Language acquisition 1

what are the skills involved in learning a language?

• association

• generalisation/extension

• recognition

• retrieval

in what ways is language acquisition learning patterns?

• look for which sounds fit together to make a word

• look for which word-types fit together in which order

what are the key milestones for language acquisition?

• recognising own language (birth)

• understands highly used words (4-8 months)

• first word (10-14 months)

• first sentence (18-30 months)

what is comprehension?

• understanding what others say (or sign or write)

• precedes production

what is production?

speaking (or signing or writing) to others

how does socio-economic status affect early vocabulary growth?

• at 18 months, children from low SES backgrounds produce fewer words (word gap)

• children from low SES backgrounds produce less complex sentences

• by 24 months there is a 6 month language gap between SES groups

what is the Matthew effect?

• “the rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer”

• term was popularised by Stanovich

• gaps between groups will widen over time

key aspects of prenatal language recognition

• foetuses can hear from 15-18 weeks

• sounds are muffled in the womb → later, infants prefer muffled sounds

which voices and languages to infants prefer?

• prefer their mother’s voice

• parents over strangers

• own language(s) over another

describe the results of study by DeCasper & Spence (1987)

foetus and infants can learn and recall cadence (and learn contingencies)

how do infants know where the breaks are between words?

• pitch

• pauses

• adults talk slower to infants

• sounds that occur together often are more likely to be from the same word (transitional probability - patterns)

• statistics??

describe the results of Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996)

• infants can segment speech

• infants preferred the part-words

• they could distinguish between words and part-words

• they can use statistical regularities/patterns to learn language

what is infant directed speech (IDS)?

speech that has characteristics that help children isolate words

what are the characteristics of infant directed speech?

• higher pitch (observed across languages)

• wider range of pitch

• exaggerated intonation

• simple structure

• highly grammatical

• slower speed

• lots of repetition

• exaggerates differences between vowels (this is observed across languages)

what is the effect of infant directed speech on segmentation?

• aids segmentation

• when presented with identical speech streams, 7 month old infants learned words significantly better if IDS was used (Thiessen, Hill & Saffran, 2005)

effects of child directed speech

• Children who hear more CDS have larger
  vocabularies (Schwab & Lew-Williams, 2016)

• Parents adjust their speech based on words they
  think their children do not know (Leung, Tunkel & Yurovsky, 2021)

• 5yrs understand sentences better in CDS (Foursha-
  Stevenson et al., 2017)

• CDS even helps adults learn words in a new
  language (Ma et al., 2020)

key milestones in infant word recognition

• 4.5 months - recognise their own names

• 6 months - understand the words ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’

• 6-9 months - show understanding of some words for familiar objects

describe the results of the study by Miller et al. (2017)

• orient name task - children with more repeated failures were diagnosed with ASD earlier than other children with ASD

differences in monolingual and bilingual children in language acquisition

• develop similarly

• macrostructure shows flexibility and robustness of language acquisition

• microstructure may give insights into how children learn language?

how does categorisation influence language?

• most of the input children hear is for categories (nouns)

• most early vocabularies are words for solid, shape-based categories with count noun syntax

describe the results of the study by Samuelson (2002)

• children trained on shape categories developed a precocious shape bias

• children trained on shape categories even over-generalised the shape bias to non-solid substances

• children trained on material categories did not develop any bias

• shape-bias is a product of word learning