Exam 2 (ch 3, 4, 5)

What is social gating?

The social function of language 'gates' children's attention which allows them to learn - info that kids remember for a long time is what comes from social interaction - auditory signals dont get analyzed if not from a person

Describe the biological theory of phonological development

biological factors underlying human motor capacity to produce speech shape both the course of phonological development Evidence: - Similar development across babies - cross-linguistic similarities - sounds at first sound like mix of all languages, later sounds are more like native Problems - Focuses on production - Why do languages differ at all - Doesn't explain system of regularities (that their lang gives them)

How can one test categorization and discrimination using a habituation paradigm? How does one test for something like a child's preference for her native language using a High Amplitude sucking paradigm?

categorization- they categorize all rectangles into one even if they have different sizes. realize it is the same shape. so they wouldnt react if you kept showing them bc they habituate to the category, test with a few and you wont have their full attention discrimination- they differentiate between shapes (circle vs rectangle) so test by showing both and seeing if you regain their attention. - play native and nonnative language and see if they change their sucking speed when they hear the native one

what are some things pre-linguistic children understand?

categorize objects properties of objects motion events before they learn language

What does the central executive center do?

component of WM that allocates mental resources among competing demands - like when you're doing tip in your head - trying to hear otp in a loud room - Working memory in new vs. continued conversation >> it is hard for kids to supply info for an ongoing convo bc they also have to remember what they were talking about so then they just say things that arent as related

What is phonotactic knowledge?

constraints on sound sequences and rules for putting them together - constraints on phonological rules - knowing how the sounds in our language can combine to form forms ex: we know if we see word "zloty" that it isnt in english bc things dont start like that ex: /st/ is possible in English but doesnt exist in Japanese, so cannot be used in a Japanese children's phonological rules

conventional gestures

culturally agreed upon meaning - nodding, shaking head no - appear just before first words

What is phonological memory and how does it relate to the non-word repetition task

it is the capacity to remember newly encountered sound sequences it related to the Non-word Repetition task because... - it is a task on phonological memory - give words and they get longer and longer but following rules of the phonemes in english (ex: grall, brasterer) - then they are asked to repeat them - accuracy with which words can be repeated predicts a lot (they arent real words, so how well can they remember new vocab? etc)

What are distinctive features of a language?

phonemes because only ones that CHANGE MEANING of words (in english)

Define phones, phonemes, and allophones

phones: different sounds a language uses. Out of all possible sounds that humans can make we use about 200 for language, each language uses about 45 - any distinct speech sound or gesture, regardless of whether the exact sound is critical to the meanings of words phonemes: a phonetic feature that creates a difference in meaning - changing /b/ and /p/ - "bat" vs. "pat" changes meaning allophones: Sounds that occur in a language (phones) but DO NOT differentiate meaning

How do newborns represent speech sounds in comprehension? When does this change? What type of experiment would reveal these differences?

Newborns - 2 months: Syllable (ba) - Ba vs. Da - 1 difference - Ba vs. Du - 1 difference Young children through adults: Phoneme (b) (a) - Ba vs. Bu - 1 difference, 1 similarity - Ba vs. Du - 2 differences

How is this (language mom uses with kid) related to socioeconomic class?

(Hart and Risley) - children of parents with higher SES have higher vocab - SES isn't just money: neighborhood, occupational status (how prestigious?) # and the quality of words (complex or not) heard over the course of childhood varies - high: heard 11,000 words/day - low: heard 7,000 words/day *by 4 yrs there is a *30 million* word difference so now low SES starts school with 30 million less words and there is a *snowball effect* bc they come in knowing less, understand less, keep struggling. this is the same effect for bilingual kids (discrepancy in both languages)

What are manner of articulation and place of articulation?

*Manner of articulation* = How the airflow is obstructed Stops- stop airflow ex: /g/ /d/ /b/ Fricatives - airflow is not completely stopped ex: /v/ /th/ /f/ *Place of articulation* = Where the airflow is obstructed Bilabial: at lips /b/, /p/ Labiodental: at teeth and lips /f/, /v/

what level do we (adults) process language in?

