PSYC 105 Midterm 2

Phonology

The sounds of a word

Morphology

Units of meaning that are part of a word

How is “slugs” and “geese” counted as 2 morphemes

Slugs is counted as 2 morphemes since it is plural, meanwhile geese is counted as 2 morphemes since it is implied based on context that this represented multiple goose.

Morphemes are based on…

Orthography, which is how words are written out

Semantics

The context of the meaning of morpheme

• Morphologically geese and slugs are the same, but because of semantics you know they are different

Lexicon

Vocabulary or concepts

• All the words you have at your disposal

Syntax (Grammar)

How words and phrases are arranged in language

• Sentences tend to follow this format: verb → object phrase → action

Pragmatics (Communication)

The tone you say something changes the meaning of the sentence

Gesture (Communication)

Non-verbal ways of communicating

• Hand-to-ear: to tell someone to speak up

Components of Language

1. Phonology

2. Meaning

   • Morphology

   • Semantics

   • Lexicon

3. Grammar

   • Syntax

4. Communication

   • Pragmatics

   • Gesture

Why is it hard to recognize when someone knows a word?

• Children might acquire phonemes and semantics at different rates for different words

• How they actually interact and combine them is going to keep developing

Production

You actually say the word

Comprehension

If you know the meaning of cow, point to it

When observing four of the children’s first words, what are something that were noticed?

1. A lot of the first words were nouns, there wasn’t a lot of verbs

2. More nouns because nouns can name a particular category

3. Very concrete and not abstract

Vocabulary Growth as an English Speaker

• By the time you are in elementary school, you know 10,000 words

  • Very rapid increase of vocab in early childhood, after that there is gradual increases.

Naming Explosion

Within 1.5 yrs into life, we see a big increase in vocab

• By age of 6, they know about 14,000 words

• Average 9 words/day everyday

Things that are involved in Word Learning

1. Identify the word

2. Learn the word (or sign)

3. Connect the sound to the correct meaning

4. Store that information

5. Remember that information

What are the things that are involved in Word Learning not involved in language?

1. Identify the word

2. Connect the sound to the correct meaning

These are aspects of how we learn in general

• Memory processing: encoding → storage → retrieval

What makes identifying a word harder or easier for us?

We can identify words easily in written language, however, we cannot identify speech through acoustic information.

• It is hard to know where our words start and where they end.

Statistical Learning Procedure

1. Infants listen to a 2 min speech stream with 4 repeating nonsense words

   • Bidaku padoti golabu bidaku

2. Tested infants with “words” vs. “part-words”

   1. Words: padoti & golabu

   2. Part-words: daku pa & ba bida

Statistical Learning Results

Children looked at part-words longer than words, meaning children are using their statistical properties and co-occurrences in their acoustic signal to figure out when a words starts and ends.

• Children are able to figure it out by hearing strings of words in their daily life

Evidence for Nativism (Speech & Language)

1. We have specialized brain regions

2. Home signs systems

   • Sign language made between family members

   • If not learned to communicate while deaf, they still produce their own sign language

3. Critical periods

4. Sensitive periods

Critical periods

• A particular period in development where you are meant to experience certain information

• If you don’t get that experience at that time then you are never going to have that skill.

Sensitive periods

• Different based on strictness

• If you are exposed to information by a certain point, you are going to be better at it

Evidence for Sensitive periods

1. It is easier to acquire a language before puberty

2. Case of Genie → didn’t know language until puberty due to maltreatment

3. Second language learners → we can learn, but we might not be as good

4. Late learners of sign language

Evidence for Late learners of sign language (Sensitive periods)

When learning about the morphology of ASL it has harder for late learners compared to native and early learners.

Evidence that the social world is still important in language learning

Infant directed speech (Higher & wider pitch, exaggerated speech)

• Supports infant language learning because it helps them find out where the segmentation of speech is suppose to happen

How does greater distinct language differences create better speech perception?

Depending on how exaggerated mother’s speech, infant were better at recognizing speech

Quine’s Problem

1. A native speaker exclaims, “Gavagai”, as a rabbit scurries by

2. What does “Gavagai” mean?

   • Gavagai can mean many things…

     • rabbit

     • ears

     • rabbit parts

     • Dinner

     • Cute

     • Fur

     • Plants etc.

The main idea of the Quine’s Problem

This relates to infants learning language, there is a lot of ambiguity of words, however, infants are very good at connecting meaning.

• How they so good despite ambiguity?

How do infants disambiguate words?

Infant may use social cues, concepts, and language form (how language is constructed)

Whole Object Assumption

Concept used to disambiguate words

• We assume that an entire word refers to an entire object

• When we see all possibilities of what an object can refer to, only a subset refers to the object

Shape bias

1. Tell children, “this is my zup”

2. Ask them what a zup is

Despite not specifying shape or texture, children still chose the shape

• Concept used to disambiguate words

Mutual Exclusivity

The assumption that an object can only have one name.

