Language Development Exam 1 Study Guide

Language Development Exam 1: 10/04/11
Ch.1 & 2 (ish) and 3 &4 (Heavily)

Chapter 1- Introduction to Language Development

Who studies language development?
-Developmental psychologists
-Linguists
-Neuropsychologists
-Speech/language pathologists
-Cognitive psychologists
-Philosophers
-Anthropologists

Learning is a complex, rule-governed system that most children learn without explicit teaching.

Language and Communication

-Cognition- the process of sensation and experience, ways of thinking and knowing.
-Communication- the transfer of information from one person to another.
-Language- Exchanging information into mutually understood symbols.
-Modality- the manner in which language and communication is expressed.
-Articulation (speech and sign)- the accuracy with which something is expressed.

Components of Language

Form
Meaning
Use
• Syntax: Sentence Structure
• Morphology: Structure of Words
• Phonology: Sound System
• Semantics or Lexicon:
• Meanings of words and phrases
• Pragmatics: Interactional skills, communicative competence
• Sociolinguistics: Language use in society

-Phonology: The mental representation of sounds as part of a symbolic cognitive system
-Morphology:
Morphemes- the minimal units of linguistic form and meaning
Bound morphemes- cannot occur on their own as full words (adds additional meanings to words) Free morphemes- can stand on there own. (full words)
-Syntax: how words are organized into sentences - The order of words makes a big difference in meaning -English is a word order language.
-Semantics: Learning the meanings of words and phrases -Our lexical knowledge involves more than just the meaning.

Child Milestones for Language Learning

First year Major Milestone: 0-12 Months - Pre-linguistic period even though a great deal of learning occurs - Phonology: vocal Play, babbling - Lexicon: Recognizes a few words, such as name - Communicative competence: intentional communication

Second Year Major Milestone: 12-24 Months - Phonology: developing sound system for spoken words
- Lexicon: Vocabulary grows to about 300 words
-Grammar: Combining words into sentences
- Communicative Competence: Talks about a range of things, mostly in the here-and-now.

Third year major Milestone: 24-36 Months -Phonology: Articulation improves
- Lexicon: Large ranges of words including abstract words, like pretend, anger, sad, think.
- Grammar: Longer and more complex sentences
- Communicative competence: Talks about a range, including past events and pretend.

Fourth year major Milestones: 36-60 Months
- Phonology: Phonological awareness, rhymes
- Lexicon: More words, and more abstract words (think, pretend)
- Grammar: Complex sentences with embedded clauses
- Communicative competence: Learning to tell stories and talks about decontextualized topics a great deal.
- Capable of complex turntaking

Beyond Four years of age
- Continue to learn more through school years and life
-Vocabulary
- How to use language
- Using language to learn new things
- Becoming literate

By School Age -They can talk -To learn and inform -To tease, pretend, and lie -To bond and assimilate culture -To tell stories and entertain

What is it about our brains that allow us to acquire language from interaction?

The Nativist view: Children are born with a universal grammar that serves as a foundation to learn their specific language. -Child acquire language rapidly, effortlessly, without direct instruction -All languages share common features
-Innate cognitive mechanisms specific to language are ‘turned on’ by the input

Interactionist of Constructivist View: No innate universal grammar - Language results from interacting using language - Innate characteristics of the mind allow language to develop -General cognitive abilities, not language specific -Large role of experience in children language learning -Input helps shape language

What is Innate?

The Domain specific account of language learning
- The cognitive structures used to learn language tare domain specific
-Specific to language
-Self contained module
-Children have inborn knowledge about the general form of language -Language Acquisition Device -Universal Grammar - Structural; similarities among all languages The Domain general accounts of language learning
-Domain- General cognitive skills underlie language acquisitions -For example: Humans ability to learn symbols, categorize, and see patterns

What kind of learning mechanisms do babies have?
- Statistical learners – babies can learn relative frequencies of sound patterns
- Rule learners- learn abstract rules or patterns, don’t just memorize sound sequences, and have a cognitive representation of an abstract rule

The Wug Test -Children can easily apply the pluralization rule to a new unknown word. Ex: Here is one wug. Here are two ____.

