Midterm - Speech & Language Development

Communication vs language vs speech

Communication: process of exchanging information and ideas, needs, and desires between two or more individuals

• collaborative

• Multiple modalities (spoked, signed, written)

• Occurs within a specific cultural context

• Linguistic and para-linguistic components

Language: process that involves a code, system and arbitrary signals. It also involves:

• phonetics (sounds)

• Phonology (sound structure)

• Morphology (words)

• Syntax (sentences)

• Semantics (meaning)

• Pragmatics (use)

Speech: verbal communication through articulation

properties of human language that are found in other animal communication systems or are successfully taught to other species

• Have fewer forms to express limited content for limited uses combined in limited ways

Difference between form, content, and use

Form: sound units and sequences + words and word beginnings and endings

• phonology

• Morphology

• Syntax

Content: word order and their relationships

• semantics

Use: language in context

• pragmatics

competence vs performance

competence: inner, unconscious knowledge of the rules of language

Performance: expression of the rules in everyday speech

Descriptive vs prescriptive grammar

prescriptive: specify how language and its grammar rules should be used

Descriptive: describe how people use language in daily life including standard and nonstandard varieties

Different types of methods used in acquisition research

1. Spontaneous conversational sampling or natural observation ‘

   1. Diary studies

   2. Checklists

   3. Language sample

2. Structured testing or experimental manipulation

   1. Habituation

   2. Conditioned head turn

   3. Preferential looking

   4. Neuroimaging

Diary

pros: rich qualitative and longitudinal data

Cons: memory limitations, unintentional bias, only production, time & effort consuming, validity and reliability not clear

Checklists

Usually with screening tools and criterion-referenced assessments

Pros: normed data, low cost, time efficient, uses comprehension and production, early age

Cons: bias and limited number of pre-determined items

Language sample analysis

Pros: more naturalistic and ecologically valid

Cons: time consuming and labor intensive

Habituation

Commonly use in testing phoneme distinction in infants

pro: no reliance on overt response (good for young infants)

Con: can’t fully indicate what the autonomous response actually means

Conditioned head turn

pros: multiple trials, linking stimulus and response

Cons: cannot be reliably used under 6 months of age and additional task demands

Preferential looking

pros: naturalistic response, cross-modal

Cons: limited information (know where, not why), difficulty with younger infants, observer bias

Neuroimaging

pros: reveal biological mechanisms that underlie cognitive capacities

Cons: expensive and infants are hard to make sit still

Behaviorism

• language acquisition could be explained by operant conditioning

  • Increase a behavior by pairing performance of the target behavior with a positive reward

• Empiricist theory

• Reinforcement and imitation drive language learning

• Positive reinforcement through:

  • Positive affect

  • Comprehension

nativism

• language cannot be learned through just conditioning

• Speed of acquistion is too rapid (lexical explosion)

• No other species have evolved to have complex communication system

• Errors children make (like past tense) cannot be explained by either imitation or reinforcement

Generativism

• all humans have an innate capacity for language (universal grammar or language acquisition device)

• Set of grammatical knowledge common to all the language of the world

Constructivism/cognitivism

• language acquistion emerges through cognitive skills (like object permanence)

• In learning languages, children are learning to pair words with concepts they have already acquired —> using schemas

Social interactionism

• social interaction is central to learning

• Social contexts provide scaffolding for learning

• Zone of proximal development: distance between child’s actual development level and their level of potential development

tʃ

[ch]

EX: chair, nature, teach

dʒ

[ j ]

EX: gin, joy, edge

θ

[th]

EX: thing, teeth

ð

[th]

EX: this, that, father

ʃ

[sh]

EX: sure, leash, emotion, she

ʒ

[zh]

Ex: vision, measure, leisure

/i/

high, front, unrounded

EX: beet

I

front, high, unrounded

EX: sIt

/e/

Front, mid, unrounded

EX: bait

/ɛ/

front, mid, unrounded

ex: bet

ɜ

Central, mid, unrounded

BIrd

æ

Front, open, unrounded

ʌ

Back, mid, unrounded

Run

ɔ

Back, open-mid, rounded

Law, caught

ʊ

Back, high, rounded

Put, wood

u

Back, high rounded

Soon, through

ə

Central, mid, unrounded

About

a

Front, low, unrounded

Hat

Common phonological processes

• substitution

• Assimilation

• Word shape patterns

Substitution

• fronting (front sound for back sound)

