty language acquisition becomes more difficult and less successful i Feral children locked up no access to other individuals difficult time learning language 1 Can learn vocabulary but struggle with syntax and structure ii Brain damaged individuals iii Bilingual adults who acquired second language at different ages B Humans and Language a Language is a species specific behavior i Primates and language non human primates do not produce language no apparatuses ii Humans have infinite generativity with language and symbols and syntactic structure b Language is also species universal language and rules of some sort in every culture i Human brain is specialized to learn language 1 Auditory cortex takes in sounds Wernicke s area comprehends sounds Broca s area speech production motor cortex controls language muscles a Stroke victims usually affect one area or the other C Bilingual Children a How do you define bilingual b 50 of the world s children are exposed to more than one language c Do children confuse languages i Delay in first speaking but other than that little evidence that there is confusion ii Bilingual children perform better on symbolism tasks and flexibility of cognitive abilities d Hemispheric Difference in Language Processing i Adults who learned their second language at 1 3 years normal pattern of greater left hemisphere activity 1 Those who learned the second language later show increased righthemisphere activity ii Pattern s of activation are different between early and later acquisition of a second language 1 Two different ways of learning language engages different mechanisms D Precursors to language development a Categorical speech perception babies can distinguish between sounds of any language comm b Production of speech sounds i Cooing 2 3 months ii Babbling 4 7 months repetition of syllables over and over frontal mouth sounds 1 What they see visually driven iii Intonation 7 months rise and fall of sounds c Social aspects of language eye contact intersubjectivity look toward things you want to communicate with turn taking d Prelinguistic speech acts pointing touching to communicate meaning crying laughing i Infant Gestures ii Infant Directed Speech 1 Common but not universal 2 Warm and affectionate tone high pitch extreme intonation clear pronunciation 3 Function important for learning sounds of your language a One on one communication e Learning parts of language i Word detection segregate speech stream 1 Statistical learning regularities in language which sounds occur together a Babies pick them up quickly can use name familiar words to segregate stream ii Word recognition familiar words iii Word comprehension what do those words mean f Grammatical Development i Charted by mean length of utterance MLU ii One word phrases 1 2 years 1 Holophrase ball use the one word to communicate different meanings iii Two or three word phrase 2 3 1 Two to three word phrases go car iv More complex speech 1 Acquisition of grammatical morphemes change meaning of words phrases a ing ed on in the b Can tend to over regularize especially ed 2 Complex grammatical forms a Negatives absence of something no questions complex constructions E Semantic Development a Learning words and meanings of words b Charted by vocabulary lots of individual variability i First words around 1 year ii Naming explosion around 18 24 months 1 Learn avg 10 new words per day 2 Fast Mapping a Rapidly learning a new word from the contrastive use of un familiar word b Number of assumptions guide children s acquisitions of word meanings i Whole object assumption leads children to expect a novel word to refer to a whole object not a part ii Mutual exclusivity assumption leads children to expect that a given entity will have only one name 1 Assume you are referring to a part of that object c Pragmatic cues meaning from context i Aspects of the social context used for word learning 1 Eye direction examples facial expression d Linguistic context novel words appear to help infer meaning i Syntactic bootstrapping use grammatical structure to figure out meaning 1 kradding examples e Overextensions of word meaning i Ie everything round is a ball F Types of Early Words a Object and action i More object words than actions ii Objects are easier concepts adults rarely name verbs iii Influenced by culture and language b State i Modifiers or labels for attributes size color possession ii Learn general distinctions before specific 1 Not concrete abstract
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