18- Child Language Acquisition

Which finding poses the strongest challenge to the behaviorist view of language learning?

Children producing novel utterances that were never reinforced

Why is conditioned head-turn particularly useful for studying phoneme category learning?

It reveals perceptual warping by observing changes in discrimination ability

According to Kuhl’s “perceptual magnet” theory, what makes category prototypes special?

They draw nearby sounds toward the category, reducing discrimination

Werker & Tees (2002) showed that English-learning infants lose the ability to discriminate certain non-native contrasts by 12 months. This supports what theoretical claim?

Perceptual specialization results from environmental exposure

Mehler et al. (1988) showed that 4-day-old infants distinguish French from Russian even when speech is low-pass filtered. What does this imply?

Prosodic information is available in utero and influences early preferences

Why might sensitivity to syllable structure help infants begin word segmentation?

Syllables encode rhythm and prosody, which the fetus hears before birth

In Saffran et al. (1996), what key ability allowed 8-month-olds to detect word boundaries in an artificial language stream?

Tracking transitional probabilities between syllables

Why is mutual exclusivity a powerful bias in early word learning?

It allows children to infer meaning without needing multiple exposures

Which observation best supports the claim that children use eye-gaze to determine word meaning?

Younger infants mislabel salient objects even when adults look elsewhere

Smith & Yu (2008) showed that infants can resolve referential ambiguity over repeated exposures. What does this suggest about word learning?

Cross-situational learning mechanisms operate in infancy

What does the fact that children initially produce plural-like forms such as “two shoe” suggest?

Errors reflect parameter settings consistent with other languages

Why is child-directed speech (CDS) thought to benefit early phoneme learning

It is hyperarticulated and reduces perceptual ambiguity

Which theoretical stance best explains why children can generate sentences they have never heard before?

Nativism / Universal Grammar

Why do infants initially succeed at discriminating phonemes from all languages but lose this ability?

Perceptual narrowing tunes the system to native contrasts

Which method is best suited to testing whether infants understand the meaning of a newly learned word?

Preferential looking

An experiment that tracks the same group of participants over many years to test for developmental changes is known as a

Longitudinal design

One challenge in word learning is to figure out which of many possible objects in a scene is being named. Suppose an adult names an object in an array (e.g., “Look at the boat!”) Older children (e.g., those 2 years and older) will be influenced by

The eye gaze of the adult naming the object

In utero, the infant hears all of the following sounds transmitted through the uterine wall EXCEPT:

Phonemes

In the context of measuring cognition in infants, habituation might refer to

A reduction in responses (e.g., in the sucking of a pacifier) over time

To test if newborn children could differentiate between their own language and a different language, Jacques Mehler and colleagues measured the sucking rate of French babies as they heard speech from a French-Russian bilingual speaker. First, the babies heard French speech; as the novelty of this speech wore off, the babies’ sucking rate slowed down. When the babies then heard speech from Russian,

Their sucking rate got faster