*on the phoneme level* - how are sounds broken up in your mind - Ex., note onset and rimes, manipulate sounds, cup ^ cup without /c/ = we are about to tease apart phoneme - Errors called *Spoonerisms* The dear old Queen -> the queer old dean. ^ we make a lot of mistakes like this where our tongue gets all tied up ^ evidence that at some level of mental representation a word is composed of separable phonemes/sounds Adults can break words down into phonemes, and we know this because adults can count syllables, rhyme, encounter spoonerisms, etc.

Describe the head turn paradigm

- babies hear sounds play - when they hear something new they get reward for looking that way - will turn to object to which the sound is associated with

How does prosody play a role in babbling drift?

- because they use prosody for it to sound like native language?

What were the different outcomes for children who were exposed to live interaction with people who spoke a different language compared to videos of a second language and what does this reveal about language development? How does this provide evidence that communication is important to language development?

- better with live interaction rather than with a video - the desire to communicate drives languages development - children are motivated to share what they're thinking and ask for stuff, so they have to practice - television is not interactive, so they don't really gain anything from it, nor do they get to practice their own speech.

^^ from last card... What about the input (specifically the distribution of the sounds in the input) that the children hear helps to facilitate this change? How do we know that these phonological abilities help in language development?

- children who heard extremes differentiated sounds better than those who heard ex from the dotted line (more muchy sounds not distinctly sounding like la and ra - those kids who are able to focus on the specific phonemes of their particular language earlier have better language development - Infants figure out which phonemes are specific to their language, and lose the ability to hear those that aren't. Infants who do this sooner have faster language development.

How does statistical learning help in rule or grammar learning?

- counting the frequency with which one stimulus is followed by another - Identifying Word boundaries - Can they identify syntactic rules? Abstract patterns that can apply to any stimuli - Example: The dog was running. The kid was studying. The boy was playing. The ______ was _____ ing. study: Heard 2 minutes of ABA pattern - gatiga taduta wafuwa Test hear new sounds in various patterns - li na li (ABA) or - li na na (ABB) *At *7 months* could tell the difference

What is babbling drift, why is it important, and when does it occur?

- drift of when sounds start to sound like native language - sounds they produce are influenced by language they hear - important because there is an environmental influence - occurs around 6-9 months?

What is lexical selection?

- early words biased towards phonemes kids can pronounce - they shy away from hard/scary words that's why we say mom vs mother

Describe habituation/dishabituation. What does it tell us?

- general term, in this case based on boredom - habituation: become acclimated to it (bored of) and stop paying attention... looking time gets shorter and shorter - dishabituation: regain interest. ex: visual stimuli looking time measure. they look more at a circle after a bunch of squares what does it tell us? - infants can categorize objects together (each rectangle is different size, but treated the same = category) - infants can differentiate circles from rectangles (this is different enough to regain attention)

high amplitude sucking

- give them headphones and pacifier connected to computer - kids suck faster when theyre interested sucking rate increases with: - a new sound playing (ba, ba, pa) - when they are working for a preference... suck at particular speed to hear moms voice/a preferred sound o they adjust to the speed necessary to hear mom - even with newborns

Methods for studying infants

- habituation/dishabituation - the head turn paradigm - preferential looking - eye tracking

What is meant when one says that children move from "universal" to "language specific" listeners? When does this happen?

- it means that they can no longer distinguish between all phonemes of all languages. they become accustomed to their native language's phonemes - it happens around 12 months

Examples: Phones, phonemes and Allophones

/r/ and /l/ sounds - In English they are distinct and differentiate meaning: "lent" vs. "rent" (phoneme) - Japanese has both but they do not differentiate meaning (allophone) /z/ and /s/ sounds - Phonemes in English - Allophones in (some dialects of) Spanish Aspirated p in pin [ph] vs non-aspirated in spin [p] - English = allophones bc no change in meaning - In Thai = phonemes bc [paa] means forest, [phaa] means to split *but they [ph] and [p] are both phones in both languages* - As English speakers we produce both all of the time but o don't hear the difference easily and o have to consciously work to produce the difference

What is cooing?

- 6-8 weeks - cooing: vowels, when happy, social - sounds like grunts, "ooh" barely open mouth. diff vowel like sounds strung together by separated intakes of breath

Phonology

- How do children. . . - Produce correction speech sounds - Comprehend speech sounds - Group sounds and words from different speakers?

