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Comprehension
understanding what others say (or sign or write)
Production
which refers to speaking (or signing or writing)
Components of language
Pieces combine at different levels to form a hierarchy: sounds become words, words become sentences, and sentences become stories and conversations.
Generative
using a finite set of words and our knowledge of the systematic ways in which those words can combine, we can generate sentences and ideas
Phonemes
the smalles usit of sound that creates differences in meaning - e.g., hat vs car; the two phonemes h/ and c/ Infants can hear all phonemes in the first month of life
Syntax
refers to the permissible combinations of words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc). The order in which words appear is important
Pragmatics
the understanding of how language is typically used in a specific cultural
What is required for language?
The human brain; but a single human, isolated from all resources of linguistic experience, could never learn language: exposure is a crucial ingredient for successful language development
A human brain
they key to language development lies in the brain
Brain-language lateralization
for the 90% of people who are right handed, language is primarily represented and controlled by the left hemisphere. Left hemisphere specialization for most aspects of language emerges very early in life
Sensitive period for language development
period during which languages are learned relatively quickly. After this period (which ends sometime between age 5 and puberty), language acquisition outcomes become more variable and, on average, less successful
A human environment
possession of a human brain is not enough for language to develop. Children must be also exposed to other people using language- any language, signed or spoken
Infant directed speech-
the idea that adults adopt a distinctive mode of speech when talking to babbies and toddlers
The process of language acquisition
infants start out paying attention to what people say or sign, and they know a great deal about language long before their first linguistic productions
Speech perception
The first step in language learning is figuring out the sounds of one's native language. Speech perception also involves determining which differences between sounds are important and which can be ignored.
Prosody
the characteristic rhythmic and intonation patterns with which a language is spoken
Categorical perception of phonemes
Both adults and infants perceive speech sounds as belonging to categories. This phenomenon, referred to as categorical perception, has been established by studying people's response to speech sounds.
In this research listeners hear a speech sound that gradually changes from one phoneme, such as /b/, into a related one /p/. These two phonemes are produced the exact same way except the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start to vibrate
Developmental changes in speech perception
Infants increasingly home in on the speech sounds of their native language, and by 12 months of age, they become less sensitive to the differences between nonnative speech sounds.
Perceptual narrowing of phonemes to native language
Babies born to English- speaking parents, listen to phonemes within an unfamiliar language (Hindi)
Can hear the difference between phonemes not used in English at 6 months, but lose this ability by 10-12 months
Word segmentation
Infants have to figure out where the spoken words start and end (in terms of sentences). They begin this process of word segmentation during the second half of the first year.
Distributional properties of speech
sounds that are part of the same word are more likely to occur together than are others
reparation for production
Newborns' repertoire of sounds is extremely limited: they cry, sneeze, sigh,burp, and smack their lips. At about 6 to 8 weeks of age, infants begin to coo —producing drawn-out vowel sounds, such as "ooohh" or "aaahh." They click, smack, blow raspberries, squeal—all with apparent fascination and delight. Through this practice, infants gain motor control over their vocalizations. While their sound repertoire is expanding, infants become increasingly aware that their vocalizations elicit responses from others, and they begin to engage in dialogues of reciprocal cooing with their caregivers. Indeed, infants with more responsive caregivers are more likely to use more mature vocalization patterns
Babbling
begins between 6 and 10 months of age (on average around 7 months). They produce strings of consonant - vowel syllables "papapa" drawn from fairly limited set of sounds
Early interactions
In a conversation, mature participants alternate between speaking and listening. Learning to take turns in social interactions is facilitated by parent-infant games, such as peekaboo and "give and take," in which caregiver and baby take turns giving and receiving objects. The infant has the opportunity to play an active and passive role in the conversation.
Intersubjectivity
two interacting partners share a mutual understanding
Joint attention
the caregiver follows the baby's lead, looking at and commenting on whatever the infant is looking at.
First words
to learn first words infants must map sounds (or signs) into meanings.
Early word recognition
Infants begin to understand highly frequent words. When 6 months old hear either "mommy" or "daddy", they look toward an image of the appropriate person
Early word production
first word. Infants produce first words between 10 and 16 months of age, but these early words are mispronounced in a variety of predictable ways.
Overextension
using a word in a broader contect than is appropriate. Eg., a child using dog for any 4 leg animal
under extension
using a word in a more limited context than appropriate. Eg., dog refers to only the child's dog
Word learning
after producing their first words, children typically plod ahead slowly, reaching a productive vocab of 50 or so words by 18 months of age •
18-month spurt- at 18 months the rate of learning appears to accelerate, leading to a vocab spurt
Whole-object bias-
children expect a novel word to refer to a whole object rather than to a part, property, action, or other aspect of the object
Mutual exclusivity
children expect that a given entity will have only one name
Pragmatic cues
paying attention to the social context in which the words are used
Cross-situational word learning
determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels and meanings across scenes and contexts
Syntactic bootstrapping
children also figure out the meanings of new words by using the grammatical structure of the sentences in which those words occur
First sentences
most children begin to combine words into simple sentences by the end of their second year.
