FLA Exam Qs + Ans

What is the ‘lack of invariance’?

Lack of invariance - no stable, one-to-one rs between a phoneme (sound category in mind) and acoustic signal (physical wave)

• Reason = coarticulation, neighbouring sounds bleed into each other

• Categorical Perception as solution » artificially manipulated sounds for no gradual sound shift

— boundary between categories is detected

— explains how variation within phoneme category doesn’t disrupt perception

How are visual cues important to FLA?

• babies as young as 4m match facial articulations to sounds

— when audio and visual don’t match up = McGurk effect

• lexical acquisition = infants use joint attention = following gaze/pointing gesture towards object

How do we know that children don’t rely on explicit instruction to learn their native language?

• children consistently produce errors that they have never heard from adults

— ie overregularisations like “goed” or “mouses”

• children then generating systematic, rule-governed errors spontaneously and not by learning

What is Mean Length of Utterance?

• child’s linguistic productivity

• average number of morphemes per utterances across speech sample

• it is used to track complexity of a child’s production and can track individual progress

What is the cue called to find word boundaries in continuous speech?

• Statistical Learning - Saffran et al 1996

— infants as young as 8m can track transitional probabilities between syllables

• segments continuous speech stream into word-sized units without explicit instruction

Why do nativists (Chomsky/Pinker) claim that babies are born with abstract knowledge of how grammar words in lang?

• based on the poverty of the stimulus

—linguistic input children receive is limited to amount to how much they know

— understand SVO

• children constrained by innate knowledge of structure dependency

— theory that grammatical operations apply to hierarchical syntactic structures

> ESSENTIALLY, correct behaviour cannot be derived from input alone so children’s mind must be guiding it with something

Why do monolingual children have a larger vocab than bilingual children who also speak this language?

• many gaps in bilingual child’s vocab is filled with that of other language = concept coverage

• not cause for concern as bilingual children’s total conceptual vocab across both langs is same or better than monolingual

• bilingual children catch up and has its own adv

Why is it called a ‘sensitive’ period and not a ‘critical’ period anymore?

• critical implied hard fixed window for acquisition occurrence

— case study Genie showed that lang acq after critical p is not impossible

• sensitive period captures nuanced reality = window closes gradually

Why does a child’s pronunciation differ from an adult’s?

• fricatives replaced by stops (taps) which is common in early dev

• complex coda means some part of word has been deleted entirely

• syllable deletion

• smaller overall trachea

• children must learn to suppress these features as they acquire adult system

Is learning/signing language better as a child or adult?

• early childhood

• brains have more neural plasticity

• faster at speaking and signing if learned this young

• lang becomes deeply entrenched during sensitive period

Mock26 - How can visual cues provide info during CLA (phono + lexical)

PHO - babies pay attention to visual cues in speech at 10m (focus on mouth)

• McGurk Effect = what we see changes what we hear

• shaping their categorical perception of phonemes

LEX - pointing and eye contact help babies

• 9-12m they connect words to meaning

M26 - Why don’t children rely on explicit instructions to learn native lang?

• When parents to to correct a child’s grammar = no effect on what they say

• attempts to recasting do nothing

• recasting or correction is rare

M26 - Describe findings of which words are produced first in a child’s development

• Noun bias - first words nouns in English and others like Japan, German

• first words = names of people, sound effects (woof) and social commentary (hi/bye)

M26 - Describe how a child’s pronunciation differs from adult target

• children use deletions, cluster reductions and prioritise articulatory ease

• child has difficulty producing all correct sounds > not matured

• Template Theory > child has simple framework for prod syllables and speech is adjusted for basic consonant-vowel template