Psych 335 Ch. 5 & 6

Intermodal perception

The combining of information from two or more sensory systems. From very early on, infants integrate information from different senses.

Prosody

The characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns, and so forth with which a language is spoken

2 key prerequisites for the process of language development?

(1) a human brain and (2) experience with a human language.

Number of preschoolers with language disorders

2-19%. A majority are late talkers.

Why is it important to focus on infancy?

1. extremely rapid change occurs in all four areas during the first two years of a child's life. 2. infant development in these four domains is particularly intertwined: the minirevolutions that transform infants' behavior and experience in one domain lead to minirevolutions in others. I.e. developing sight -> opportunities for new information. 3. the majority of recent research on perceptual and motor development has been done with infants and young children. There is also a large body of fascinating research on learning and cognition in the first few years. 4. the methods used to investigate infants' development in these four domains are, of necessity, quite different from those that researchers are able to use to study older children.

When do infants begin walking independently? How?

11-12 months. They keep their feet relatively wide apart, which increases their base of support; they flex slightly at the hip and knee, thereby lowering their center of gravity; they keep their hands in the air to facilitate balance; and they have both feet on the ground 60% of the time

When do babies lose their ability to perceive the speech sounds that aren't part of their language?

12 months - Werker

Imitating Intentions: Meltzoff, Intention and Attention

18-month-olds observed an adult attempting, but failing, to pull apart a small dumbbell toy. When the infants were subsequently given the toy, they pulled the two ends apart, imitating what the adult had intended to do, not what he had actually done.

Gramatical Category

Hearing "This is a dax," they assume that dax refers to an object, as well as to other objects from the same category. In contrast, "This is a dax one" suggests that dax refers to a property of the object (e.g., its color or texture), while "This is dax" suggests that dax is a proper noun (a name).

When do infants notice the connection between emotional expression in faces and voices?

5-7 months. When infants hear a happy voice, they look longer at a smiling face, and they look longer at an angry face when they hear an angry voice.

At what age do babies begin to babble?

6-10 months

At what age do babies begin to coo?

6-8 weeks

Woodward

6-month-old infants saw a hand repeatedly reach toward one of two objects sitting side by side in a display. Then the position of the two objects was reversed, and the hand reached again. They looked longer when the hand went to the new object (in the old place) than when it reached for the old object it had reached to before.

Classical conditioning

A form of learning that consists of associating an initially neutral stimulus with a stimulus that always evokes a particular reflexive response - Pavlov

Thelen

Held infants under the arms and submerged them waist-deep in water. "The case of the disappearing reflex." The reflex in question, the stepping reflex, can be elicited by holding a newborn under the arms so that his or her feet touch a surface; the baby will reflexively perform stepping motions.

Infants Vision: What is the preferential-looking technique?

A method for studying visual attention in infants that involves showing infants two patterns or two objects at a time to see if the infants have a preference for one over the other. Founded on the expectation that babies will look longer at objects they find interesting

Stepping Reflex

A neonatal reflex in which an infant lifts first one leg and then the other in a coordinated pattern like walking. Typically disappears after 2 months (Zelazo)

Drawing

A popular symbolic activity. Young children's early scribbling quickly gives way to the intention to draw pictures of something, with a favorite theme being representations of the human figure.

Violation-of-expectancy

A procedure used to study infant cognition in which infants are shown an event that should evoke surprise or interest if it violates something the infant knows or assumes to be true. The majority of the evidence that young infants can represent and think about invisible objects comes from research using the violation-of-expectancy procedure.

Universal Grammar - Chomsky

A proposed set of highly abstract, unconscious rules that are common to all languages. Despite many surface differences, the underlying structures of the world's languages are fundamentally similar. *Nativist

Infants Vision: What is habituation?

A research tool used in studying fetal development. This procedure involves repeatedly presenting an infant with a particular stimulus until the infant's response to it habituates, that is, declines. Babies love novelty.

Positive reinforcement

A reward that reliably follows a behavior and increases the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated. Such research features a contingency relation between the infant's behavior and the reward: if the infant makes the target response, then he or she receives the reinforcement.

