temp

"We tested 4-day-old babies born in an environment where adults speak exclusively in French. They could distinguish English from Cantonese, but not from Dutch".

Newborns are sensitive to rhythmical patterns of speech and can distinguish two languages that are rhythmically dissimilar

preferential looking procedure

a study type used by Fantz to research infants' visual preferences infants prefer complex patterns to simple patterns and solid colors

variegated babbling

long strings of nonidentical syllables that appear in the vocal play of some 8-10 month old infants At ~10-14 months, babies begin to produce non repetitive sound sequences with prosodic (intonational) contours.

canonical babbling

6-10 mos. Repetitive syllable production; increased lip control; labial and alveolar plosives /p, b, t, d/, nasals, and /j/ begin to emerge around the age of 7 months, infants start to use their voice to make syllable-like strings

phone

sound, voice

Saffran, Aslin and Newport (1996)

- Infants listen longer to unfamiliar sequences Significant difference in the looking time indicates that infants distinguished the words from non-words/part-words The present study shows that a fundamental task of language acquisition, segmentation of words from fluent speech, can be accomplished by 8-month-old infants based solely on the statistical relationships between neighboring speech sounds. Moreover, this word segmentation was based on statistical learning from only 2 minutes of exposure, suggesting that infants have access to a powerful mechanism for the computation of statistical properties of the language input.

Jusczyk et al., (1993) showed that American 9-month-olds prefer to listen to words that have the "strong-weak" stress pattern (e.g., shower) to those that have the "weakstrong" pattern (e.g., guitar). What does this tell us?

9-month-olds have learned a frequently encountered pattern of syllables that constitute a word in English.

Mandel, Jusczy & Kemler Nelson (1994)

9-month-olds prefer the phonotactics of their language e.g., a unit like "topdog" is not likely to be one-word because "pd" does not usually appear within a word

Nativism

A policy of favoring native-born individuals over foreign-born ones "Language learning is not really something that the child does; it is something that happens to the child placed in an appropriate environment, much as the child's body grows and matures in a predetermined way when provided with appropriate nutrition and environmental stimulation

Jusczyk, Houston & Newsome 1999

A series of 15 experiments was conducted to explore English-learning infants' capacities to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The studies in Part I focused on 7.5 month olds' abilities to segment words with strong/weak stress patterns from fluent speech. The infants demonstrated an ability to detect strong/weak target words in sentential contexts. Moreover, the findings indicated that the infants were responding to the whole words and not to just their strong syllables. In Part II, a parallel series of studies was conducted examining 7.5 month olds' abilities to segment words with weak/strong stress patterns. In contrast with the results for strong/weak words, 7.5 month olds appeared to missegment weak/strong words. They demonstrated a tendency to treat strong syllables as markers of word onsets. In addition, when weak/strong words co-occurred with a particular following weak syllable (e.g., "guitar is"), 7.5 month olds appeared to misperceive these as strong/weak words (e.g., "taris"). The studies in Part III examined the abilities of 10.5 month olds to segment weak/strong words from fluent speech. These older infants were able to segment weak/strong words correctly from the various contexts in which they appeared. Overall, the findings suggest that English learners may rely heavily on stress cues when they begin to segment words from fluent speech. However, within a few months time, infants learn to integrate multiple sources of information about the likely boundaries of words in fluent speech.

Cognitive Revolution

A shift in psychology, beginning in the 1950s, from the behaviorist approach to an approach in which the main thrust was to explain behavior in terms of the mind. One of the outcomes of the cognitive revolution was the introduction of the information-processing approach to studying the mind. a shift in psychology from the behaviorist's stimulus-response relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the mind

Swingley & Aslin (2000)

Although children's knowledge of the sound patterns of words has been a focus of debate for many years, little is known about the lexical representations very young children use in word recognition. In particular, researchers have questioned the degree of specificity encoded in early lexical representations. The current study addressed this issue by presenting 18-23-month-olds with object labels that were either correctly pronounced, or mispronounced. Mispronunciations involved replacement of one segment with a similar segment, as in 'baby-vaby'. Children heard sentences containing these words while viewing two pictures, one of which was the referent of the sentence. Analyses of children's eye movements showed that children recognized the spoken words in both conditions, but that recognition was significantly poorer when words were mispronounced. The effects of mispronunciation on recognition were unrelated to age or to spoken vocabulary size. The results suggest that children's representations of familiar words are phonetically well-specified, and that this specification may not be a consequence of the need to differentiate similar words in production.

