Speech & Language Acquisition

What is language?

· A socially shared code or conventional system for representing concepts through the use of arbitrary systems and rule-governed combinations of those symbols

Does language = speech?

o Language - the principal method of human communication, consisting of words used in a structured and conventional way and conveyed by speech, writing or gesture

o Speech - neuromuscular activity that turns language into an oral sound signal and transmits it to an aural receiver

What do contemporary views of language hold?

o Language evolves within specific historical, social and cultural contexts

o Language, as rule-governed behavior, is described by at least five parameters: phonologic, morphologic, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic

o Language learning and use are determined by the interaction of biological, cognitive, psychosocial and environmental factors

o Effective use of language for communication requires a broad understanding of human interaction including such associated factors as nonverbal cues, motivation, and sociocultural roles

What is Bloom and Lahey's model for organizing language?

Form, content, and use

What are 3 forms of language?

o Phonology - study of speech sounds

o Morphology - how words are formed

o Syntax - rules to combine words

What is the content of language?

semantics - meaning

What is the use of language?

pragmatics - social use of language

What is phonology? What is a phoneme?

· Study of the sound system of a language the sounds the language uses in the rules further combination

· Phoneme: smallest linguistic unit of sound

What is morphology? What is a morpheme?

· the rules that govern the use of morphemes in a language

· concerned with the internal organization of words (ex: grammer, tense)

· morpheme: smallest unit of meaning in a language

What is syntax?

· the rules by which sentences are made

· rules for how to combine words into acceptable phrases and sentences

What is semantics?

· the study of the meaning system of language

· word meanings (vocabulary)

What is pragmatics?

· the rules for the use of language in social context

· includes interpersonal and social function

· communicate competence - social conventions

Does language = communication?

· Communication:

o exchange of information or messages

o includes a sender and receiver

o a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs or behavior

How does language differ from humans to animals?

· Language is unique (specific) in the human species

· language is similar (or uniform) in humans

animals are able to communicate at some level with other animals and humans

What are the characteristics of human language?

o Productivity - speakers can make new utterance is an recombine the forms that they have learned

o Semanticity or symbolism - language represents ideas, events and objects symbolically. A word as a symbol that stands for something else

o Possibility of displacement - Messages do not need to be tied to the immediate context

How does language development differ across cultures?

· the order of appearance of developmental milestones (ex: speech) is not affected by culture or the language to be learned

· lots of variation within a culture

What are language milestones?

sounds, first words, differentiate sounds, body language (nonverbal communication)

What are the two prototypical cultural models of parenting?

Interdepence Model

Autonomy Model

What is the interdependence model?

o Child is a member of the community

o Ex: babies don't sleep alone, are in constant body contact with caregivers, our less talked to

What is the autonomy model?

o child is an independent agent

o lots of talk to the child

o desire to see the child develop independence (ex: sleep alone)

What did Lieven and Still do? What did they find?

· Compared village in eastern Nepal (Chintang) to Rural area in western Germany

· Noticed similar onset of emerging communicative skills (ex: pointing, showing, attention-getting, etc) in both cultures

· Somewhat different rate: German children tended to point more (probably given one-on-one interaction with adults)

What is the nature vs. nurture spectrum?

nature - born knowing all you will know

nurture - exposure and environment are very important

What are the distinguishing features of theoretical approaches? (two sets, four total)

Structuralism vs. Functionalism

Competence vs. Performance

What is structuralism? What is functionalism?

Structuralism

· Attempts to discover invariant processes underlying observable data

· "I want milk" --> analyze the form of the utterance

· Evidence that the child knows English word order

Syntactic side

Functionalism

· Establish predictive relationships between situational variables and language

· "I want milk" --> utterance is followed by a glass of milk

More interested in pragmatic side

What is competence? What is performance?

Competence

- Individual's knowledge of language

- Structuralists

Performance

- actual instances of language use

- functionalists

What is the behavioural approach/theory?

· Focus on measurable aspects of language behavior

· Avoids mentalistic explanations (ex: intentions or implicit knowledge of grammatical rules)

· Emphasize performance over competence

· Language is a behavior (Skinner)

· Child is typically viewed as a passive recipient of stimuli (parents provide stimuli and reinforcements)

How does language acquisition happen with the behavioural approach?