What kind of knowledge does the child acguire?
Language knowledge consists of rules and symbols: -Abstract, independent of specific items. -Subject Verb Object
Language knowledge consists of connections in neural network: -Form connections among nodes from experience or input - The network is the knowledge -Input activates certain patterns, repeatedly -Strengthens correct patterns, weakens ones that are not correct

How do we study child language for research and clinical knowledge?
-Transcription of a sample of the childs speech to analyze
-Video or audiotape record a child
-hard part: getting a representative sample
-Senteces, typically 100 utterances.
-Standardized tests and measures of language development -asseses language maturity -MLU- Mean Length of Utterances

Summary
-Language is a profound cognitive activity
-Children must learn phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
- How children learn language has broad theoretical appeal and interest -Is language innate or learned from experience -Are language learning mechanisms domain specific or general cognitive skills.

Chapter 2: Biological basis of Language Development

Keywords

Pidgins- a language developed when people are thrown together that shares no common language. People invent a language that uses the lexical items from on or more of the contact languages but which has its own, very primitive grammar.
-Vocabulary is borrowed from one of the contact languages, but the grammar is not

Creole- is a language that once was a pidgin but which subsequently became a native language for some speakers.
-Creolization is a process that creates new languages.
- if the model is a primitive language, such as pidgin- humans will make it more complex- into a Creole.

Neurolinguistics- is the study of the relation of the brain to language functioning. -Where language resides in the brain and what it is about the human brain that makes language possible.

Cerebral cortex- is the outer layer of the brain.
- The cortex controls higher mental functions, such as reasoning and planning, and the subcortial structures control more primitive functions, such as eating and breathing.
- The cortex itself is divided into two cerebral hemispheres; in the most individuals, the area of the cortex that sits over the ear ( the temporal lobe) is larger in the left cerebral hemisphere than in the right.
-The left and right verebral hemispheres are connected by a band of nerve fibers known as the corpus callosum.
- Each cerebral hemisphere is connected to the opposite side of the body. These contra lateral connections, the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa.

Aphasia- condition in which language functions are severly impaired
Broca’s Aphasia- difficulty producing speech and the speech they do produce seems to lack grammatical structure. Their speech tends to consist of short strings of content words- nouns and verbs- without grammatical morphemes. -Typically associated with damage to the front part of the left hemisphere, near the part of the cortex that controls movement. - Left-hemisphere damage, which results in language impairment - ‘Seat of grammar’

Wernicke’s Aphasia- Use words that are wrong for the meaning they are trying to express or they use made-up, meaningless words. Describes as “syntactically full but semantically empty”.
- Damage to the right cerebral hempisphere, which causes visual-spatial information. - ‘Seat of meaning’
-Typically associated with damage to a region more posterior than Broca’s area, next to the primary auditory cortex.

Functional Asymmetry- The characteristic of the human brain in which each hemisphere serves different functions.
-The account of brain development as moving from an initial state of redundant capacity throughout the brain to one of nonredundant.
-Daily use of the left hemisphere for language appears to stabilize language in the left hemisphere and allows elimination of the redundant right hemisphere capacity. If the left hemisphere is damaged early in life, the right hemisphere still has the capacity to take over language functions, but with age that capacity declines.

Plasticity- is the ability of parts of the brain to take over functions they ordinarily would not serve. - Brain tissue does not regenerate once it is damaged
-Children’s brains have more plasticity than adult brains do (but adult’s brains do have some, but children’s brains have more.
-Children with left hemisphere damage can recover some language using the right hemisphere (never complete recovery)

Critical period Hypothesis- the notion that a biologically determined period exists during which language acquisition must occur, if it is to occur at all. - When baby bird’s hatch, the first thing they see is their mother and will follow her around; this is said that babies are imprinted on their mother. - Some environmental input is necessary for normal development, but biology determines when the organism is responsive to that input. That period of responsivety is the critical period. Ex: some cells in the brain respond to input from both eyes in the normal adult, but if these cells fail to receive input from two eyes during the first year or two of life, they lose this capacity.