• Stephanie thinks orange and ahrange are different things

  • “oar-ange” = food

  • “ahr-ange” = color

    • This an oar-ange

    • Therefore, it can’t also be an ahr-ange

    • So, ahr-ange must mean something else

New words refer to new items in their environment

• Concept used to disambiguate words

Syntactic Bootstrapping

Children can figure out the meaning of words based on context

• Children start using language form clues by about 2 years of age

• a language form that is used to disambiguate words

Gaze following

By the way someone looks at an object while saying the word, you assume that object means that word.

• Social cue used to disambiguate words

Follow-in labeling

Researcher labels toy that child is looking at

• By 16-17 months, infants solve follow-in labels

• part of Gaze following

Discrepant labeling

Researcher labels the toys that the child is NOT looking at

• By 18-19 months, they can solve discrepant labels

• part of Gaze following

Emotional reaction

How people emotionally react to object can help find its meaning.

• Social cue used to disambiguate words

Kids attention in word learning

Mapping when the word was produced and what was in their visual field

• When children do learn the word they look at the target objects longer

• This shows that when we talk about the things they are experiencing, it is the best way to learn words

• Social cue used to disambiguate words

Gesture

• Critical mode of communication

• Used in tandem with words

• Can be used consciously or not

• Social cue used to disambiguate words

Emblems

Precise meaning gesture
“thumb up”

Deictic

Pointing gesture → very common among children

Beat

Emphasize rhythm gesture

Iconic

Gestures standing for concept aspects

Metaphoric

Gestures standing for abstract aspects

• “balancing” hand gesture

Producing words

Production lags behind comprehension

1. Infants coo to learn how to produce sound

2. Then they babble to learn word production

Types of errors children make in speech

• phonemic

• semantic

• morphological

• syntactical

Overregularization

Applying a linguistic rule too broadly

• Morphological error

Child: I used to wear diapers. When I growed up

Father: When you grew up

Child: When I grewed up, I wore underpants

Concepts

Knowledge or representation used to group similar objects, event, ideas, or people

Categories

Set of entities that are generated together

Why are categories are important?

1. Simplifies the world

   • reduces load on memory

   • helps store/retrieve info efficently

2. Helps generalize information

   • reduce need to learn

   • helps make inferences

Drawbacks of categories

1. Stereotypes and overgeneralization

2. Ignoring variability

Conceptual Development

How our knowledge and internal representations change over time.

Theories of Concept Structures

1. Defining features

2. Probabilistic features

3. Theory-based representations

Defining features

• Set of criteria define the category

• All members of categories meet all criteria

• Advantages

  1. Intuitive

  2. Simplicity

Probabilistic features

Concepts represented in terms of likely features

• learned through experience, honed by examples

Key ideas of Probabilistic features

• Cue validity → how good of a signal is it?

• Correlation among features

• Prototypes → Idealized version of a dog

Prototypes

Most representative instances of a concept

• High feature overlap with other instances of same concept

• Low features overlap with instances of different concepts

• Based on experience

Prototypes limitations

• Need to attend to relevant features for each instance

• But, what is relevant?

• Does not account for Ad hoc categories → categories we do not use in our day-to-day, but we can still think about them

Changes in Prototypicality Study

1. Showed cheetah where some ran faster, slower, or medium pace

2. Asked half of participants who was the best cheetah and which is the most representative cheetah

Changes in Prototypicality Results

• Young children do not choose the most representative example but rather the most idealized example

• As they grow up, they switch to using the most average example as the best representation of a category

Defining vs. Characteristic Features Study

• Describe a scenery to children

  1. Described a piece of land with apartment buildings, snow, no green things growing, and surrounded by water

  2. Described a piece of land that sticks out like a finger, coconuts trees, and palm trees grow there, warm temp, water on all sides expect one

  3. Asked “Could this be an island?” for both questions

Is this a real island Study Results

• Kindergarten stated that the second example was an island while the first one isn’t despite following the correct definition

• As kids get older, they’re stating to be guided by more defining features

• Our ability to categorize things doesn’t really change, but what we use to actually categorize things into different groups changes

Defining Features limitations

• Need to learn the defining features/rules for each concept

• Hard to define necessary and sufficient features

• Typicality effects → not all triangles are typical

  • people tend to associate categories with the more typical example

Theory-based representations

Instances of concept cohere because of underlying relation among features

Key ideas of Theory-based representations

1. Causal connection

   • genetic material connects all the difference features of birds

2. Background knowledge

Best account for ad hoc categories and why?

Theory-based representations

• Explaining how people use background knowledge to create context-specific categories on the fly

“Wugs” vs. “Gillies” study procedure

Two groups of children were given identical descriptions of “wugs” and “gillies.”

• Control → did not hear anything

• Experimental → told why wugs and gillies had the particular properties

“Wugs vs. “Gillies” study results

• The experimental group was better at categorizing new examples, and they were better at remembering different types of wugs and gillies they had seen before, compared to the control group

• When explained, it is easier for us to categorize examples

Theory-based representations limitation

• Causal relation not obvious, often not directly observable

• Correlated features does not equal causal relations

• what counts as a “theory”?

