PSY 357 Final

basic auditory abilities of fetuses in the womb:

Fetus' recognize their mothers voice in the womb, -Familiar rhyme (prosody), Heart rate increases for familiar rhyme

What kinds of information are they learning about language in the womb

Fetus are learning the basic contours of language, Mehler 1998 study: 4 day old infants using the sucking paradigm

which methods by which the language processing abilities of fetuses have been investigated:

Fetal heartbeat, Sucking paradigm

What age did Mehler show that infants can distinguish intonational contours in their maternal language

4 days old. This shows that fetuses are learning the basic contours of language while still in the womb

What is the research technique devised by Janet Werker to examine these abilities in infants

Werker taught the infants to turn their heads to new sounds/ when the sound changes

What way Jen Saffran and colleagues have proposed by which infants become able to break up long, unbroken strings of speech into meaningful units:

Babies are mini statisticians

Languages have statistical regularities, where certain sounds are likely to follow other sounds, and the packages emerge as meaningful clumps of sounds and babies can pick up the regularities where certain sounds are likely to follow other sounds

cooing

ah," "eh," or "oh

reduplicated babbling

ba-ba, da-da

variegated babbling

magaba

telegraphic speech

baby eat cookie

What piece of evidence that has been used to support the idea that infants babble to practice the sounds of their own language

Nakazima, 1975:Babies practice babbling while they are alone in their cribs. DeBoysen-Barties et al., 1984: Babies babble differently depending on their language. 

what approximate age at which the one -word stage begins

12 months

 At the park, a father sees a tree and tells his son, “Look at that tree! See that tree? What is the problem that the father is trying to help the child solve:

the mapping problem

 At the park, a father sees a tree and tells his son, “Look at that tree! See that tree?b) the means by which the father is trying to help him:

.. by using child directed speech

What is MLU its primary function as a measure

Measures the child's grammatical understanding: count the number of morphemes in 100 spontaneous utterances and divide by 100

how might MLU  be problematic as a measure

It is believed that children understand/comprehend more than they produce. That means the test could underestimate the child's grammatical understanding

Know and understand the “Sesame Street” evidence collected by Golinkoff and colleagues (1987)

Children had 2 screens in front of them: Screen 1 was cookie monster tickling big bird and screen 2 was big bird tickling cookie monster.THe children were given sentences like "OH LOOK!!! BIG BIRD IS TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!! FIND BIG BIRD TICKLING COOKIE MONSTER!!" (or vice versa).The babies were able to follow the directions and look at the correct screens that they were asked.

overextension

when children use a term in a broader way than the adult usage. Example: horse is used to describe all 4 legged animal

overregularization:

when children extend regular grammar rules to form irregular words. Example: "mouses" instead of mice

undergeneralization

:when children use a word in a way more narrow than how an adult would. Example: "round" is only used to refer to balls

 Be able to apply findings from Bloom et al.’s (1976) study on the development of conversational skills to specific examples of children having conversations with their parents.

By 36 months, children's utterances are becoming more contingent compared to the 20 month old children

Be able to identify a statement that statements best summarizes the research on 4 -year -olds’ ability to take addressee’s perspectives into account as they speak, according to Gelman (1973):

4 year olds are able to adjust their utterances to the needs of their audience

-With adults they used longer/more complex utterances

-With the 2 year olds they used shorter/simpler utterances

What specific type of metalinguistic skill that plays a significant factor in the acquisition of reading, as well as examples of what that skill allows people to do

phonological awareness

What were the results and implications of the “mow -motorcycle” study of children’s phonological awareness:

phonological awareness is poor until about 6 years old

-Only 10% of kindergarten students can identify "mow" vs "motorcycle"- this means they cant use length-of-word heuristics

 Understand the results and implications of Allington and Strange’s (1977) study of individual differences in reading strategies for sentences

the readers rely more on bottom up processing reading strategies than top up

-Read the sentence "the frog jumped oven the snow"

-The "better" readers read aloud "oven"

-The "worse" readers read aloud "over"

bottom up approach

strategy that begins with individual components or elements, building up to a larger system or solution

top down

strategy that starts with a big picture and then breaks it down into smaller, more manageable parts

phonics based approach

method of teaching reading and spelling that focuses on the relationships between letters and sounds

whole word/whole language approach:

focuses on understanding meaning and context over decoding individual letters and sounds

balanced literacy

combines explicit instruction (like phonics) with student-centered activities and whole language approaches

Simultaneous bilinguals

: L1 and L2 are learned at the same time

early sequential bilinguals

L1 learned first, L2 learned after but relatively early in childhood

 late sequential bilinguals

 L1 learned first, L2 learned after but in adolescence or later

Benefits of bilingualism

Metalinguistic awareness,Cognitive flexibility, Creativity, Superior verbal fluency

costs of bilingualism

There may be some initial delay in learning, Slight deficit in cognitive processing and working memory in language 2

explanations that have offered for why it might be that feral children such as Victor and Genie were never able to fully acquire language

Preexisting cognitive disability, Autism, Past the critical period

What age range do Korean and Chinese immigrants most successfully learned a second language

before age 7-9

the measure Johnson and Newport used to assess proficiency is

grammaticality judgment task (GJT) 

Be able to apply Singleton’s (1995) findings concerning adult success in learning a second language

5% of adults can master a second language

linguistic universals

Nouns and Verbs, Consonants and Vowels , Negatives, Questions, Past/Present

common linguistic constraints

Not all languages have the same structure (SVO, SOV, VSO)

Know the general relationship and order of development of pidgins and creoles

Ubiquity of language to flourish even when circumstances don't make language easy, drive to fill language void, -Presence of innate language acquisition device in children (which also corresponds to critical period)

the mechanism of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, that allows children to learn the specific rules and structures of their native language

paramaters

identify a description of how parameters works:

Once one switch is turned on, it turns on other switches (SOV-> postpositions, SVO->prepositions

 a description of Pinker’s nativist argument, based on negative evidence, for why language acquisition must have an innate component

humans are born with the capacity for language—what he calls the "language instinct."

What is description of research that supports Pinker’s assumptions concerning negative evidence

the final argument is that some constraints or parameters must be innate

What ways in which empiricists such as Elman have responded to Pinker’s nativist argument regarding negative evidence

general learning mechanisms, rather than innate linguistic knowledge, can explain language acquisition

 Geschwind’s model of language processing in brain (especially the order in which linguistic information travels between different areas in the left hemisphere):

Wernicke's area handles comprehension and Broca's area manages production.

results and conclusions of Caramazza and Zurif (1976) test of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics on their ability to match pictures correctly to reversible

Broca's aphasics struggled with semantically reversible sentences, which require accurate syntactic analysis, while Wernicke's aphasics performed relatively well on both reversible and non-reversible sentences. This suggests that Broca's aphasics have difficulties with complex syntactic structures, particularly those that are not in the canonical word order.