Left/Right Hemisphere- The left hemisphere is specialized for language, and the right hemisphere is specialized for processing visual-spatial information. - Right hemisphere makes some contribution to normal language functioning. -Right hemisphere lesion patient sometimes produce abnormal intonation contour when they speak and they may have difficulty recognizing the emotional tone of an utterance, - Right hemisphere damage patients have difficulty understanding jokes, understanding sarcasm, interpreting figurative language and following indirect requests. - Right hemisphere is involved in semantics and pragmatics but that syntax is the province of left hemisphere. -Left hemisphere is specialized for damage, regardless of modality - Left hemisphere damage resulted in aphasia for signers just as it does for users of spleen language, even though sign language used a visual-spatial modality, signers with right hemisphere damage were not aphasic.

Language = Human Universal - Whenever there are humans there is language. - All humans are capable of learning language - Language is not merely something that humans can do it exposed to the right conditions but that language is something that humans cannot help doing.

Chapter 3: Communicative Development

Intentionality- the characteristic of having a purpose or goal (in speaking)
-The infant tries to get the adult to do something
-Contact with another mind
-Intentionality distinguishes reflexive communication from true communication
-Evidence of intentionality: - Extends arm to show you something - Points at some interesting object or event - Extend arms to be picked up - Requests something by reaching - Pretend actions and objects.

Development of Intentionality:

Speech acts- Doing things with words
-Prelocutionary Phase: -Birth. ~ 9 months of age
-Children produce reflexive communication (adults assume the infant is trying to communicate)
-Child does not intend to communicate.
Ex: The child who wants an object that is out of reach may try to get it and may make a fuss in the process. The mother may observe the child, infer the child’s desires, and get the object fort the child. - The child’s behavior has the affect of obtaining the object, but the child makes no effort to communicate with the mother.
-Illocutionary Phase: -~10-12 months of age
- Children come to understand that other people can be helpful in satisfying ones goals and that it is possible to elicit this help by communicating with them. -Beginning of intentional communication
-Actively tries to get adults attention
-Communicative goal but no language form -Vocalizations, gestures, physical behavior
Ex: a child who wants something will not just reach and fuss but will actively try to elicit another aid in obtaining that object
-Locutionary Phase: - >12 months - When children’s communicative behavior includes using language to refer - Intends to communicate & use words -Words are used referentially or as part of communicative routine. - This phase does not suddenly begin with the child’s first words.
Ex: First uses the sound “mm” with a pointing gesture to indicate a request. A little more advanced, a child uses “bam” while knocking down blocks, but is used a part of the activity. It does not stand for of used to refer to the activity. Gradually children begin to use language referentially  at that point; all three components pf speech acts are in place.

Joint attention
- The state in which the child and an adult together attend to some third entity.
-A major milestone in speech act development is the change from the perlocutionary to the illocutionary phase.
- Before joint attention (10 months) infants are able to relate to an object or to another person but not to both at the same time.
Ex: relating to an object  playing with a rattle of looking at a mobile over ones crib. Relating to another person  smiling or cooing.
- Between the ages of 9-15 months (or after 10 months) children spend much of their time with others in joint attention (mutual engagement). -Engages in “conversations” with adult about object - First joint attention is nonverbal but as they become older, nonverbal symbols such as gesture and verbal symbols (words) are used in these interactions.

-The role of joint attention in language learning: - Facilitates language development - More joint attention = advanced language development - Early joint attention skills may reflect earlier brain maturity.
-Better joint attention skills  more interactional episode; better at engaging adults.
- 18 month, all typically developing children can follow the speaker attention. Can engage in joint attention
-30 months, the role of joint attention declines and the child becomes better at initiating conversations.
-Autism and Aspergers Syndrome  have mild to profound impairments in joint attention -Lack of initiating and lack of interest in engaging in joint attention.