high-amplitude sucking procedure

Babies are presented with a phoneme until they habituate; then the phoneme is changed

conditioned head turn procedure

Experimental technique usually used with infants between five and eighteen months with two phases: conditioning and testing. During the conditioning phase, the infant learns to associate a change in sound with the activation of visual reinforcers, first presented at the same time and then in succession, such that the infant begins to anticipate the appearance of the visual reinforcers and look at them before they are activated. During the testing phase, when the infant looks to the visual reinforcers immediately after a change in sound, it suggests that the infant has perceived the change in sound, thereby demonstrating the ability to discriminate between the two sounds involved. A procedure used to assess infants' abilities to discriminate stimuli. The infant is trained to expect a visual/auditory reward following a stimulus change. Then, the infants' conditioned expectation (indicated by their turning their heads to orient to the reward) serves as a measure of discrimination ability.

Fernald et al. (1989) Infant directed speech

Fernald et al. (1989) showed that the mean pause duration between utterances in speech addressed to 4-month-olds was significantly longer than in ADS by both American English-speaking mothers (1.31 vs. 1.13 s) and fathers (1.86 vs. 1 s). This study compares the prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants in French, Italian, German, Japanese, British English, and American English. At every stage of data collection and analysis, standardized procedures were used to enhance the com prability across data sets that is essential for valid cross-language comparison of the prosodic features of parental speech. In each of the six language groups, five mothers and five fathers were recorded in semi structured home observations while speaking to their infant aged 0; 10-1; 2 and to an adult. Speech samples were instrumentally analyzed to measure seven prosodic parameters: mean fundamental frequency

(Kisilevsky, et al., 2003) pre-birth measures

Fetal heart rate increased in response to mother's voice only (Hoff, p.83) The ability of human fetuses to recognize their own mother's voice was examined. Sixty term fetuses were assigned to one of two conditions during which they were exposed to a tape recording of their mother or a female stranger reading a passage. Each condition consisted of three 2-min periods: no stimulus, voice (mother or stranger), and no stimulus. Fetal heart rate increased in response to the mother's voice and decreased in response to the stranger's; both responses were sustained for 4 min. The finding of differential behavior in response to a familiar versus a novel voice provides evidence that experience influences fetal voice processing. It supports an epigenetic model of speech perception, presuming an interaction between genetic expression of neural development and species-specific experience.

word segmentation

In language development, the ability to break the stream of speech sounds into distinct words. the process of discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech

Lew-Williams, Pelluchi, & Saffran (2011)

Infants are adept at tracking statistical regularities to identify word boundaries in pause-free speech. However, researchers have questioned the relevance of statistical learning mechanisms to language acquisition, since previous studies have used simplified artificial languages that ignore the variability of real language input. The experiments reported here embraced a key dimension of variability in infant-directed speech. English-learning infants (8-10 months) listened briefly to natural Italian speech that contained either fluent speech only or a combination of fluent speech and single-word utterances. Listening times revealed successful learning of the statistical properties of target words only when words appeared both in fluent speech and in isolation; brief exposure to fluent speech alone was not sufficient to facilitate detection of the words' statistical properties. This investigation suggests that statistical learning mechanisms actually benefit from variability in utterance length, and provides the first evidence that isolated words and longer utterances act in concert to support infant word segmentation.

Ferguson & Lew-Williams (2013; 2014)

Infants seem to be more willing to learn abstract rules based on stimuli that are communicatively useful. Infants' ability to detect patterns in speech input is central to their acquisition of language, and recent evidence suggests that their cognitive faculties may be specifically tailored to this task: Seven-month-olds reliably abstract rule-like structures (e.g., ABB vs. ABA) from speech, but not other stimuli. Here we ask what drives this speech advantage. Specifically, we propose that infants' learning from speech is driven by their representation of speech as a communicative signal. As evidence for this claim, we report an experiment in which 7-month-old infants (N=28) learned rules from a novel sound (sine-wave tones) introduced as a communicative signal, but failed to learn the same rules from tones presented in non-communicative contexts. These findings highlight the powerful influence of social-communicative contexts on infants' learning.

Why is babbling a critical step in the development of infants' language production?

It facilitates social interaction. b. It elicits more linguistic input from caregivers. c. It contributes to the development of vocal apparatus and related muscles.

