Development of Spoken Language

What are the 5 core domains of spoken language?

Phonology, Semantics, Morphology, Pragmatics, Syntax

What are the three things that are needed in language?

It must be productive, symbolic, and have displacement

What do we mean by productive?

Can recombine forms into new meanings

What do we mean by symbolic?

Words represent something else

What do we mean by displacement?

Can refer to things outside of the here and now

What is communication?

Exchange of information that does not require language (gestures, sounds (can be verbal or non-verbal))

T/F: Developmental milestones are different depending on culture or language

False

T/F: Speech is not suppressible. Typically developing children will learn it if in contact with older humans

True

T/F: Language cannot be taught to other species

True

T/F: Languages have some universal features. A human infant can learn any language

True

Is the bee waggle dance an example of language?

No, there is no productivity (only speaking of food, cannot reorder words to make new meaning)

Is KoKo the gorilla an example of language?

While it is symbolic, we don’t know if it is productive or has displacement since we can not always understand his meaning

How many words was Koko able to learn?

About 400 was his cap

How many words was Alex the parrot able to learn throughout life?

About 100-150; similar to a human aged 4-5

Why is the hyoid bone important to in the study of language evolution

It was adapted in early hominids to enable complex speech

What are the key determinants of language?

Social basis, genetic basis, and neural basis

What are the two important areas in the brain for language?

Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area

If broca’s area is damaged, what is the result

Someone who struggles with coordinating the movements needed for speech (non-fluent aphasia)

If Wernicke’s area is damaged, what is the result?

Someone who struggles with auditory processing; unclear language (fluent aphasia)

Pragmatics

How context contributes to meaning

Phonology

Representation of sound in the mind

Semantics

Meanings of words/phrases

Syntax

Grammar, putting words together

Morphology

Internal structure of words

What do NNS and HPP stand for?

Non-nutritive sucking and head turn preference procedure

When does speech perception start?

The womb

What do NNS rates show us in studies?

That the rate of sucking slowed down when infants heard stories they were more familiar with

What does this show us?

That prenatal auditory experience influences post-natal speech perception

When do the earliest ‘conversations’ start?

During feeding

What are important elements during feeding have?

Eye contact, attention, contingency, turn-taking, care giver-child bonding, and language as a social experience

Why are these elements important?

They lay the foundation for language

Statistical learning

the ability of an infant to track patterns and calculate regularities in spoken language to help acquire words

What does lower transitional probability cue you to?

A word boundary

What is infant directed speech?

Alterations in speech when talking to infants in pitch, intonation, articulation, precision, rate, duration, repetition, phrase/sentence length

What is infant directed speech not

IDS is different from ‘baby talk’ (imitating errors e.g. “wook at the wittle baby”)

What is contingency

Prompt, meaningful, and on topic responses from a caregiver that directly follow a child’s communicative attempt, gesture, or babble

T/F: IDS is the only pathway that children are responsive to when it comes to learning language

False

How do we encourage vocal development?

Contingency

What is phonetic contingency

Imitating the child’s sounds

What is semantic contingency

Talk about what the child is doing

What is categorical perception?

The brain’s ability to sort continuous, blending physical sound signals into distinct, separate categories of speech

Explain how and when perceptual tuning work over the first year of life

When babies first come into the world, no matter the language, they are able to make distinctions between similar sounds that us adults would not be able to notice. As they start to approach the 10-12 month age range however, they are no longer able to do this due to the narrowing of their perceptual focus on the sounds in their native environment

T/F: Bilingual infants maintain the ability to discriminate sounds (even those outside of their language) for much longer

True

What are the communicative functions produced by infants?

Gaining attention, requesting, protesting, labeling, commenting, directing, and asking for help

Why are social routines so critical in language learning?

They are repetitive, they are consistent, they are predictable, and they involve social engagement

What is Theory of Mind

The understanding that people can have differing thought, beliefs, and desires from your own

Why it theory of mind essential for social cognition and communication

It engages in conversation, predicting, and responding

What are different components or examples of theory of mind

Joint attention, pretend play, and recognizing emotions

At what age does the understanding that people may have differing feelings start to emerge?

18 months

At what age does joint attention start to emerge?

9-15 months

T/F: Joint attention = Parallel Play

False

What is the definition of joint attention?