Maternal Responsiveness
-Adult treats the infant as a conversational partner since birth. -Assume vocalizations have meaning - Use any child behavior to interact -Mothers “pull intentionality” out of their child.
-Responsive language mentors  better later language development
- Mothers who follow their child’s focus of attention  bigger vocabularies later -First word is earlier -50 word vocabulary benchmark is earlier.
- Bell and Ainsworth study
- Infants who had the most responsive mothers when they were 6-12 months old cried less at the age of 12 months than did the infants with less responsive mothers.
- Infants who cried less at 12 months were more communicative in terms of both their vocalizations and their non-vocal behavior
- Children whose mothers are responsive to their vocalizations at 13 months produce their first word earlier and reach a 50-word vocabulary earlier than children who have less responsive mothers.

Pragmatic bootstrapping
-As speech acts come to be expressed with increasingly conventional forms borrowed from the adults system, the child mover toward a language system that is no longer a set of expressions for different pragmatic intents.
- Early functional communication (speech acts) allows a child access to interaction. These primitive language forms are replaced by linguistic form.

Pragmatic development –Children learn to put language to communicative purposes.
-(1) Children have a range of communicative intentions before they have the adult linguistic means of expressing those intentions & (2) that not just language but also communicative functions develop in the first few years.
-Earliest Communicative Functions: -12-16 months of age
-Consistent sound- gesture combinations to express 8 different communicative functions

***REVIEW MORE***

-Functions in second year: -12-24 months of age - Greater range of intentions or functions -Higher frequency of use -Greater range of grammatical forms to express each intention - Beginning to participate in conversations
Connected discourse- using language longer than a single sentence.
- Grammar: Sentence level structure
-Conversations, narratives (stories, past events, future events), monologues (talking to self)
-Discourse can involve:
- Two or more people talking, in which case they are called conversations. -Rules of conversation: -Take turns (turn taking) -Be cooperative, includes four rules of conduct:
-Quantity- be informative. Provide enough but not too much information
-Quality- be truthful. Do not make your beliefs sound like facts. - Relation- be relevant - Manner- be clear, brief, orderly, unambiguous. (Poor conversationalists violate these rules)
-Narratives, when one speaker talks at length, as in a lecture, extended monologue, or stories (extensively studied). - The beginnings of narrative development can be found in the spontaneous descriptions of past events children produce in conversation, starting before the age of three. -Conversations can include narratives
- Preschool Discourse - Preschool children’s speech is not really communicative.
- It is rather Collective monologues- looks like a dialogue but really just joint monologues. They take turns talking, but each speaker’s turn has little to do with the previous speakers turn. Rather, each child is producing his or her worn monologues, albeit with interruption for the other child’s monologue. -Child does not participate in true dialogue because he/she is unable to place himself at the point of view of his hearer”
Ex: Julie: “I love my dolly, her name is Tina”
Carol: “I’m going to color the sun yellow”
Julie: “ She has curly hair like my auntie”
Carol: “ Maybe ill color the trees yellow too”
-Paiget viewed Children’s inability to engage in true dialogues via, “skill” and “will”
-“Skill” being that children are egocentric, unable to assume another point of view; Egocentrism is not limited to language use but is a general characteristic of children’s thought at this stage.
-“Will” being that children are not trying to engage in dialogue and focuses the functions of children’s self-directed, or private speech.

Private Speech - or non-dialogic speech is when children talk to themselves when they are alone and engaged in task or in play. Private speech provides behavioral guidance.
-Solitary monologues- used in private speech.
- Produce soliloquies alone in their beds before they fall asleep.
- May produce longer and more complex narratives when alone compared to the narrative produced in a conversation with parents.
-As well as producing monologues in the presence of other people, in what would seem to adults to be more suitable context for conversation.
- Form of language practice
- It is not work for them to practice; in contrary it is language play.