• Stopping (stop for fricative)

• Gliding (glide for liquid)

Assimilation

• place assimilation: incorrect placement

• Consonant harmony: incorrect use of CVC pattern in words

• Initial voicing: voiceless is replaced with a voiced

• Final devoicing: voiced is replaced with a voiceless

Word shape patterns

1. Final consonant deletion: from CVC to CV (last consonant)

2. Cluster simplification: removal of a consonant

3. Reduplication: CVCV (dada, Kiki)

4. Weak syllable deletion: unstressed syllables are deleted

Stage 1 (0-2 months)

Reflexive stage (reflexive/vegetative sounds) → fussing, crying, burping, swallowing (automatic)

• quasi-resonant nuclei

  • Vowel like sounds with consonantal elements

  • Vibration of vocal folds

  • In response to interaction with caregivers

Stage 2 (2-4 months)

• cooing and laughter

• Primarily vowel sounds - 8 weeks

• Turn-taking - about 12 weeks

• Laughter - about 16 weeks

Stage 3 (4-6 months)

vocal play

• extreme of loud and soft, high and low

• Bilabial trills

• Non-speech grunts growls

• Adding consonants

• Stops, nasals, and glides

• Some syllables

Stage 4 (6 months and up)

• babbling:

  • Reduplicated babbling - about 9 months

    • CV sequences (dadada)

    • Primarily vowels, stops, nasals and glides

  • Nonreduplicated babbling - about 12 months

    • Pabida

• Baby jargon: long strings of unintelligible sounds with adult-like prosody and intonation

first words (around 12 months)

• single syllables with CV structures or reduplicated syllable s

  • Draws from a small inventory of sounds from the babbling stage

• Many common phonological processes

which phonological process is active during the first words stage?

phonological templates: a generalized sequence of phone categories that create a template (CV, CVC)

• after learning several words, children discover words follow phonotactic rules and develop a template that functions across their system

• [baba, dada, mama, Wawa] = CaCa

Processes involved in speech perception

1. Segmentation

2. Discrimination

3. Categorization

4. Comprehension (all lead to this)

Segmentation

segment single unit from continuous speech

Starts at around 6 months of age

discrimination

knowing that two sounds are different

Perceptual tuning/narrowing (ability to perceive sounds in one’s linguistic environment while reducing in ability to perceive difference in sounds not present in the linguistic environment)

By 6-8 months, infants get better at discriminating sounds in their own linguistic environment and worse at foreign sounds

Categorization

Labeling a sound

its difficult to map different phonemes and waveforms because different individuals have different rates of speech = variability in speech

Perception of distinct categories when their is gradual change in a variable along a continuum

How is the head turn paradigm used to study infants’ speech perception?

The paradigm allows researchers to study if infants understand certain words

EX: Jusczyk and Aslin

• infant is given a passage of a dog during the familiarization

• Is given 2 words dog or cup correlated with two lights on either side of the room

• Babies head turns are measured = higher head turns towards dog (familiar stimulus) than cup (unfamiliar stimulus) → 7.5 months better

Properties of infant-directed speech

Exaggerated prosody

• higher pitch voice

• Wider pitch range

• Longer pauses

• Shorter phrases

Slower tempo

Free morpheme

Can stand alone as individual words

Bound morpheme

cannot not stand alone and need another morpheme to attach to

Simple morpheme

made up of one morpheme

Complex morpheme

made up of two or more morphemes

Cues children rely on to identify words

1. Trochaic stress pattern (pattern in which first syllable is stressed)

2. Transitional probabilities (how likely a symbol will appear when given a preceding symbol)

3. Phonotactic constraints (using sounds in a given language to determine how words and syllables are combined)

Underextension

Incorrect assumption where individual is not extending a word to the correct object

EX: a child not labeling penguins as a type of bird

Overextension

incorrect assumption which in an individual is extend a word for an incorrect object