Connectionism

A type of information-processing approach that emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units.

Other race effect (ORE)

A well-established finding, initially observed in adults, in which individuals find it easier to distinguish between faces of individuals from their own racial group than between faces from other racial groups. By 9 months of age, infants have more difficulty discriminating between other-race faces than between own-race faces

DeLoache, 2004 - Miniature room results

A young child watches as an experimenter hides a miniature toy in a scale model of the regular-sized room next door. The child is then asked to find a larger version of the toy that the child is told "is hiding in the same place in the big room." Three-year-olds readily use their knowledge of the location of the miniature toy in the model to figure out where the large toy is in the adjacent room.

Differentiation

According to Gibson... The extraction from the constantly changing stimulation in the environment of those elements that are invariant, or stable. For example, infants learn the association between tone of voice and facial expression because, in their experience, a pleasant, happy, or eagerly excited tone of voice occurs with a smiling face—not a frowning one—and a harsh, angry tone of voice occurs with a frowning face—not a smiling one.

Piaget and Intermodel Perception

According to Piaget (1954), information from different sensory modalities is initially separate, and only after some months do infants become capable of forming associations between how things look and how they sound, taste, feel, and so on.

Cross-Situational Word Learning

Across experiences, a child might observe that whenever "dax" is said, one object is always present, and thus that object is probably the dax. Through this process of cross-situational word learning, even infants can narrow down the possible meanings of new words

Adults influence on word learning

Adults facilitate word learning by highlighting new words. For example, they stress new words, or place them at the end of a sentence. They also tend to label objects that are already the focus of the child's attention, thereby reducing uncertainty about the referent. *Naming game

Human faces vs. monkey faces

Adults, 9-month-olds, and 6-month-olds can all readily discriminate between two human faces. However, adults and 9-month-olds have a great deal of difficulty telling the difference between one monkey face and another (Pascalis, de Haan, & Nelson, 2002). 6-month-olds are just as good at discriminating between monkey faces as they are at discriminating between human faces.

When does the human auditory system reach adult levels?

Age 5-6

Private Speech

An important regulatory function: children talk to themselves as a strategy to organize their actions.

Infants and Touch

An important way that infants learn about the environment is through active touch, initially through their mouth and tongue, and later with their hands and fingers. Learn about their own bodies and the texture, taste, and other properties of the objects they encounter. Around 4 months of age, infants gain greater control over their hand and arm movements

Metalinguistic knowledge

An understanding of the properties and function of language—that is, an understanding of language as language. Adults have a considerable amount of this.

Pragmatic Cues - Baldwin

Aspects of the social context used for word learning. Showed 18-month-olds two novel objects and then concealed them in separate containers. Next, the experimenter peeked into one of the containers and commented, "There's a modi in here." The adult then removed and gave both objects to the child. When asked for the "modi," the children picked the object that the experimenter had been looking at when saying the label. Thus, the infants used the relation between eye gaze and labeling to learn a novel name for an object before they had ever seen it

Narratives

At most, 3-year-olds' conversations include occasional brief references to past events. In contrast, 5-year-olds produce narratives—descriptions of past events that have the form of a story

Optical expansion

Babies are sensitive to this. A depth cue in which an object occludes increasingly more of the background, indicating that the object is approaching.

Mutual Exclusivity

Children expect that a given entity will have only one name. Novel name-nameless category principle: leads children to expect that a given entity will have only one name (Woodward and Markman, 1998)

Linguistic Context

Brown (1957) established that the grammatical form of a novel word influences children's interpretation of it.

Linguistic - Kradding, Naigles

Child was told the duck was kradding the rabbit. The duck and rabbit were kradding.

What are the cognitive benefits to bilingualism?

Children who are competent in two languages perform better on a variety of measures of executive function and cognitive control than do monolingual children. The link between bilingualism and improved cognitive flexibility likely lies in the fact that bilingual individuals have had to learn to rapidly switch between languages, both in comprehension and production.

Why does the stepping reflex disappear?

Chubbier babies generally begin walking (and crawling) somewhat later than do slimmer ones. Thelen reasoned that infants' very rapid weight gain in the first few weeks after birth may cause their legs to get heavier faster than they get stronger. Tested: When weight was added, the babies suddenly stopped stepping.