Kuhl, Tsao, & Liu (2003)

Maintenance of nonnative contrasts can be possible and is enhanced by social interaction. 9 month old American babies exposed to Mandarin Chinese (12 lab visits) ‣ Group 1: Human experimenter ‣ Group 2: Audio-visual (Video recording) ‣ Group 3: Audio-only ‣ Group 4: English-speaking experimenter (control) Through exposure (25min/session * 4 weeks), they learned a phonetic contrast that exists in Mandarin but not in English ‣ an alveolo-palatal affricate (/ji/) and an alveolopalatal fricative (/xi/). The present experiments address these two questions. In Experiment 1, we examined whether exposure to ≈5 h of natural infant-directed Mandarin Chinese between 9 and 10 mo of age is sufficient to reverse the decline typically seen in foreign-language phonetic perception. A control group also experienced 5 h of natural language but heard only English. The age of 9 mo was chosen to begin exposure, because infant studies show that the decline in foreign-language phonetic perception is well underway by this time (18). The results of Experiment 1 confirmed the hypothesis: infants exposed to Mandarin reversed the decline in Mandarin phonetic perception shown in the English control group. In Experiment 2, we tested whether social interaction contributed to learning. The same foreign-language material was presented to American 9-mo-old infants using either auditory-visual (AV) or auditory-only (A) DVDs. The results of Experiment 2 provided no evidence of phonetic learning, suggesting an important role for social interaction in early language learning, perhaps analogous to the role social interaction plays in avian song learning.

poverty of the stimulus

Noam Chomsky -language is unlearnable without supplemental innate grammar knowledge because limited data is available to children learning a language A hypothesis that humans must have innate language capabilities because we learn our native language in the absence of environmental conditions, such as direct instruction or a large number of correct and incorrect examples.

Universal Grammar (UG)

Noam Chomsky/Aspects of the Theory of Syntax: belieft that language acquistion was innate--not acquired. the system of categories, operations, and principles shared by all human languages and considered to be innate

heart-rate monitoring (pre-birth measure)

One type of monitor is a Doppler ultrasound device. It's often used during prenatal visits to count the baby's heart rate. It may also be used to check the fetal heart rate during labor. The healthcare provider may also check your baby's heart rate continuously during labor and birth.

basic-level bias

People can categorize the same object at different levels of abstraction (i.e., superordinate, basic, and subordinate). Of these, there is a bias to the basic level. ... For categorization researchers, the bias is due to the organization of categories in memory producing faster access to the basic level (Murphy, 1991).

Werker et al (1981)

Previous work in which we compared English infants, English adults, and Hindi adults on their ability to discriminate two pairs of Hindi (non-English) speech contrasts has indicated that infants discriminate speech sounds according to phonetic category without prior specific language experience, whereas adults and children as young as age 4, may lose this ability as a function of age and or linguistic experience. Previous research has suggested that infants discriminate many speech sounds according to phonemic category regardless of language exposure, while adults of one language group may have difficulty discriminating nonnative linguistic contrasts. Our study attempted to address directly questions about infant perceptual ability and the possibility of its decline as a function of development in the absence of specific experience by comparing English-speaking adults, Hindi-speaking adults, and 7-month-old infants on their ability to discriminate 2 pairs of natural Hindi (non-English) speech contrasts. To do this, infants were tested in a "visually reinforced infant speech discrimination" paradigm, while a variant of this paradigm was used to test adults. Support was obtained for the above hypotheses. Infants were shown to be able to discriminate both Hindi sound pairs, and support for the idea of a decrease in speech perceptual abilities wih age and experience was clearly evident with the rarer of the 2 non-English contrasts. The results were then discussed with respect to the possible nature and purpose of these abilities.

Eimas et al. (1971)

Studies of speech perception in infants rate of sucking on a pacifier to examine ability to distinguish differences between articulatory features (e.g., t/d) Loudspeaker played /ta/, /ta/, /ta/.....every time the baby sucked the pacifier. When the baby heard the same sound and got bored, she slowed down sucking rate. Changed the sound to /da/, /da/, /da/. If the baby could hear the difference in the sound, she would pick up the pace to hear this new noise; if she couldn't hear the change, she would slow down sucking - Discriminiationi of synthetic speech sounds was studied in 1- and 4-month-old infants. The speech sounds varied along an acoustic dimension previously shown to cue phonemic distinctions among the voiced and voiceless stop consonants in adults. Discriminability was measured by an increase in conditioned response rate to a second speech sound after habituation to the first speech sound. Recovery from habituation was greater for a given acoustic difference when the two stimuli were from different adult phonemic categories than when they were from the same category. The discontinuity in discrimination at the region of the adult phonemic boundary was taken as evidence for categorical perception.