EX: calling an airplane a bird

Milestones in typical lexical development

1. Recognize own name → ~4 months

2. First signs of word comprehension → 6~8 months

3. Production of first word → 10~15 months

4. Produce 50 words → 18 months

Constraints that guide object names

1. Mutual exclusivity (a bias to line up object categories and linguistic labels in a one-to-one correspondence)

2. Whole object bias (new word refers to entire object rather a subset of it)

3. Taxonomic principle (a novel word that refers to one thing can also refer to things of a similar kind)

Syntactic bootstrapping

Using syntactic properties of words to identify and narrow down those aspects of meaning that words are likely to convey

Can be used to figure out if word is:

• intransitive or transitive

• It’s part of speech

Inflectional affix

Added to assign a particular grammatical property to the word

Do not change the essential meaning or grammatical category of the word

In the English language, there can only be one per word

Types

1. Plural [-s]

2. Possessive [-‘s]

3. Present tense [-s]

4. Past tense [-ed]

5. Past participle [-en]

6. Present participle [-ing]

7. Adjective comparative [-er]

8. Adjective superlative [-est]

Derivational affix

play more of semantic role

Often change the meaning and also the grammatical category of the word

There can be multiple per word

Semantic relations between words at 2 word stage

1. Agent + action

2. Action + object

3. Agent + object

4. Action + location

5. Entity + location

6. Possessor + possession

7. Entity + attribute

8. Demonstrative + entity

Milestones in typical syntactic development

1. One-word stage

2. Two-word stage combinations

3. Telegraphic speech

Computing mean length of utterance

Find the averages of multiple utterances

1. Count the morphemes per word and add them up

2. Count the amount of words in the utterances

3. Average them out

Only include morphemes used productively

• allgone or goodnight = 1 morpheme

• Walked or singing = 2 morphemes

Brown’s study on the order of acquisition of function morphemes

Found that order in which function morphemes are acquired is very similar across children

EX: production of progressives occurs first than plurals

Wug test

test used to study how children learn morphemes and develop their syntax

Overgeneralization of rules and U-shaped development

Children’s syntax development has a u-shape where:

1. Have no generalizations (adult like) when first learning a word

2. But start making overgeneralizations (more errors) as they learn about grammatical rules and start using them incorrectly

3. As they learn exceptions to these rules and correctly generalize, their grammar is adult-like again

Syntax of negation acquisition

1. Single word (no, don’t, no-more)

2. External negative: negative marker outside before the sentence (no go movies, no mommy do it)

3. Internal negative without auxiliaries: negative before main verb and after first noun phrase with auxiliaries (I no like it, I no want book)

4. Correct internal negation with auxiliaries (Sarah can not have one, you did not caught me) - can still make mistakes in word order

Types of questions

1. Intonation only (You’re serious?)

2. Tag questions (You’re serious, aren’t you?)

3. Yes-no (Are you serious?)

4. Wh- questions (What did you say?)

Stages of question acquisition

1. Intonation only

   • yes/no = marked by intonation only

   • Wh-questions = incorrect structure (what that is?)

2. Add auxiliaries

   • yes/no (Will it fit?)

   • Wh-questions (What a doctor can do?) = incorrect structure

3. Subject-aux inversion in wh-questions

   • wh-questions: (what can a doctor do?)

Errors of omission and commission

omission = missing function morphemes (daddy go)

Commission = incorrect modification or addition (him eat, brang, goed)

How children interpret passive voice sentences

children focus on the word order, instead of the broad meaning of the sentence leading to confusion to the main subject vs object of the sentence

Identifying types of relative clauses

Subject relative clause (clause is missing the subject)

Object relative clause (clause is missing the object)

Object relative clause is more difficulty than subject for children

Experimental methods used to test syntax comprehension

1. Language sample analysis (hard to see actual productions tho)

2. Elicitation experiments (preferential looking, habituation, etc)

Poverty of stimulus and negative evidence

Poverty of the stimulus → children are not exposed to rich enough data to acquire all the rules of their language

Negative evidence → children are only exposed to positive evidence (but not the negative or what is not possible in a language)

• parents mostly focus on explicit corrections or don’t directly correct ungrammatical utterances

Regardless of these two factors, children learn grammar because basic knowledge about how human language works is innate