Pre-reaching movements

Clumsy swiping movements by young infants toward the general vicinity of objects they see.

What does language require?

Comprehension and production. Comprehension precedes production.

Arnold Gesell and Myrtle McGraw

Concluded that infants' motor development is governed by brain maturation.

Rovee-Collier

Contingency between infant behaviour (kicking) and an external event (moving mobile)

What did Chomsky point out?

Countered Skinner: Some of the reasons why language cannot be learned through the processes of reinforcement and punishment. We can understand and produce sentences that we have never heard before (generativity). How could children produce words they have never heard before, like wented or mouses? The explanation of such instances must be that we know details about the structure of our native language that we have not been taught—facts that are unobservable and thus impossible to reinforce—contrary to Skinner's proposal.

Current Motor Development Theorists

Current theorists, many of whom take a dynamic-systems approach, emphasize that early motor development results from a confluence of numerous factors that include developing neural mechanisms, increases in infants' strength, posture control, balance, and perceptual skills, as well as changes in body proportions and motivation

Carolyn Rovee-Collier and Contingency Learning

Developed an instrumental-conditioning procedure for studying learning and memory in young infants. In this method, experimenters tie a ribbon around a baby's ankle and connect it to a mobile hanging above the infant's crib. The interesting mobile movement thus serves as reinforcement for the kicking. The intensity of the reward—the amount of movement of the mobile—depends on the intensity of the baby's behavior.

What are the key process's of perceptual learning?

Differentiation and affordances.

Kellman and Spelke (1983)

Display could be perceived either as two pieces of a rod moving on each end of a block of wood or as a single rod moving back and forth behind the block. Importantly, adults perceive displays of this type the latter way. After habituating to the display, the infants were shown the two test displays. Look longer at the broken rod because that display would be relatively novel.

Characteristics of Infant Directed Speech

Emotional tone - It is speech suffused with affection—"the sweet music of the species," as Darwin (1877) put it. Exaggeration. When people speak to babies, their speech is slower, and their voice is often higher pitched, than when they speak to adults, and they swoop abruptly from high pitches to low pitches and back again. Even their vowels are clearer (Kuhl et al., 1997). Exaggerated facial expressions. Many of these characteristics have been noted in adults speaking such languages as Arabic, French, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish (see de Boysson-Bardies, 1996/1999), as well as in deaf mothers signing to their infants (Masataka, 1992). Caregivers use various pitch patterns of IDS to communicate important information to infants even when infants don't know the meaning of the words uttered.

The origin of perceptual constancy was a traditional component in the debates between ______ & _____________

Empiricists and nativists. Briefly, empiricists maintain that all knowledge arises from experience (spatial experience in our environment), whereas nativists hold that certain aspects of knowledge are, in fact, innate, or hard-wired (nervous system properties).

Overregularization

Evidence for generalization. Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular. For instance, a child who previously said "men" and "went" may begin producing novel forms such as "mans" and "goed," as well as "foots," "feets," "breaked," "broked," and even "branged" and "walkeded"

Auditory Perception

Fetuses can hear sufficiently well to learn basic features of their auditory environment (their mother's heartbeat, the rhythmic patterns of her native language, and so forth). At birth, the conduction of sound through the outer parts of the ear is inefficient. Over the course of infancy, there are vast improvements in sound conduction from the outer and middle ear to the inner ear.

What is the first step in language learning?

Figuring out the sounds of one's native language - Prosody

Mirror neuron system

First identified in the ventral premotor cortex in nonhuman primates. In research with macaque monkeys, this system becomes activated when the monkey engages in an action

Intentionality - Tomasello

For instance, in one study, 2-year-olds heard an experimenter announce, "Let's dax Mickey Mouse." The children interpreted the novel verb dax as referring to the action the adult apparently intended to perform "Find the gazer" in the containers

Palmer et al., 2012

Found that 4-month-olds could, in fact, discriminate between the signs. However, by 14 months of age, only infants who were learning ASL were able to detect the difference between the hand shapes; those who were not learning ASL had lost their ability to make this perceptual discrimination. Perceptual narrowing is thus not limited to speech.