Whole object bias (Markman)

The (theoretical) assumption by babies that a new word heard in the context of a salient object refers to the whole thing and not to its parts, color, surface, substance, or the action the object is involved in. an assumption made by language learners that a word describes an entire object rather than just some portion of it

categorical perception

The ability to perceive sounds as belonging to different phoneme categories (e.g. that ability to differentiate between /p/ and /b/) the perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories

vocal play

The activity of producing a variety of different consonant and vowel sounds that is typical of infants between 16 and 30 weeks.

babbling drift

The notion that the sounds in infants' babbling are influenced by the ambient language. Their babbling "drifts in the direction of the speech the infant hears" infants gradually restrict their babbling to the sounds of their native language

manner and place of articulation

The place of articulation refers to that area in one of the resonating cavities (larynx, mouth) where the articulators are opposing some kind of stricture or obstacle to the passing of air. The manner of articulation refers to the way the articulators are set so that the resonance effect is possible.

preference procedures: head turn preference procedure & preferential looking or preferential listening

The preferential looking paradigm (PLP) and head-turn preference procedure (HPP) are experimental methodologies employed by researchers to measure infants' and toddlers' spontaneous looking and listening behaviors toward visual and auditory stimuli. The preferential looking paradigm (PLP) and head-turn preference procedure (HPP) are experimental methodologies employed by researchers to measure infants' and toddlers' spontaneous looking and listening behaviours towards visual and auditory stimuli. The preferential looking paradigm typically compares infants' looking times towards pairs of pictures presented side-by-side, while the head-turn preference procedure measures the duration of infants' listening times to differing streams of sound. The techniques allow the investigation of aspects of early perceptual, cognitive and linguistic development that would otherwise be difficult to explore in young infants, such as their ability to discriminate between stimuli, their natural or experimentally-induced preferences for stimuli, and their knowledge or learning in relation to the stimuli presented. - these three are all very similar, the difference is that head turn preference procedure requires the baby to turn its head to one side of the room or the other to trigger particular stimulus to play; any preference procedure that is non-head-turn based has the stimuli right in front of the child so no head turn is needed

Maye, Werker & Gerken (2002)

The present study provides the first evidence for such a mechanism, showing that the statistical distribution of phonetic variation in the speech signal influences whether 6- and 8-month-old infants discriminate a pair of speech sounds. We familiarized infants with speech sounds from a phonetic continuum, exhibiting either a bimodal or unimodal frequency distribution. During the test phase, only infants in the bimodal condition discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum. These results demonstrate that infants are sensitive to the statistical distribution of speech sounds in the input language, and that this sensitivity influences speech perception. Test phase ‣ Preferential-looking paradigm ‣ Alternating and Non-alternating Looking time measured in the alternating and non-alternating conditions Only infants in the bimodal condition exhibited differential looking times for alternating and nonalternating stimuli = discriminated tokens from the endpoints of the continuum Maye et al. (2002) investigated whether statistical distribution of phonetic variation in speech signal influences young infants' (6- and 8-montholds) phonetic discrimination. They compared infants' [ looking times ] between the Alternating vs. Non-Alternating stimuli to find that these measures significantly varied as a function of [ distributional structures in the exposure input ], as manipulated in the two conditions illustrated in the figure below.

Werker & Tees (1984)

The present work was designed to (a) determine the generalizability of such a decline by comparing adult English, adult Salish, and English infant subjects on their perception of a new non-English (Salish) speech contrast, and (b) delineate the time course of the developmental decline in this ability. The results of these experiments replicate our original findings by showing that infants can discriminate nonnative speech contrasts without relevant experience, and that there is a decline in this ability during ontogeny. Furthermore, data from both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies shows that this decline occurs within the first year of life, and that it is a function of specific language experience.

switch task

Used in conjunction with habituation ex apple and orange paired with their appropriate words, then if we switch children will look at the switch trial than at the same trial during the test phase. A simple word-mapping test in which infants are exposed to a visual representation of an object paired with an auditory stimulus during a habituation phase. During the subsequent test phase, the infants hear either the same object-word pairing, or they hear a new word paired with the familiar object. A difference in looking times between the novel and familiar pairings is taken as evidence that the child had mapped the original auditory stimulus to the familiar object.