Shared engagment and focus on task, activity, or object; shared focus

Describe stage 1 of vocal development with the following: Name, age rangem attributes, motor skills and social skills

Name: Reflexive sounds

Age: 0-2 months

Attributes: Crying, grunting; vegetative sounds, communication is limited to wants and needs

Motor: scrunched, low activity, require support, turning head

Social: reflexive social context, looking with eye gaze

Describe stage 2 of vocal development with the following: Name, age range, attributes, motor skills and social skills

Name: Cooing and gooing

Age: 1-4 months

attributes: social smile, laughter (especially during surprise play) special attention to faces

Motor: Kicking, waving, jerky movements, lots of support, active eyes focusing

Social: Attentive, social smile

Describe stage 3 of vocal development with the following: Name, attributes, age range, motor skills and social skills

Name: Vocal play

Age: 5-10 months

Attributes: Repeated sequences of consonants and vowels; whispers (vocal control!!)

Motor: Increased gross motor, reaching, neck support, trunk support, rhythmic stereotypy

Social: responsive, imitating vocally

Describe stage 4 of vocal development with the following: Name, attributes, motor skills and social skills

Name: Cannonical babbling

Age: 11-12 months

Attributes: consistent (not necessarily accurate) word forms

Motor: unimanual, pointing, gesturing, very interested in objects

Social: social routines, initiating conversation

Describe stage 5 of vocal development with the following: Name, attributes, motor skills and social skills

Name: Jargon

Age:

Attributes: Overlap between babbling and first words

What is stage 6 of vocal development?

First words!

How do motor skills and vocal behaviors shape the development of joint attention?

Motor behaviors: allows child to direct attention and interact with objects

Vocal behaviors: Related to turn taking, bids for attention, provide opportunity for responses

When a child starts walking (12 mo), what about their environment changes?

They can access objects in a range of places; they are now directing their own environment

Phonology

Studying the rules for how sounds go together in a word

Phonotactics

Sound structure of words

Phone

Physical instance of a speech sound

Phonetics

The study and classification of speech sounds

Phoneme

The smallest unit of meaning that distinguishes a word from another in a language

What do we mean by minimal pair?

A pair of words that have completely different meanings and differ by only one sound in the same position

How are the consonants in the IPA organized?

Place and manner

What does manner mean?

How the sound is being produced

What are the different manners of articulation?

Stops, nasals, glides, fricatives, affricates, and liquids

How is sound produced

By a constriction somewhere in the vocal tract with air resonating the oral and nasal cavities

Phonotactics

The rules or constraints that dictate permissible combinations of speech sounds in a given language

What are cognates?

Sounds that share the same place and manner but different in voicing

Intonation

Modification of voice pitch

What does intonation cue a listener into?

The type of statement being made (i.e if its a question, list, exclamation, etc.)

When is rising intonation used

Yes/no questions and incomplete thoughts

When is falling intonation used

Statements and commands, wh- questions

T/F: Infants can recognize more in between sounds

True

Phonological regression

Children may initially be more accurate, then as they explore other ways of producing forms, may become less accurate

What are ways that they explore

Trial and error, overgeneralization, avoidance, and selection of favorite sounds

What does U shaped pattern of language development mean

A child’s performance of producing a word starts high, dips into error, and then rises back to high performance

How many consonants make up 95% of infants language

12 out of 24

What predicts early language development

The quality and complexity of babble, early onset of words, large productive vocab

What are protowords

Word-like utterances used consistently that is not a real word (shows understanding that sounds have meaning)

Substitution errors

Substituting in a glide or stop for a fricative, affricate, or liquid

What is an example of a substitution error

Fronting

What is fronting?

When a child substitutes a back of mouth sound with a sound made at the front of the mouth

What are assimilation errors

When a consonant becomes more like another consonant in the word (affects place or manner)

What are the three kinds of omission errors?

Final consonant deletion, cluster reduction, and syllable deletion (usually delete least stressed one)

Intelligibility

Percentage of the utterance you can understand

What do SSDs lead to?

Limited vocal output, babbling delays, slow word development, small phonetic inventories, and low intelligibility

Dysarthria

Motor neuron damage leading to somebody not being able to execute speech movements even though they know what they want to say

Child Apraxia of Speech

Difficulties with planning and programming speech movements. Struggle with transitions!!

How does phonology lead to literacy

Phonological awareness supports literacy development

Why do we consider dialect when thinking about multilingualism?

Because pronunciation and words vary which can lead us to misidentifying a speech disorder

Where does word learning start?

With use of categorical concepts

What is the semantic feature view

Learning the essential features of an object so can depict it later

What is the prototype view

First learning a good example then looking at what is similar

What is the probabilistic view

Learning what is what based on the statistical likelihood of overlapping features

Associative learning

Evaluating associations across multiple contexts

Developmental theory

Learning meanings of words drawing from many domains