Why was Genie a good example of the critical period for language?

From the age of approximately 18 months until she was rescued at age 13, Genie's parents kept her tied up and locked alone in a room. During her imprisonment, no one spoke to her; when her father brought her food, he growled at her like an animal. At the time of her rescue, Genie's development was stunted—physically, motorically, and emotionally—and she could barely speak. With intensive training, she made some progress, but her language ability never developed much beyond the level of a toddler's: "Father take piece wood. Hit. Cry" (Curtiss, 1977, 1989; Rymer, 1993).

Affordances

Gibson: The possibilities for action offered by objects and situations. They discover, for example, that small objects—but not large ones—afford the possibility of being picked up

Early Word Production

Gradually, infants begin to say some of the words they understand, with most producing their first words between 10 and 15 months of age. The words a child is able to say are referred to as the child's productive vocabulary.

Why do infants have poor contrast sensitivity?

Immaturity of infants' cones, the light-sensitive neurons that are highly concentrated in the fovea (the central region of the retina) and are involved in seeing fine detail and color. - newborns' cones catch only 2% of the light striking the fovea, compared with 65% for adults - No richly colorful world. At best, they can distinguish some shades from

Western Lifestyle Motor Milestones

Months: 1: lifts head 2: chest up, uses arms for support 3: rolls over 4: supports some weight with legs 5: sits and stands without support 6: pulls self to stand 7: walks without using furniture 10: stands alone easily 11: walks alone easily *Note: other cultures, such as China, are discouraged from locomotion - leads to slower development

Unconditioned response (UCR)

In classical conditioning, a reflexive response that is elicited by the unconditioned stimulus.

Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

In classical conditioning, a stimulus that evokes a reflexive response.

Conditioned stimulus (CS)

In classical conditioning, the neutral stimulus that is repeatedly paired with the unconditioned stimulus.

Conditioned response (CR)

In classical conditioning, the originally reflexive response that comes to be elicited by the conditioned stimulus.

What is referencing? What is the problem with it?

In language and speech, the associating of words and meaning. Figuring out which of the multitude of possible referents is the right one for a particular word is, as the philosopher Willard Quine (1960) pointed out, a very complex problem. illustrated by the case of a toddler who thought "Phew!" was a greeting, because it was the first thing her mother said on entering the child's room every morning

Babies and Voice Onset Time

In the original, classic study (one of the 100 most frequently cited studies in psychology), 1- and 4-month-olds sucked on a pacifier hooked up to a computer (Eimas et al., 1971). The harder they sucked, the more often they'd hear repetitions of a single speech sound. After hearing the same sound repeatedly, the babies gradually sucked less enthusiastically (habituation). Then a new sound was played. If the infants' sucking rate increased in response to the new sound, the researchers inferred that the infants discriminated the new sound from the old one (dishabituation). A critical feature of the study is that for both groups, the new and old sounds differed equally in terms of VOT. Since this classic study, researchers have established that infants show categorical perception of numerous speech sounds

Neonatal Reflexes

Innate, fixed patterns of action that occur in response to particular stimulation. I.e. Grasping, rooting, sucking, swallowing. Other reflexes, such as tonic, are not useful.

Infants and Music Sensitivity

Infants are sensitive to music, as shown by the fact that caregivers around the world sing while caring for their infants. infants prefer infant-directed singing over adult-directed singing Infants not only discriminated between performances of the same song in two different keys but also continued to remember the original key of the song two weeks after they had last heard it sung. *preferences for consonant music as opposed to dissonant music.

DeLoache and colleagues

Infants in the DVD-viewing conditions showed no more advancement in vocabulary than the infants in the control group did. The infants who showed the greatest vocabulary development were the infants in the parent-teaching group. Interestingly, the performance of infants in the DVD-viewing conditions was unrelated to how much parents thought their infant had learned from the DVD. However, there was a correlation between how much the parents liked the DVD themselves and how much they thought their infant had learned: the more parents liked the DVD, the more likely they were to overestimate its positive effects

What were the results of Jusczyk & Aslin's word segmentation study?