- Classical and operant conditioning (reinforcement)

- Productive speech is the result of reinforcements and punishments supplied by environmental agents

- Language development is determined by training, not maturation

- Imitation is an important factor for language learning

What is the linguistic approach? Who is associated with this approach?

· Language is innate in humans

· Language has a structure (or grammar) that is independent of language use

- environment triggers the maturation of a physiologically based language system but does not shape verbal behavior

- It favours competence (formal organization of grammar) over performance

- Chomsky

What is Chomsky's language faculty? What are the 2 components it must have?

-component of the brain devoted to language

- Language faculty must have at least 2 components:

1. Cognitive system --> info storage

2. Performance frequency --> access info and makes use of it

What is Chomsky's universal grammar?

- system of principles, conditions and rules that are elements of all human languages"

- 'system of categories, mechanism and constraints shared by all human languages and considered to be innate"

What is language acquisition device? What theory does it belong to?

Linguistic theory

- innate biological component that specializes in language processing

What is a critical period for language acquisition?

- time period for when you need to be exposed to language

What is the interactionist approach? What are the 3 types of interactionist approach?

· Multiple factors affect development (ex: social, linguistic, biological, cognitive) and these factors interact with each other

· 3 types of interactive approaches:

1. Cognitive

2. Social

3. Usage-based gestural

· These are a compromise between behavior and linguistic approaches

What is the cognitive approaches: Piaget's Theory?

· Internal structures determine behavior

· Invariant order of acquisition across languages

· Piaget: language is not a separate innate characteristic but rather an ability that results from cognitive development

· The sequence of cognitive development determines the sequence of language development

· Complex structures of language are neither innate nor learned

· Children need to complete the sensorimotor period before using language

· Constructivism - "knowledge is actively constructed by the child in interaction with their world"

What is the cognitive approach: Info Processing Models?

· Children are novice information processors

· Competition model --> various cues in the language environment compete with one another

· Language comprehension and production involve parallel processing

· Multilayered networks of connections interpret linguistic input and generate speech

What are two types of information processing associated with the info processing models?

1. Serial processing - operations performed one at a time

2. Parallel processing - multiple operations occur simultaneously

What is parallel distributed processors associated with the info processing models?

· Parallel distributed processors (PDPs) --> consist of a series of processing units called activation nodes which are connected to other nodes by pathways that vary in the strength of the connection

What is the social interactionist approach? Who is this approach associated with?

· Combines aspects of behavioral and linguistic approaches

· Speech directed to children (motherese or infant-directed speech) facilitates language development

· Language emerged from interplay between children's linguistic and cognitive capacities and social environment

· Non-linguistic aspects of interaction are key: turn-taking, mutual gaze, joint attention, and cultural conventions

· Social interaction language learning interactions between caregivers and children are the basis for future conversational patterns

· Environment plays an important role in child's language growth

- Vygotsky

What does Vygotsky believe?

o Cognitive development results from interaction between childrens innate skills and social experiences

o Social interaction between an infant and a "capable" person (ex: caregivers) is critical for language acquisition

What is Vygotskys zone of proximal development?

area between what a child can accomplish independently (actual developmental level) and what he can accomplish with another person who has greater knowledge or skills (level of potential development)

What are gestural and usage based approaches?

- language acquisition is the product of cognitive and social processes

What are the origins of gestures and signs?

· Human language roots consist of communicative pointing and iconic gestures

· American sign language is a full and genuine language

· Mirror neurons: a neuron that fires both when performing an action and when observing the same action performed by another person

· Pointing plays an important role in communication

· Signs can convey the same information as a spoken sentence without mastering syntactic rules

What is a usage based approach?

· Grammar --> emerges in the child through cognitive skills (pattern finding) and interactions with caregivers

· Language is a social phenomenon

· Joint attention is key

· Pattern finding facilitates child's language acquisition

What are the early communicative attempts?

· Infants' productions change over the first year of life

· Early babbling sounds are similar across languages, but these change towards the end of the first year

· Communication goes beyond the perception and production of sounds

· "infants are active interactional partners and their actions affect the subsequent behavior of their caregivers"

· Its difficult to decide whether a behavior is intentional communication at very early ages

What are the criteria to decide if an infant is engaging in intentional communication?

