Lecture 13: Language Development (pt.1)

Symbolic

arbitrary words stand for ideas

Productive

infinitively many new combinations of words

Displaced

can refer to things not immediately present in space and time

Combinatorial 

combines concepts to form new meanings (‘Left of the blue wall” experiment)

What are the necessary ingredients for language development?

Human brain and Human environment

Sensitive period

0-7 years old: children must learn a language early for full fluency

Infant-directed speech

helps language learning by using higher pitch, slower tempo, and exaggerated intonation

Scaffolding

adults adjust language slightly above the child’s level → helps children learn step by step

Phonological

The sound system of a language (Phonemes: the smallest unit of meaningful sound)

Semantic

Word meanings (morphemes: the smallest units of meaning)

Syntactic

Rules for combining words to form sentences (grammar)

Pragmatic

Using language in context: speaker, intent, tone, social cues

Perceptual narrowing

Infants can initially hear all speech sounds across languages. But then they become specialized for their native language and lose sensitivity to non-native sounds by 12 months old.

Categorical perception

babies group sounds into meaningful categories, ignoring small variations that don’t matter in their language

Cooing 

6-8 weeks: long vowel-like sounds, helps babies learn that their vocalizations get responses 

Babbling

3-10 months repeated consonant-vowel combinations

Statistical learning

Babies find word boundaries by noticing which sounds often go together

Reference problem

When hearing a new word (like “gavagi”), children must figure out what is refers to- the whole object, a part or something else

Whole-object

A word refers to the whole object, not its parts or properties (“table” refers to the whole table)

Shape bias

Words extend to things with similar shapes (calling other cup-shaped things “cup”)

Taxonomic bias 

Words group items by category rather than theme (‘dog” groups with “cat,” not “leash”)

Mutual exclusivity

Each object tends to have only one label - if a new word is used, it must refer to something new (called a cat “soft”)

Fast mapping

Children can learn a word’s meaning after a single exposure, even indirectly (Let’s use the koba to measure this”→ child remebers what “koba” means)

Holophrastic stage

10-14 months: one-word sentences ('“milk”)

Telegraphic speech

2 years: two-or-three word phrases missing small words (“give milk,” “want cookie”)

Overregulation

Children apply grammar rules too broadly (“goes” instead of “went,” “mans” instead of “men”)

Wug test

When shown a made-up word

synaptic bootstrapping

Kids use sentence structure to infer what a new word means