What is infant directed speech? What are some of the features of this type of speech and how do those features influence language and emotional development?

- Motherese - Most cultures do it, but not universal - Higher and wider range of pitch - Shorter phrases and slower tempo > emphasizes more thing - Longer more prototypical/average vowels (ex: wooooow look aaat thaaat helps id vowels) - Highlight particular words (ex: the BOTTLE is RED not THE bottle IS red) - Preferred by infants - Improves phonological processing = beneficial to language development ** it is driven by the child. child is engaged => parent wants to do it more. it isnt something we are born with influences emotional dev: IDS improves phonological word processing and word meaning, which would lead to better expression of emotion down the road

Aspects of phonology

- Phonemes: /b/ and /p/ - "bat" vs. "pat" - Tones: ex. Mandarin Chinese /ba/ with no rise or fall- "eight" /ba/ with a rise- "to pull" *so raising it or not changes meaning

What are some of the errors that young children make in production?

- Reduplication ball --- baba - Deletion of weak syllable banana ---- nana (bc they are trying to follow the rule of first syllable stress, so they FIX IT. Wrong but shows they picked up pattern) - Stopping: making a frictive a stop see --- tee

How does sleep relate to language learning and development and what does that reveal about the domain specific or general nature of language learning?

- Sleep and memory in general - Statistical learning is improved if babies nap between learning and test - Sleep improves retention of new words in preschoolers *DOMAIN GENERAL - Sleep helps with learning, memory consolidation, and cognition in general, not specifically language development

How does maternal responsiveness influence language development?

- They are "conversational partners" at birth > kid babbles we talk back, kid babbles we talk back - Children whose mothers are more responsive to their communication, have better language earlier o Responses to crying >> day crying, shows them they have the power to communicate and by 1 yo will have better language skills o Following kid's attention >> "oh what can we do with this box?!"

not tuning into native language is not very good...

- Tuning faster infant's native language = faster language development between 11 and 30 months - Infants who are BETTER at distinguishing non-native sounds are SLOWER at word learning o Not losing all phonemes hinders language (ex: Baby Einstein would)

What advances in phonological production are made between 16 to 30 weeks?

- Vocal play: increase in types of sounds (consonant and vowel-like sounds increase), longer series of sounds - All babies sound the same at this point girl fighting with monkey, "ayayayetata", not too structured, no syllables really - they squeal and growl - consonants are produced in the back of mouth rn

What are vegetative sounds? When do they first occur?

- accompany biological functions of breathing, sucking, and so on ex: Cry, burp, sneezing, etc. occur: newborns, before 6 weeks

mental lexicon What features of language are included in the lexicon?

- all the words we know - mental dictionary of words you know includes definition, correct pronunciation (sound) and the grammatical category (is it a noun or a verb)

What is the path of an action compared to the manner of an action and how might categorizing and differentiating these help in language development?

- path: the DIRECTION the agent moves in (over, under, ascend). in english it goes into preposition- before the object/noun - manner: the WAY agent moves (run, crawl). in english, the verb is usually the manner important: they get an idea of how we use prepositions and verbs in english prepositions vs verbs (in english) >> english doesn't put path in the verb *even before language, kids can pull apart path w/o manner or vice versa, or adjective w/o object*

What is the prosody of speech? What are prosodic and phonological bootstrapping? Give examples of how these influence other aspects of language development.

- prosody: melody of speech, stress patterns - prosodic and phonological bootstrapping: use prosody and phonology to learn syntax or word meaning, grammatical structure >> can use melody and sound to id meaning, rules from environment to help learn grammar. bc like: o Nouns vs verbs in syllable stress (nouns in english have a first syllable stress record vs record) o Pauses at phrase boundaries ("the fuzzy brown bear walked to the store") >> you package like halfway not the fuzzy/brown bear/... *kids actually dont like it when you say it/pause in a weird way, so they recognize how well formed sentences should sound like* *bootstrapping= u can figure out if a word is a noun or the verb based on a lot

Why are vowels difficult for children to differentiate and categorize?