Language play- the ability to play with language is itself a skill that is manifest in forms as varied as pins and poetry.
- The tendency to engage in spontaneous language play may be related to skill at language play. Ex: Kindergarten children who produce high amounts of language play in their spontaneous speech are also better than average at explaining verbal riddles.

Turn-taking
-Infants and toddlers are able to take turns in a conversation
- Very dependent on adult for support
-Respond to adult speech -With some type of reply -Early turn-taking- unrelated to mother talk - 1-2 year old children - Partial understanding of language - Strategies for participating -Respond with anything - Respond with an action - Action response - Not clear if child understands mother’s speech.

Contingent Responses- Response that is related to adult’s previous utterance
-MLU- Avg. phonemes per utterance.

Each utterance is encoded as either adjacent or non-adjacent. -non-adjacent was further encoded as non-contingent, imitative, or contingent. **define

- Responses that were non-contingent or only imitative became less frequent as the children got older and contingent responses became more frequent.
- Initiating a new topic is actually easier for children than producing a response that shares the first speaker’s topic and adds new information to it.
- Peer to peer conversations -3-5 years old – range 4-12 turns -21-77% of utterances were contingent on the others communication.

Topics scaffolding -adult introduces a past event as a topic (“did you go to the zoo?”) and then eliciting more information on the topic (“What did you see there?”). -Child supplies one-word responses to the adult’s questions.
-Scaffolding the child -Provide support to allow the child to perform at a higher level than if alone.
- 1 year of age dependent on adult to initiate topic.
- By age 2, can initiate some topics  can initiate about past events and absent objects
- Topic initiation can be non-verbal - May not be dependent on grammar skills. Depends on cognitive skills.

Sociolinguistic development- refers to the child’s development as a socially competent language user.
-Three different sociolinguistic accomplishments:
-The use of situationally appropriate language, the understanding that people in different social roles use language differently, and using language in gender-typed ways. -These are social understandings and socially conditioned patterns of language use in adults, and we wish to determine when children start to look like adults in these respectives.

Registers- Styles of language associated with a particular group of people.
- Language use to which children show early sensitivity is the use of different registers.
-Academic register, mother-to-child register, peer-to-peer register, high status register - 3-5 years- develop notions of register -Register develops throughout adulthood
-Using language appropriately requires control over the different styles that different situations require, and it requires knowing when to use what register.
Ex: “good” speech is used in church, in talking to westerners, and in talking about things like the bible; “bad” speech is used at home, in talking to family member, and in talking about informal, everyday topics.

Sustained interactions-

Questions

What behaviors would you look for to know whether a child can communicate intentionally?
- eye gaze, body movements, gesture, joint attention, vocalizations, words, etc.

How might gesture facilitate later language development?
-It helps a child to communicate prior to words

A child points to a dog, looks at dad, and vocalizes. What type of communication is this?
- protodeclaritive (proto- an early form of…)

Piaget said preschool children do not engage in conversations because _______________.
-They are egocentric

A mother says to a 24 month old, “Where did we go in Florida? We went _______. What is this?
-Scaffolding

Chapter 4: Phonological Development

Phonological Knowledge in Adults

How do we describe vowels?
-By the position of the tongue, width of the jaw opening, shape of the lips.

Phonological Rules in a language dictate which physical differences are important to the language.

Phones- are the different sounds a language uses
-Physically, each production of a speech sound -Every time we produce a /p/ sound, it is technically different -Mental representation -Abstract concept of what fits in that phoneme class.
Phonemes- are the meaningfully different sounds in a given language
- Variety of physical forms; variations do not signal changes in meaning.
-We have cognitive representation of each phoneme - /p/, /z/, /i/….
Allaphones- are phones that do not differentiate meaning
-Family members of a phoneme
All of the different phonetic variations
-Different phones but in the same phoneme class - In English, [p] and [pｈ] are allophones of the phoneme [p].

