PSYC 307 1st Edition Lecture 14Overview of Previous Lecture - How do we study babies?- Types of knowledgeo Cognitiveo Social-emotionalo Physical - What do babies think?- Research at A&MOverview 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 Developmenta. 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 languagec. 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 language1. Can learn vocabulary, but struggle with syntax and structure ii. Brain damaged individualsiii. Bilingual adults who acquired second language at different agesB. Humans and Language a. Language is a species-specific behaviori. 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 confusionii. Bilingual children perform better on symbolism tasks and flexibility of cognitive abilitiesd. Hemispheric Difference in Language Processing i. Adults who learned their second language at 1-3 years, normal pattern of greater left-hemisphere activity1. Those who learned the second language later show increased right-hemisphere activityii. 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 developmenta. 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 Speech1. Common but not universal2. Warm and affectionate tone, high pitch, extreme intonation, clear pronunciation3. Function – important for learning sounds of your language? a. One-on-one communication e. Learning parts of languagei. Word detection – segregate speech stream1. Statistical learning – regularities in language, which sounds occur togethera. Babies pick them up quickly; can use name/familiar words to segregate stream ii. Word recognition – familiar wordsiii. 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 speech1. Acquisition of grammatical morphemes; change meaning of words/phrasesa. –ing, -ed, on, in, the b. Can tend to over regularize (especially –ed) 2. Complex grammatical formsa. Negatives (absence of something, no), questions, complex constructions E. Semantic Developmenta. Learning words and meanings of words b. Charted by vocabulary (lots of individual variability)i. First words around 1 yearii. 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 wordb. 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 partii. 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 objectc. 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 meaningi. Syntactic bootstrapping: use grammatical structure to figure out meaning1. “kradding” examplese. Overextensions of word meaningi. Ie: everything round is a ballF. Types of Early Wordsa. Object and actioni. More object words than actionsii. Objects are easier concepts, adults rarely name verbsiii. Influenced by culture and languageb. Statei. Modifiers or labels for attributes – size, color, possessionii. Learn general distinctions before specific1. Not concrete –
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