1. Checklist of objectives for Early Language Acquisition

what are the auditory abilities of fetuses in the womb? What does it tell us?

1. Fetus' recognize their mothers voice in the womb

2. Familiar rhyme (prosody)

3. Fetus are learning the basic contours of languags

what are the methods that we use to measure that fetuses can process language in the womb?

• Fetal heartbeat

• Sucking paradigm

How did Mehler show infants can distinct languages like French and those of other languages like Russian ?

• 4 days old. This shows that fetuses are learning the basic contours of language while still in the womb

  • less sucking of thumb when heard languages they recognized

  • more thumb sucking for unfamiliar languages

Given a list of babies and adults of different languages and ages, be able to apply findings from phoneme discrimination abilities to choose the baby/adult that would or would not be able to detect differences between certain phonemes of a given language.

A. Be familiar with the research technique devised by Janet Werker to examine these abilities in infants

B. Be able to identify conclusions drawn from this Werker research that help explain why we lose the ability to discriminate some phonemes over the first year, but not others

• Within the first year of life, infants have the ability to detect differences in ALL phonemes. After the first year, they start to lose this ability

  • Japanese speakers can initially hear difference between r and l then lose this ability since Japanese doesn't distinguish those sounds

  • Click consonants → english adults can still hear the difference because our language doesn't use them at all

• Werker taught the infants to turn their heads to new sounds/ when the sound changes

Be able to identify the main way Jen Saffran and colleagues have proposed by which infants become able to break up long, unbroken strings of speech into meaningful units (aka speech segmentation)

• Babies can pick up on these statisctical regularities automatically

  • Long unbroken strings of sounds presented to 8 month olds during training

  • Short segments presented during test

    • from initial long unbroken string

    • new

• Result: babies listen longer to new words than old ones

  • babies needed to have broken up the long segment to hear each word to know it was familiar vs a new word being said

Be able to match a given utterance (or babbling pattern) to the age at which that speech pattern is most likely to appear AS WELL AS specific instances

1. Cooing → soft, vowel-like sounds such as "ooh," "aah," and "mmm”

2. reduplicated babbling → consonant-vowel sequence “Dadadadadada”

3. variegated babbling → strings of varying consonants and vowels “Badokabodabo”

4. telegraphic speech → “Blanche dying.”

Be able to identify a piece of evidence that has been used to support the idea that infants babble to practice the sounds of their own language.

• Nakazima, 1975- Babies practice babbling while they are alone in their cribs

• Harley 2010- “Babbling is like warming up before a football game: you practice some of the moves, but it’s nothing like the real game.”

• DeBoysen-Barties et al., 1984 - Babies babble differently depending on their language. You can tell the difference between a baby babbling in French vs Chinese.

  • French adults could distinguish between the babble which means they are being tuned to their own language, practicing the sounds

Be able to identify the approximate age at which the one-word stage begins

• Babies say their first word at 10-18 months

• Two types of infant talkers

  • Referential group (talks about objects first)

  • Expressive group (people and feelings first)

At the park, a father sees a tree and tells his son, “Look at that tree! See that tree?” Identify:

a) the problem the father is trying to help the child solve

b) the means by which the father is trying to help him

• the mapping problem by using child directed speech