1. Child make eye contact with the partner while gesturing or vocalizing (alternate gaze between object or partner)

2. Some gestures become consistent (opening and closing hand when the baby wants something)

3. Some vocalizations become consistent (producing "eh eh" when the baby wants something)

4. After a gesture or vocalization, the child pauses to wait for a response from the partner

5. The child persists in attempting to communicate if he/she is not understood (can modify behavior)

When does intentional communication tend to emerge? What does it consist of?

- First signs of intentional communication tend to emerge between 8 to 10 months

- Early communication consists of gestures and sounds

- this is key for language development

What are some early communicative behaviours?

- joint attention

- protowords

· To communicate with their caregivers infants can:

- Show an object to their caregiver while vocalizing

- Give an object to the caregiver

- Point to direct attention to an object (around 6 to 10 months)

- Look towards an object indicated by a caregiver (around 9 to 12 months)

What is joint attention?

- Eye gaze alternation - pointing - showing

- Emerge around 12 months of age

- Very important communicative skill

What are protowords?

vocalizations with consistent sound patterns used across situations but unique to the child (ex: an invented word that the child uses to describe something, normally something meaningful)

How does the speech of the caregiver sound? What is IDS, CDS, or motherese?

· Speech directed to babies is typically different to that directed to adults

· Infant directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), or motherese (parentese) --> speech directed to infants that contains specific characteristics

What are the characteristics of IDS, CDS, or motherese?

- Higher pitch

- Slower rate of speech

- Variable pitch (greater pitch variation)

- Exaggerated stress

- Simplified sentence structure

What does the conversational nature of caregiver's speech refer to? What is important with this?

· Even at early ages caregivers tend to respond to infants vocalizations ("conversations" with infants)

· Caregivers comment on various nonverbal and verbal behaviors exhibited by the infant

· As infants grow up caregivers change in what they accept as a turn in a conversation (ex: babbling vs. a burp for a 7-month-old)

· Quantity of adult-to-child speech is important for rate of language development

How does maternal communication vary with SES? What should we advise parents to do?

· In USA maternal communication style may vary by SES --> high SES mothers tend to use longer sentences a richer vocabulary than low SES mothers

· Children from higher SES showed faster vocabulary growth

*Parents should be advised to speak to their children in the language they feel most comfortable speaking in (the importance is high quality language, good vocabulary, emotional connection to child and the language)

When do children say their first words?

· 6 months --> infants recognize meanings of a few words

· Around 12 months --> production of first word

· Great variability in children's early world comprehension and production

What are the 4 main factors that intentional communication seems to emerge from?

- Biological basis for language

- Changes given maturation

- Social cognitive development

- Child experiences with caregivers

What age do children start putting words together? What is the timing of first words related to?

· Age 2

· Timing of first word combinations is related to:

- Timing of child first words

- Time at which child understands approx. 50 words

- Mother's responsiveness to child communication at age 1

Are grammatical rules taught by parents?

· Grammatical and syntax rules are not explicitly taught by parents (don't tell kids these rules, we just use them)

· Children comprehend many grammatical rules of their language before producing words

How can we assess the early comprehension of syntax?

- Diary studies - write down what the child understands, keep a diary of when this behavior is observed

-Act-out tasks - ask child to act out a sentence

- Direction tasks - child is asked to carry out a direction "tickle the cat"

- Picture-choice tasks - the child has to select one picture that best represents what the experimenter said- ask child to act out a sentence

What is the preferential looking paradigm?

- experimental method used with prelinguistic infants that tracks eye movement (track the eye movement of kids)

- children can comprehend word order before they begin using two-word sentences

What is the general trend for children acquiring syntax?

· Single word utterances --> 12 to 24 months

· Tow-word combination --> 18 to 24 months

· Longer multi-word utterances --> 24 to 30 months

What is the one word stage of syntax?

· Comprehension is ahead of production

· One-word utterances express sentence-like meaning

· "Daddy" --> "There's Daddy"

· "Ball" --> "I want the ball"

· They use one word but they are trying to express more than that

What is the two-word stage in syntax?

· Most of the child utterances are two words long

· Child's language is creative (no imitation of adult sentences)

· Sentences are simple

· Early sentences composed of nouns, verbs and adjectives (content words or open-class words)

· Function words (or closed-class words) such as prepositions, conjunctions and articles are usually missing at this stage

· Two-word stage example: more car, all wet, bye-bye baby, mama come

How does the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes go?