- there is no airflow obstruction - Position of tongue (high, low) and lips (round, non-round) matter >> like u can have same vowel but it might come from diff place in your mouth - Hard to differentiate and find commonality (High frequency helps infants with this) - They vary greatly between dialect and speaker but also within speaker ex: vowel accents on "pin" and "pen" they end up sounding the same in some states

Describe preferential looking

- they like faces (would prefer the right side up face) - show a car and a shoe and ask "where is the shoe" >> works from 10-2.5 for testing word comprehension - say a word and see what screen they stare at

Describe expansions and reframing? How are these related to "negative feedback"? How could expansions and reframing influence language development?

- this is what they do instead of negative feedback - In terms of feedback we give expansion and repetition ex: if they say "my feets are cold" we reply "oh your feet are cold?" - it influences language development because they notice how you said it correctly/correct syntax

Describe eye tracking

- tracks exactly where eyes go - the bigger the dot, the longer they are looking - kid with autism dont look at the faces, they look all over if ur trying to differentiate between circle and square you wouldnt use this

pre-linguistic sounds order

- vegetative sounds - cooing - vocal play - canonical/reduplicated babbling - non-reduplicated o jargon

What evidence do we have that children's limited abilities in the central executive center influence language?

- you need it to acquire language - language disorders (if u give kids with a disorder too much to hold in WM they have difficulty) - trouble with sentence comprehension (w/ attending to all aspects of a long sentence bc too much in WM)

how many consonants do 12 mo have?

12 months have just 11 consonants - Not difficult ones like /th/

At what age do children appear to show a mastery of the phonemes of their native language?

7 years have mastered phonology (mastery in production) (most by 4 or so) except Phonological awareness - which is Individual's awareness of the phonetic structure of words and it is *foundational to reading*

How is phonological memory related to language development?

Better phonological memory = better - Vocabulary - Grammar - Second language learning *accuracy with which words can be repeated predicts a lot (they aren't real words, so how well can they remember new vocab? etc)

pre-linguistic sounds they make 6-9 months

Canonical (reduplicated) babbling: true syllables /babababa/ - reduplic. series of the SAME VOWEL AND CONSONANT combo - not necessarily communicating - parents mock kid not other way around - Rare in babies who are deaf vs. hearing (this is the first development that distinguishes them, they do all the ones before this) ex: super cute baby with towel Jargon - babbling with prosody. Around 10 months - prosody sounds like native language - melody without the words - a part of nonreduplicated, but not too much consonant variation yet ex: twins Nonreduplicated babbling - range and type of consonants and vowels increase - more than just bababa >> maybe tatabawa ex: girl talking otp "aywiwiwi" Examples also include jargon and nonredupicated babbling *milestones are the same across all kids*

What do cross-linguistic studies and research with children who are deaf tell us about the phonological production that occurs between 6 and 9 months?

Deaf children do not develop canonical/reduplicated babbling

How do early vocabularies influence phonological development?

Does vocabulary drive phonology? More words require more sounds BAT vs BAM easier than bam vs. bat vs. bag vs. ball vs. bar vs. bark vs. . . Evidence for and against this argument as vocab ^ they are forced to get phonological processing but if better at phon. processing = more words

how is cooing related to brain development?

Infants tend to coo when they are happy, which relates to the limbic system in the brain. cooing accompanies an emotional state: cooing, and limbic system is associated with expression/control of emotion

What is articulatory phonetics?

Speech sounds in terms of HOW they are produced Basics: - Consonants: airflow is obstructed - Vowels: airflow is not obstructed (e.i. produced by obstructing air)

How do frequent frames in speech aid learning of syntax? Give examples.

Frequent frames cue syntactic categories: "You _____ it" (frame usually occurred with verbs) - this is used with kids a lot and they might start noticing the frame/sentence structure followed when talking about an action "The ______ is" (frame usually occurred with nouns) *it helps them tease apart info* -ok these are the words that go into this frame - using frames helps to tell if a new word is a noun or verb > important in learning rules of how nouns and verbs can be combined in sentences - how sentences are built

Describe the behaviorist theory of phonological development

Imitation and reinforcement Problems: - Adults don't correct phonology in children, they think it's cute - Can't explain "system of regularities", (voicing assimilation rule) subconscious abilities But parent responsiveness helps - babbling/talking back when baby babbles - they'll still develop language

What evidence do we have that children can read the intentions of others from a young age? How is intention reading related to language development?