Infants in this study were tested on repetitions of words that had been presented in the sentences (such as cup) or words that had not (such as bike). The researchers found that infants listened longer to words that they had heard in the passages of fluent speech, as compared with words that never occurred in the passages. This result indicates that the infants were able to pull the words out of the stream of speech—a task so difficult that even sophisticated speech-recognition software often fails at it.

Infants knowledge about the physical world

Infants seem to appreciate that objects do not float in midair, that an object that is inadequately supported will fall, that a nonround object placed on a stable surface will stay put, and so forth. Infants also gradually come to understand under what conditions one object can support another. *Baillargeon, Needham, & DeVos

Do young infants or adult make more speech distinctions?

Infants. Can discriminate between speech sounds they have never heard before.

Symbolic Proficiency

Involves mastery of the symbolic creations of others and the creation of new symbolic representations To use symbolic artefacts, children must have acquired dual representation.

Whole-object assumption

Leads children to map the label "bunny" to the whole animal, not just to its tail or the twitching of its nose.

What hemisphere is language prominent in?

Left - This is prominent very early in life. *EEG studies show that infants exhibit greater left-hemisphere activity when listening to speech but greater right-hemisphere activity when listening to nonspeech sounds

What is a key component in the development of babbling?

Native language.

Can more than the human brain acquire a communicative system with the complexity, structure, and generativity of language? Can humans learn the communicative systems of other species?

No. Humans are notoriously poor at learning the communicative systems of other species

Infants are sensitive to ___________ of these cues (3)

Optical expansion, binocular disparity, stereopsis, monocular depth cues (or pictorial cues)

Instrumental conditioning

Or "Operant Conditioning." Learning the relation between one's own behavior and the consequences that result from it.

Scaffolding

Parents actively assist their children to develop the ability to produce coherent accounts of past events. Those toddlers whose parents scaffold their early conversations by asking useful, elaborative questions produce better narratives on their own a few years later

Syntax

Rules in a language that specify how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on) can be combined

Auditory localization

Perception of the location in space of a sound source. When they hear a sound, newborns tend to turn toward it.

Perceptual Narrowing

Perceptual narrowing permits the developing child to become especially attuned to patterns in biological and social stimuli that are important in their environment.

Syntactic development

Rules in a language that specify how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on) can be combined Learning the syntax or rules for combining words (nouns, adjectives, etc.)

Collective Monologue

Piagets. Conversation between children that involves a series of non sequiturs, the content of each child's turn having little or nothing to do with what the other child has just said

Statistical Learning

Picking up information from the environment, specifically, detecting statistically predictable patterns. From quite early on, infants are highly sensitive to the regularity with which one event follows another. Statistical learning abilities have been measured across numerous domains, including music, action, and speech. Proposed to be of vital importance in language learning,

Categorical Perception

Possessed by adults and infants. The perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories

Needham, Barrett, & Peterman

Pre-reaching infants were given Velcro-patched mittens and Velcro-patched toys that allowed them to pick up objects. The manual exploration of objects made possible by these "sticky mittens" led to the infants' increased interest in objects and the earlier emergence of their ability to reach independently for them.

"Goldilocks effect"

Prefer patterns that have some variability over patterns that are very simple or very complex (random) (Gerken, Balcomb, & Minton, 2011; Kidd et al., 2012). This "Goldilocks effect"—avoiding patterns that are either too easy or too hard, while continuing to focus on those that are just right, given the infant's learning abilities—suggests that infants allocate attention differently to different learning problems, preferentially attending to those patterns that are the most informative.

What methods are used to study sensory and perceptual development in infants?

Preferential-looking technique and habituation

Hochberg and Brooks (1962)

Raised their own infant son with no exposure to pictures at all: no art or family photos; no picture books; no patterns on sheets, clothing, or toys. Nevertheless, when tested at 18 months, the child readily identified people and objects in photographs and line drawings. BUT they do not yet understand what two-dimensionality means; hence, they attempt to treat pictured objects as if they were real objects

SES and Children's Language - Hart and Risley

Recorded the speech that 42 parents used with their children over the course of 2½ years, from before the infants were talking until they were 3 years of age. Some of the parents were upper-middle class, others were working class, and others were on welfare. After 4 years, an average child with upper-middle-class parents would have accumulated experience with almost 45 million words, compared with 26 million for an average child in a working-class family and 13 million for an average child with parents on welfare.