statistical learning

ability to detect speech patterns (like syllable breaks) certain sounds (making words) are more likely to occur together and babies are sensitive to those probabilities

infant directed speech

adults speak slowly and with exaggerated changes in pitch and loudness a type of speech directed toward infants, characterized by short, simple sentences

allophone

any of the speech sounds that represent a single phoneme, such as the aspirated k in kit and the unaspirated k in skit, which are allophones of the phoneme k. In English, the sounds [l] (as in lion) and [r] (as in rabbit) are phonemes. In Japanese they are:

cooing

early vowel-like sounds that babies produce

Stager and Werker (1997)

found that 14-month-olds perceive sounds differently when they are part of words. Infants aged 4-6 months discriminate the fine phonetic differences that distinguish syllables in both their native and unfamiliar languages1,2,3, but by 10-12 months their perceptual sensitivities are reorganized so that they discriminate only the phonetic variations that are used to distinguish meaning in their native language12. It would seem, then, that infants apply their well honed phonetic sensitivities as they advance and begin to associate words with objects, but the question of how speech perception sensitivities are used in early word learning has not yet been answered. Here we use a recently developed technique to show that when they are required to pair words with objects, infants of 14 months fail to use the fine phonetic detail they detect in syllable discrimination tasks. In contrast, infants of 8 months—who are not yet readily learning words—successfully discriminate phonetic detail in the same task in which infants aged 14 months fail. Taken together, these results suggest a second reorganization in infants's use of phonetic detail as they move from listening to syllables to learning words.

Consider a hypothetical High-Amplitude Sucking experiment in which we test typically developing 1-month-old hearing infants who are being raised in a monolingual Englishspeaking environment. During exposure, infants hear the syllable /pa/. When they suck at a certain rate, they hear the sound again. After habituation, a shift happens and the infants hear the syllable /ph a/. Interestingly, /p/ and /ph / are allophones in English, but they are distinct phonemes in other languages. Based on Eimas et al. (1971), what does the post-shift sucking rate look like, compared to the sucking rate immediately prior to the shift?

immediately after, the rate of sucking is higher.

shape-bias

in early language development, children's tendency to rely heavily on shape as a distinguishing property when learning names for objects. previous learning of nouns based on shape heightens attention to the shape properties of additional objects

phoneme

in language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

Stimulus and response

is a key feature of Behaviorism

distributional learning

learning which acoustic differences matter for meaning The learning of the central tendency and variability of a range of stimuli, such speech sounds varying on some acoustic property. Infants' learning of the distributional properties of acoustic signals is thought to underlie the formation of phonetic categories. A type of statistical learning.

high-amplitude sucking technique

measurement technique that uses a pacifier with an internal sensing device that indicates when the infant's rate or intensity of sucking increases, this then generates a visual or auditory stimulus The high-amplitude sucking technique (HAS), also called non-nutritive sucking, is an experimental method appropriate for testing infants from birth to age 4 months. The HAS technique capitalizes on infants' sucking reflex: Infants hear a sound stimulus every time they produce a strong or high-amplitude suck.

vocal folds

muscular membranes in the larynx that produce sound

Nature vs. Nurture

name for a controversy in which it is debated whether genetics or environment is responsible for driving behavior

phonological processes

patterns of sound errors that typically developing children use to simplify speech as they are learning to talk simplifications used by children not capable of producing adult speech patterns

Usage-based approach

takes language to be an embodied and social human behavior. and seeks explanations in that context. As the name indicates, this theoretical. perspective incorporates the basic insight that usage has an effect on linguistic. structure.

habituation

tendency of the brain to stop attending to constant, unchanging information decreasing responsiveness with repeated stimulation. As infants gain familiarity with repeated exposure to a visual stimulus, their interest wanes and they look away sooner.

Cognitivism

the belief that much of human behavior can be understood in terms of how people think A theory of learning. The idea is that learning is a conscious, rational process. People learn by making models, maps and frameworks in their mind. ~ is the opposite of behaviorism.

voice onset time

the interval between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of vocal cord vibrations the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating

prosody

the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry

transitional probability

the probability of transitioning from one specific sound to the letter that comes after it the likelihood that one particular sound will follow another one to form a word

indeterminacy of word meaning

the problem that for any particular instance of a word's use, multiple meanings are possible in the situation

dishabituation

the restoration to full strength of a response to a stimulus that had previously become weakened through habituation recovery of a habituated response after a change in stimulation

phonotactics

the set of constraints on how sequences of segments pattern Description of the allowed combinations of phonemes in a particular language.

Behaviorism

the view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes. Most research psychologists today agree with (1) but not with (2).