Intention reading: realizing others have intentions, discerning what intentions are - know around 4 mo that humans have intentions - know there is a goal but it takes a little longer to figure out what the goals are Evidence: missed string in a cup experiment - By 18 months imitate correct behavior. if u miss cup and say "aw man" theyll try to do it right - only if it is by a human >> if a robot misses/puts it outside cup, they will too intention reading and language learning: - novel word label goes to what the adult is looking at, not what child is looking at (around 24 months) - they use your eye/social info to attach labels - they're not gonna call a toy a "divorce" bc you say it otp and they hear you * Joint attention supports language, but isn't necessary theres other strategies they use too - it is only ~25% of child/parent interactions - some cultures dont do it and its ok

Describe joint attention, gaze following, communicative pointing. What is the importance of these skills to language development?

Joint attention: 2 people attend to the same object or event. Can be child or parent oriented, can be with eye gaze or pointing. 9-12 mo - relating to another person about an object *enables intention reading* - Gaze following: child looks where person is looking. The earlier they do it, the better their language skills because the better you are at communicating = the better at language. Occurs around 10-15 months - Communicative pointing: child points to an object and looks at person. This is pointing to communicate, to show something, to socialize. Request or provide info. Around 10 mo- 1 year. ex: see adult looking for something they'll point at it - kids with autism usually only do the pointing that is to get something. they usually dont have joint attention skills = impaired in language

What is phonological knowledge?

Knowledge of the sounds and sound patterns of a language

What types of feedback do parents typically provide to their children related to their language errors?

Parents correct some things, but rarely grammar - Factual errors, bad words, some mispronunciation are corrected - We don't give negative feedback like "no that's wrong"

Do children realize theyre saying words wrong?

Perception vs production: Hear errors in others that they produce ex: 'fis' vs fish, 'Meetro'

Phonological processes

Phonological processes are systematic alterations of sounds in the target language to fit with sounds that they can produce

What types of things about a mother's speech or language influences word learning?

Quality of maternal input - Range of vocabulary - Complexity of sentences (more complex = better lang skills) - Chances for child to respond Quantity of maternal input - More speech that children hear spoken to them, relates to higher vocabulary *All true for pre-k teachers as well*

What can some production errors tell us about how phonemes and words are represented for production? How does this relate to phonological idioms? How does this indicate a difference in comprehension and production of phonemes?

Represented as whole words in production - we know because we look at phonological idioms o Phonological idioms: child produces sound correctly in one word, but mispronounces in another. - ex: "wa-bit" but "rag" 3- but the other important factor is that children comprehend at the phoneme level but produce at the word level comprehend before producing>> words they are trying to say but don't produce it correctly

What are all of the features of differences in language use related to socioeconomic status that eventually seem to impact language development?

SES is related to the type of language used: Variety and amount of info you provide - Avocado example >> kid asks "whats that?".. you can say 1) you wouldn't like it 2) an avocado, you wouldn't like it 3) remember that guacamole you didn't like? ^ you cannot just assume they're not gonna like it. for 1 you don't even provide a label *you do not need to buy avocado for them to experience, just need a network of info and explanation* Type of language - directives (pick that up now) vs - eliciting speech (what do we do after playing?) *low SES parents have stressful jobs and all they want is for kids to clean up quickly* Responsiveness - label what kids attend to - respond to kids' communications, babble and speech *Mother's education is the best measure of SES for language outcomes*

Language specific babbling was tested using 2 different methodologies. Explain these two studies.

Test 1: adult French raters listened to babbling from French, Arabic and Chinese learning babies at 6, 8, and 10 months of age - Novice raters: identified French at 8 months - Experts raters: identified French at 6 months french speakers could tell difference between languages' babbling. it was also easier to tell with 8 mo vs 10 mo Test 2: Experts identified vowels and consonants: - Differences can be observed at 9 months - Why? No prosody *So, between 6 and 9 months influence of native language* found that the vowels and constants in children's babbling depend on the language the children is being exposed to. So Japanese babbling contains more nasal sounds than English babbling. It's just more support for babbling drift.

What is voicing?