Infants and technology

Reduces the time infants and toddlers spend actively engaged with caregivers and objects, their best source for learning. Children younger than 2 years: researchers examined the association between TV/DVD viewing and vocabulary development. For 8- to 16-month-olds, there was a negative correlation between the amount of time infants watched DVDs and parental reports of the infants' vocabularies: the more the babies watched, the lower their vocabulary scores.

Generativity

Refers to the idea that through the use of the finite set of words and morphemes in humans' vocabulary, we can put together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas.

Adolph & Robinson, 2013

Replicated Gibsons study. Infants apparently have to learn through experience how to integrate perceptual information with each new motor behavior they develop. Do not transfer what they learned about crawling down slopes to walking down them Used social referencing - looked and listened to parents reactions.

When do children begin combining words into sentences?

Second year - Telegraphic Speech. Once children are capable of producing four-word sentences, typically at around 2½ years of age, they begin to produce complex sentences containing more than one clause

Taste and Smell in infants

Sensitivity to taste and smell develops before birth, and newborns prefer sweet flavors. Preferences for smells are also present very early in life - a powerful role in how a variety of infant mammals learn to recognize their mothers

Cognition - Nativists and Empiricists

Some nativists argue that infants possess innate knowledge in a few domains of particular importance. According to empiricists, infants' mental representations of the physical world are gradually acquired and strengthened through the general learning mechanisms that function across multiple domains

What type of behaviour is language?

Species-specific (only humans acquire language in the normal course of development) and species-universal (achieved by typically developing infants across the globe)

Werker

Studied infants ranging in age from 6 to 12 months. The infants, all from English-speaking homes, were tested on their ability to discriminate speech contrasts that are not used in English but that are important in two other languages—Hindi and Nthlakapmx

Damage to what area of the brain leads to aphasia?

Studies of individuals with brain damage resulting in aphasia provide evidence of specialization for language within the left hemisphere. Broca's (motor and language functioning) and Wernicke's (auditory) area.

Symbols

Systems for representing thoughts, feelings, and knowledge, and communicating them to others.

Johnson and Newport (1989)

Tested the English proficiency of Chinese and Korean immigrants to the United States who had begun learning English either as children or as adults. The results reveal that knowledge of key aspects of English grammar was related to the age at which these individuals began learning English, but not to the length of their exposure to the language. The most proficient were those who had begun learning English before the age of 7.

Self-locomotion

The ability to move oneself around in the environment. 8 months. First takes form in crawling or self-propulsion. Infants adjust their mode of locomotion according to their perception of the properties of the surface they want to traverse - Gibson

Rational learning

The ability to use prior experiences to predict what will occur in the future.

Bilingualism

The ability to use two languages

Pragmatic development

The acquisition of knowledge about how language is used.

Phonological development

The acquisition of knowledge about the sound system of a language. "the mastery of the sound system of their language."

Scale Error

The attempt by a young child to perform an action on a miniature object that is impossible due to the large discrepancy in the relative sizes of the child and the object. I.e. try to sit in a chair too small for them

Reaching

The development of reaching sets off a mini-revolution in the infant's life: "once infants can reach for and grasp objects, they no longer have to wait for the world to come to them" With age and practice, infants' reaching shows increasingly clear signs of anticipation; for example, when reaching toward a large object, infants open their fingers widely and adjust their hand to the orientation of the desired object At about 7 months, as infants gain the ability to sit independently, their reaching becomes quite stable. Reaching shows signs of anticipation, and by 10 months of age, infants' approach to an object is affected by what they intend to do with the object.

Binocular disparity

The difference between the retinal image of an object in each eye that results in two slightly different signals being sent to the brain.

What is Infant-directed speech (IDS)? Does it help with development?

The distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies and very young children. *Not universal IDS also seems to aid infants' language development. Draws infants' attention to speech itself. Some studies suggest that infants' preference for IDS may emerge because it is "happy speech"; when speakers' affect is held constant, the preference disappears

Phonemes

The elementary units of meaningful sound used to produce languages.

Dual representation

The idea that a symbolic artifact must be represented mentally in two ways at the same time—both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself. Very young children have substantial difficulty with dual representation, limiting their ability to use information from symbolic artifacts (DeLoache, 2004).

Modularity hypothesis

The idea that the human brain contains an innate, self-contained language module that is separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning

Object segregation

The identification of separate objects in a visual array. You can tell where one object ends and another begins. Infants (after habituation), like adults, assumed there was a single intact rod moving behind the block as evidenced by longer infant gaze at broken rod

Habituation

The infant has formed a memory representation of the repeated, and now familiar, stimulus. Highly adaptive: diminished attention to what is familiar enables infants to pay attention to, and learn about, what is new. The speed with which an infant habituates is believed to reflect the general efficiency of the infant's processing of information.

Semantic development

The learning of the system for expressing meaning in a language, including word learning.

Voice onset time (vot)

The length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating. To study the perception of VOT, researchers create recordings of speech sounds that vary along this VOT continuum, so that each successive sound is slightly different from the one before, with/b/gradually changing into/p/. adult listeners do not perceive this continuously changing series of sounds. Instead, they hear/b/repeated several times and then hear an abrupt switch to/p/.

Perceptual constancy

The perception of objects as being of constant size, shape, color, etc., in spite of physical differences in the retinal image of the object I.e. you perceive the image in the mirror as being the same size as any other adult face, no matter how far or close you are

Pictorial cues

The perceptual cues of depth (such as relative size and interposition) that can be perceived by one eye alone. Newborns: Recognize 2D versions of 3D objects Five-month-olds: Recognize people and objects in pictures and drawings Nineteen months: appreciation of the symbolic nature of 2D objects (From DeLoache et. al, 1998)

Monocular depth cues

The perceptual cues of depth (such as relative size and interposition) that can be perceived by one eye alone. Yonas et al.

Holophrastic period

The period when children begin using the words in their small productive vocabulary one word at a time. For example, they just say "drink!"

Distributional Properties

The phenomenon that in any language, certain sounds are more likely to appear together than are others. Researchers found that infants are able to discriminate between words and sequences that are not words. Used recurrent sound patterns to fish words out of the passing stream of speech.

Visual acuity

The preferential-looking method enables researchers (and eye-care professionals) to assess infants' visual acuity, that is, to determine how clearly they can see. Can be estimated by comparing how long infant looks at research patterns. Infants prefer to look at patterns of high visual contrast

Stereopsis

The process by which the visual cortex combines the differing neural signals caused by binocular disparity, resulting in the perception of depth.

Word Segmentation

The process of discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech

Perception

The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information.

Fast Mapping and Carey Bartlett

The process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of a familiar and the unfamiliar word. an experimenter drew a child's attention to two trays—one red, the other an uncommon color the child would not know by name—and asked the child to get "the chromium tray, not the red one." The child was thus provided with a contrast between a familiar term (red) and an unfamiliar one (chromium). From this simple contrast, the participants inferred which tray they were supposed to get and that the name of the color of that tray was "chromium." After this single exposure to a novel word, about half the children showed some knowledge of it 1 week later by correctly picking out "chromium" from an array of paint chips.

Sensation

The processing of basic information from the external world by the sensory receptors in the sense organs (eyes, ears, skin, etc.) and brain.

Morphemes

The smallest units of meaning in a language, composed of one or more phonemes. Morphemes, alone or in combination, constitute words. The word dog, for example, contains one morpheme.

Syntactic Bootstrapping

The strategy of using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning. When children in Naigles's (1990) study heard an adult describe this filmed scene as "The duck is kradding the rabbit," they used the syntactic structure of the sentence to infer that kradding is what the duck is doing to the rabbit.