· Children show a similar acquisition of grammatical morphemes

· Some grammatical morphemes are acquired earlier than others: ing is acquired before be, and verbal agreement suffix s is acquired later

· Acquisition --> morpheme is supplied in 90% of its obligatory contexts

What predicts the morphosyntax order of acquisition?

· Frequency does not account for the particular order in which the 14 morphemes develop

--> Example: most frequent morphemes in parents' speech were articles, but these were not among the earliest to be acquired

· Linguistic complexity predicted order of acquisition

- order of acquisition might be influenced by multiple factors

What is linguistic complexity? Define it in 2 ways.

- Semantic: number of meanings encoded in the morpheme

- Syntactic: number of rules required for the morpheme

What does a plural morpheme encode?

number

What does a past-tense morpheme encode?

"earlierness"

What does a third-person singular encode?

number and "earlierness"

What is the order of acquisition of pronouns?

· First pronouns acquired are I, it, and you

· Subjective and objective pronouns are acquired by age 3

· Possessive pronouns are acquired by age 5

What is the optional infinitive stage?

· At ages 2 to 3 children do not know that tense must be obligatory marked in main clauses

--> Example: "I bump my head" "elephant fall down"

· Children stop producing uninflected clauses about age 4 ½

What are overregularization errors?

- over application of rules to irregular parts of the language (ex: pluralizing foot as foots)

· Around age 3 or 4 children:

--> Add the plural -s to nouns (mans, foots)

--> Use regular past tense on irregular verbs (goed, failed)

What is the main purpose of the Wug Test? What is it?

- The main purpose is to investigate how the plural and other inflectional morphemes are acquired in a certain language

- children were shown novel creatures and actions that were given invented names

- ex: "this is a wug" --> "now there is another one, there are two of them, there are two ______" wugs

What are the 3 main periods in acquisition of negation?

- 1st period: sentence is made negative by placing a negative marker, ex: no go movies, no mommy do it

- 2nd period: negative word is moved inside the sentence and placed next to the main verb, ex: I no like it, I no want book

- 3rd period: appearance of auxiliary and approximation to adult forms, ex: you can't have this, im not sad now

How is communicative intent assessed?

Low structured observations, structured observations, clinical evaluation (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and Rossetti Infant-Toddler Language Scale)

What are low-structured vs structured observations?

- low structured observations: caregiver plays with the child in a natural way, trained observers score the childs behavior

- structured observation: manipulation of the situation to increase the likelihood of observing the behavior of interest (ex: communicative temptation task)

What is Rossetti Infant-Toddler Language Scale?

- assesses communication skills from birth to 3 years of age

- areas: interaction-attachment, pragmatics, gesture, play, language comprehension and expression

What is theMacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories?

- parent questionnaire

- focus on production, not understanding (it is hard to tell what children at this age understand)

- used for 18mos - 3 years

What are lexical principles? What 4 did we discuss?

lexical principles help the child to develop accurate word-referent mappings

whole object assumption, principles of mutual exlucisivity, overextension, under extension

What is whole object assumption?

child assumes that a new word refers to a complete object and not to its parts (ex: show child a picture of a dog, they assume it refers to the whole dog, not just the tail)

What is the principle of mutual exclusivity?

children avoid two labels for one referent (ex: shown picture of a car and a weird green thing and asked "which one is feb", kids will point to weird green thing because they know the other is a car)

What is an overextension? What is an underextension?

Overextension - child extends the word beyond the adult word context, too broad meaning, ex: calling all men daddy

Underextension - concept is very restricted, ex: cup makes reference to just the childs cup. common for 1-2 year olds

Why is a language sample important?

- gives us a lot of information

- common child language assessment tool

- allows us to gather information on different language skills (syntax, morphology, semantics, narrative skills, parent child-interaction, etc)

- provides a more naturalistic assessment of child's language skills

- can be done at home or at lab

What are 3 important things to consider for elicitation of a language sample?

sample length, communication context, analysis

What are 5 strategies to elicit communication according to a child's age?

- play based conversation - using developmentally appropriate play to engage the child in a conversation (preschool)

- interview - asking questions about topics of interest to the child (mid way through preschool to elementary)

- narratives - the child is asked to tell a story (familiar or unfamiliar), could include story retelling or story

- generation (end of preschool to beginning of high school)

- expository - the child is asked to describe a process (ex: how to play her favourite game) (mid elementary to mid high school)

- persuasion - the child is asked to persuade someone about a specific topic (end of elementary to end high school)