Do children have theories?

Children have collection of knowledge about objects and how they interact with one another

• Instead of having a bunch of facts about the world, children organize different facts into a coherent theory

To claim that something is a theory in children’s mind, it need to be…

1. Coherent

   • If something was in one case, then it should happen in another case

2. Causal

   • allow us for prediction

3. Unobservable

   • when you let go of an object, it is drawing the idea that some unobservable force is pulling the object down (gravity)

What are the similarities of Core Knowledge & Theory-Theory?

Children have three theories about the world

• Psychology

• Biology

• Physics

What are the differences of Core Knowledge & Theory-Theory?

• Core Knowledge argues that these theories are innate and that biology is not different from psychology

• Theory-theory believes that these theories are learned and that biology is separate and distinct.

Naive Physics

How objects behave & interact

• Core object and action knowledge

  • Soldity makes sense to an infant

  • Impetus: objects are going to keep having momentum

Naive Psychology

About people

• “Theory of mind” → people around us have their own wants, intentions, desires, that guide behavior

• Social Relation → how we think someone should act depending on situation

Naive Biology

Why organisms behave the way that they do?

Theory-based representations may be best for…

• Biology

• Psychology

• Sociology

Defining feature representations may work well for…

• Physics

• Mathematics

Biological motion as evidence for how we can detect which things are alive

Point-light walkers move independently, but the pattern in which they’re moving makes us think of a person walking

• 2-day-olds look at biological movements more than random movements

How are children able to detect change over time?

• Found that 3 year olds think that the bunny is going to be bigger once it’s adult

• They know non-living thing do not change

Key biological concepts

1. Life

2. Inheritance

3. Death

4. Growth & Change

5. Health & Illness

Growth & Change Study Results

• Children younger than 8 are going to think animals are identical, but change in size

• Older children + adults believed that it’s not only going to change in size, but it might also change in properties

• Children do not think drastic change is possible

How do children figure what it means to be alive?

1. Children first believe in animism, which is the belief that if something moves, it has to be alive

2. They start to believe in the vitalist model by the time they are 6 years old

   • Children believe things are alive if they have agency and intention

   • Start associated with the insides and intention

Sub-concept of Death

1. Universality, Inevitability → All living things must die

2. Irreversibility, Finality → death cannot be reversed

3. Non-functionality, Cessation → body no longer functions after death

4. Causality → can be many different causes

Children develop some understanding about the sub-concepts of death at what age and what order

By age 4, children have some understanding

1. Inevitability

2. Universality

3. Processes stop at death

4. Causes of death

Comparing the understanding death in different life forms (the study)

Asked whether question 1 or 2

1. “Point to the ones that stay dead after they die”

or

2. “The ones that will die later on”

Results:

• They understood that plants would die, but not artifacts

• understand plant death earlier than other sorts of death

• shows that even 3 to 4-year-olds have some understanding of death

After-life beliefs in children

Dead entities retain certain functions

• opposite of cessation

• dependent on religion, religious children believe they have wants, thoughts, emotions

Dia de lost Muertos

• 82% believe dead relatives came back to visit during

• 78% believe that dead relatives ate food in the ofrenda

• 56% believe that they saw, smelled , or interacted with dead relative

Where do children learn about death?

1. These beliefs are innate

2. Direct experience

3. The way we structure language

4. Parental Input → conversation, questions about causality

5. Media

6. Cultural practices

Indonesian vs. American Children in categorization study

Research found Indonesian children do not have an animal category, tended to categorize more things as living

How do children think of illnesses?

• Moral or magical reasons

  • Ex. someone got sick because they went outside or didn’t eat dinner

• Germs - Deterministic

  • start to believe illness is the result of coming into contact with germs

• Probabilities

  • Not every time you come in contact will you get sick

• Differences in severity and type

Medicine beliefs in children

1. Children believe that medicine is ONLY GOOD and cannot cause any harm

2. By age 9, they realize medicine can have side effects, bad, or uncomfortable

   • “This medicine tastes bad.”

Medicine spatial proximity

Believe medicine you swallow will be more effective than an ointment

Viruses Mechanical Model

• Viruses are like dust

• Inert, and move through mechanical processes

  • It can only be pushed by wind or water

• No intentions, wants, or desires

Viruses Animistic Model

• Viruses are like really small animals

• Able to replicate

• Can die

• Use energy

Healing

• Children tend to say medicine is good for physical illnesses

• Talking is more helpful for psychological illnesses

How other cultures view illnesses

• People think that other things cause illnesses

• cold weather theories

• Transmitted in parent-child conversations

• Less common in white suburban samples

• More common in Latin American countries

Psychological Essentialism

Belief that some internal property or “essence” determines the characteristics of the entity

• part of inheritance concept