Telegraphic Speech

The term describing children's first sentences that are generally two-word utterances. Around 2½ years of age: four-word sentences which often contain more than one clause

Critical period for language

The time during which language develops readily and after which (sometime between age 5 and puberty) language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful

Infants and Social Knowledge

The understanding that the behavior of others is purposive and goal-directed.

Overextension

The use of a given word in a broader context than is appropriate. I.e. calling any man "daddy". Naigles: point to a sheep, point to a bunny, understand what's what.

Specific language impairment (SLI)

These children exhibit challenges in many language-related tasks, including speech perception, word segmentation, and grammatical comprehension.

Generative

Through the use of the finite set of words and morphemes in their native vocabulary, individuals can create an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas.

The first indication of communicative competence is....

Turn Taking. In these "dialogues," the infant has the opportunity to alternate between an active and a passive role, as in a conversation in which one alternates between speaking and listening. Intersubjectivity: two interacting partners share a mutual understanding. Joint Attention: established by the parent's following the baby's lead, looking at and commenting on whatever the infant is looking at.

Common movement

Two segments always moved together in the same direction and at the same speed. Such a powerful cue that it leads infants to perceive disparate elements moving together as parts of a unitary object. As they get older, infants use additional sources of information for object segregation, including their general knowledge about the world

Gibson and Walk

Used an apparatus known as the "visual cliff." 6- to 14-month-old infants would readily cross the shallow side of the visual cliff. They would not, however, cross the deep side, even when a parent was beckoning to them to come across it.

Animals that have learned to respond to spoken language?

Washoe, a chimpanzee, and Koko, a gorilla, became famous for their ability to communicate with their human trainers and caretakers using manual signs The most successful sign-learning nonhuman is Kanzi, a great ape of the bonobo species. Kaminski, Call, and Fischer (2004) found that Rico, a border collie, knew more than 200 words and could learn and remember new words using the same kinds of processes that toddlers use. Alex, an African Grey parrot, learned to produce and understand basic English utterances, although his skills remained at a toddler level (Pepperberg, 1999).

Production

With regard to language, speaking (or writing or signing) to others

Comprehension

With regard to language, understanding what others say (or sign or write)

Do infants exhibit social preferences?

Yes, show desire to engage with some individuals over others. Kinzler, Dupoux, & Spelke: Showed preferences for adults who spoke their language. Well before their 1st birthday, infants have already learned a great deal about how humans behave and how their behavior is related to their intentions and goals.

Xu & Garcia

demonstrated that 8-month-olds could make predictions about simple events. Infants were shown a box containing 75 ping-pong balls; 70 were red and 5 were white. The infants then observed an experimenter close her eyes (to suggest a random selection) and draw 5 balls from the box—either 4 red and 1 white or 4 white and 1 red—and put them on display. (The experimenter was actually drawing preselected "random samples" from a hidden compartment in the box.) The infants looked longer at the display with the 4 white balls, indicating that they were surprised that the experimenter drew mostly white balls from a box that was mostly filled with red balls.

Observational Learning: Imitation and Meltzoff and Moore

found that after newborns watch an adult model slowly and repeatedly stick out his or her tongue, they often stick out their own tongue. By the age of 6 months, infant imitation is quite robust. Six-month-old infants not only imitate tongue protrusion, but they also attempt to poke their tongue out to the side when that is what they have seen an adult do.

Baillargeon, Spelke, & Wasserman - Fan/screen rotation results

infants were first habituated to the sight of a solid screen rotating back and forth through a 180-degree arc. Then a box was placed in the screen's path, and the infants saw two test events. In one, the screen rotated upward, occluding the box as it did so, and stopped when it contacted the box. In the impossible event, the screen continued to rotate a full 180 degrees, appearing to pass through the space occupied by the box (which the experimenter had surreptitiously removed). Infants as young as 3½ months of age looked longer at the impossible event than at the possible one.

What does learning language require?

phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic development.

Babbling

repetitive consonant-vowel sequences ("bababa...") or hand movements (for learners of signed languages) produced during the early phases of language development

Contrast sensitivity

the ability to detect differences in light and dark areas in a visual pattern. Infants are not good at this. They can detect a pattern only when it is composed of highly contrasting elements.