Because aspiration is never the basis for a contrast between two words, aspiration is not a distinctive feature in English; it does not carry meaning. -Nasal sounds, voiceless stops, voiced fricatives  sounds grouped together on the basis of common distinctive features

Phonotactic knowledge- The knowledge of constraints on the sequencing of sounds.
For example: What sounds can occue after /s/?

* Adults language knowledge: -What sounds their language uses, what sound distinctions signal meaning distinctions, and what sound sequences are possible. Phonetic features- /z/ and /s/, you can feel that your teeth , lips, and tongue stay in about he same place. The thing that changes is the voicing. These are phonetic features.

Prelinguistic Speech Production

Stages of Prespeech vocal development:
- Reflexive crying and Vegetative sounds – from birth
- Cooing and laughter – begins 8 weeks -Produce their first laughter around age of 16 weeks.
- Vocal Play (or expansion stage)- begins 16-30 weeks -Marginal babbling (squeals, growls, and “friction noises”)
- Starts to sound like an English syllable as long series of a sound are produced at the end of the expansion stage
-Reduplicated, or canonical babbling - begins 6-9 months
- Series of same consonant and vowel combinations with presence of true syllables. (ex: dada  CVCVCV) not communicative. -Major benchmark in development
- First development that distinguishes the vocal development of hearing children from that of deaf children. - At this time babies produce of their language in their native environment.
-Nonreduplicated, or variegated babbling (12 months) - Contains prosody- rhythmic patterns of the native language - These wordless sentences are often referred to as jargon.
 At the end of babbling stage:
-Large reptoire of consonants, prosody and sound patterns o the target language
- Just 11 consonants account for 90% of the sounds produced by 12 month olds.

Transition from babbling to words
- a little after 12 months they will begin to produce their first words.
-Babble underlies first words, meaning their first words are made up words that express broad meanings, which are called protowords.
- Vocal Development overlaps communitive gestures.
- At the end of their first year, children typically have not really begun talking but they have developed the ability to produce many of the sounds speech requires.

Prelinguistic Speech Sound Development

Processes Underlying infants speech development
Three factors that contribute to changes we see in infant’s vocalizations over the first year of life:
-Physical growth of the vocal tract -Vocal tract is shaped differently -Head size grows- tongue has more room -Muscles and sensory receptors changing -Increasing control over sound production.
-Nervous system maturation -Responsible for changes in infant vocalization
- Connection between limbic area, cooing, and emotions
-Maturation of the limbic system may also underlie the development of laughter at around 16 weeks.
- The maturation of still higher levels of the brain- areas of the motor cortex- may be required for the onset of canonical babbling at 6 to 9 months.
-Experience
-Hearing adult speech -Hearing their own speech production
- Infants learn speech by listening to ambient language and attempting to produce sound patterns that match what they hear.

Prelinguistic Speech Perception
How do the children develop the ability to perceive speech sounds?

* Newborns can distinguish utterances in native language from another language.

Early speech perception skills:
Categorical perception
- Occurs when a range of stimuli that differ continuously are perceived as belonging to only a few categories with no degrees of difference.
- Babies perception of categorical perception used as evidence that babies come in the words specially prepared to acquire language. -Which theory would this support -the HAS technique and it suggests that infants sort sounds into phonemic categories, and they do so with little, if any, experience. So this would support the theory that we learn language in the womb, so before we are born.

Speech Sounds
What is the cognitive representation?

Infants mental representation of speech sounds
-Syllable is the unit of representation -Not phoneme - Learn to separate phonemes with experience

Child directed Speech
-how adults talk with prelinguistic babies  motherese -talk using a higher-pitched voice, a wider range of pitcher, longer pauses, slower tempo which results in elongating vowels , and shorter phrases

Phonological Development once speech begins

Sounds in first words
-Simple syllable structure - CV, or CVCV
-First 50 words – 18 months of age

3 Infant Speech Perception
4 Phonological Development
5 Models of Development