Time the vocal cords start vibrating relative to the release of air. - Voiceless: cords vibrate after air release ex: /s/, /p/ - Voiced: cords vibrate before air release ex: /z/, /b/ So, /b/ is a bilabial voiced stop -after all voiceless consonants the plural is pronounced /s/ -after all voiced consonants the plural is pronounced with /z/"

Describe the connectionist theory of phonological development

Type of usage based account - shaped by input, how phonological dev arises from language experience Connections, based on association - Self babbling - association between motor coordination and sound they make - Hearing sounds by others - link sounds they make to sounds mom makes (diagram) watching moms mouth => sound of moms speech -> motor movements to make sound -> sound of baby babbling Accounts for: - Universal to language specific sound perception - Error production just due to weak connections - Learning the system of regularities

Explain how each of the following relates to speech sound development in production: physical growth, brain development and experience.

physical growth: - vocal tract - smaller, different shape, muscles developing (so it is hard to talk when tongue is too big and fills whole mouth, ratio is important) - facial skeleton getting larger so allows for tongue to fit better= more motion brain development: - Limbic system (cooing accompanies an emotional state: cooing, and limbic system is associated with expression/control of emotion) - Motor cortex (later babbling requires greater control over the tongue and throat) experience: - need to continuously babble and hear themselves - Hearing self: children who are deaf vs. hearing (deaf kids do fall off a little, they produce less elaborate vocal play and reach canonical babbling later)

What are phonological rules? Describe voicing assimilation. When do English-speaking children display voicing assimilation? (pg 111)

rules of how sounds go together, like what would come after a certain other sound - JUST RULES - *voicing assimilation:* consonants match in voicing when they are together in a word ex: wug and blick -after all voiceless consonants the plural is pronounced /s/ -after all voiced consonants the plural is pronounced with /z/" Plural: Wugs (wug/z/ both voiced) vs. blick (blick/s/ both voiceless) Past tense: Wugged (wug/d/ - voiced) vs. blick (blick/t/ -voiceless) *English rule that kids follow this rule correctly by age 4*

What are spontaneous gestures and how do they differ from baby signs (we talked about this in class). What is important about the development of spontaneous gestures? How do spontaneous gestures relate to language development?

spontaneous gestures are created by the child - they are symbolic communication - they are different than baby signs because they are not explicitly taught - child guided but they need to know intentions of others - it is consistent with the kid but differs among all. They all have different signs ex: moving hand and saying "nana" like banana, blowing on food, a hand symbol for bunny important because: they are predictive of language abilities later. Even more than baby signs how they relate to language dev: - predict syntax development and vocabulary (bc they start using symbols and words) - object pointing at will soon be a word in their vocab - number of objects they point at predicts vocab size - do gesture and mom more likely to say word referring to - They have now created a symbol that consistently used for something, this is important for word learning bc the same goes for word too. Symbol to concept idea is good for understanding words

What is important about the fact that children can categorize objects, properties of objects and motion events before they learn language?

they can form categories - important because it tells us they know most nouns label categories they can distinguish properties of object vs objects - it is important bc they see difference between adjectives and nouns - so they can tease adjective from thing ex: red is a property of something they recognize and categorize motion events - important because they see diff between prepositions (path) and verbs (manner) pre-verbal children can still form categories and it's clear that they understand the difference between nouns and verbs because they understand that different objects are different and that objects are nouns.

number of abilities and preferences infants have at birth

they prefer: - language to other audio - mother's voice to other women - stories they've heard in the womb - native language > if exposed to English in womb, that's what they prefer when they are born. this is about familiarity its not that they are racist. no preference if exposed to multiple They are also "universal listeners"... they can differentiate all languages' phonemes Link visual face cues to language sounds - by 5 months they can recognize that the audio/visual information is not synchronized in the video they are watching (McGurk effect) - Prefer linked audio and visual - McGurk Effect, > fooled at 5 mo bc they integrate visual and audio

system of regularities

understanding which sounds go together during production how sounds are combined in the language a baby (heh) version of phonological rules - rules of how sounds go together, like what would come after a certain other sound - like voicing

What is a phonetic feature?

we can characterize sound production, both by physical properties (amplitude and frequency) and by production (voicing).