Young children understand word combinations much earlier than when they can produce them
Telegraphic speech
short utterances that leace out non-essential words
Grammar
a tool for building new words and sentences
Wug experiment
Pre-schoolers were shown a picture of a made-up animal, which was referred to as "a wug"
Then the children were shown a picture of two of the creatures and the experinenter said "Here are two of them, what are they"
Children as young as 4 readily answered "wugs"
Showed that children didnt have to be familiarized with a term to generalize the English plural
Overregularization
with irregular plural words like man → men. Children treat irregularm forms as if they were regular
Conversational skills
Young children are eager to participate in conversations, their conversational skills lag well behind their burgeoning language skills. For one thing, their speech is often directed to themselves, rather than to another person.
Collective monologues
when young children converse with other children, their conversations tend to be egocentric. Piaget labeled young children's talk with their peers as collective monologues
Narratives
descriptions of past events that have the form of a story
Speaker's goals and beliefs
The development of conversational perspective-taking ability is related to children's level of executive function; as children become more able to control their tendency to assume their own perspective, it becomes easier for them to take the perspective of a conversational partner.
Cultural norms of conversation
In tasks that require participants to take the experimenter's perspective, infants and young children who are monolingual perform worse than those who are bilingual—and also worse than those who, while not bilingual themselves, live in multilingual environments
Bilingual children are also better at adapting to the needs of their communication partner than monolingual children
Living in a diverse linguistic environment may attune children to the challenges of communication—and the need to take others' perspective in order to effectively communicate—in a way that monolingual environments do not.
Later development
While children continue to develop their language skills beyond the ages of 5 or 6 years, this later development is less dramatic than in the early years of life. For example, the ability to sustain a conversation, which grows so dramatically in the preschool years, continues to improve into adulthood.
Nicaraguan sign language
Completely new language that has been evolving over the past 40 years
An education program brought hundreds of deaf children together in two schools in the city of Managua
For most of the children it was their first exposure to other deaf people
Teachers didnt know formal sign language and neither did the children, only simple home signs used to communicate with their families
Children began to build on each others existing informal signs, constructing a relatively crude, limited sign language
What happened next was astonishing. As younger students entered the schools, they rapidly mastered the rudimentary system used by the older students and then gradually transformed it into a complex, fully consistent language (NSL)
Theoretical issues in language development o Chomsky and the nativist view
In 1957 reviewed Verbal Behavior -Simple associations can't explain word learning
We know rules for combining words that dont seem to be learned -Children do not get good language input from other people- the stimulus (input) is poor
We must have some innate capacity to organize language in order to learn it
Universal grammar
a hard set of principles and ruled that govern grammar in all language
Empiricist / Behaviorist view of language development
-Book: Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner -We learn a language the way we learn everything (according to behaviorists) B.F. Skinner
Associate words with things
Hear phrases, repeat them, get corrected
Only need basic learning mechanisms
Same as rats & pigeons, just more neurons
Ongoing debates in language development
Theories must explain how language users are able to generalize byond the specific words or sentences they have been exposed to .
The ways in which various accounts handle these facts differ along two key dimednsions:
The first dimension is the degree to which these explanations lie within the child (nature) versus within the environment (nurture). The second dimension pertains to the child's contributions: Did the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language learning evolve solely to support language learning (domain specific), or are they used for learning many different kinds of things (domain general)?
o Box 6.4 - "I just can't talk without my hands"
using gestures while you speak.
Infants often produce recognizable, meaningful gestures before they speak recognizable words
Infants who gestures more have larger vocabularies when measured months or even years
Nonlinguistic symbols and development
Anything can serve as a symbol so long as it stands for something other than itself. For eg., printed words, numbers, graphs,, pictures and drawings
Symbolic proficiency involves both the mastery of the symbolic creations of others and the creation of new symbolic representations
Using symbols as information
The primary function of many symbols is to provide useful information. E.g., a map- can be crucial for lactating a particular place
Dual representation
the symbolic artifact must be represented mentally in two ways at the same time, as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself
Drawing and writing
when young children first start making marks on paper, their focus is almost exclusively on the activity, with no attempt to produce recognizable images
By age 3 / 4 most children begin trying to draw pictures of something § Development of drawing people
By age 4 children understand a key difference between writing and drawing, namely that written words correspond to specific spoken words, whereas drawing can correspond to many different words
Dividing objects into categories
forming broad divisions for inanimate objects, people, and other animals allowing children to draw accurate inferences about unfamiliar entities.
Perceptual categorization
the grouping together of objects that have similar appearances
Category hierarchies
a category that is organized by set-subset relations, such as animal/dog/poodle
Superordinate level
the general level within a category hierarchy; ex: within animal/dog/poodle, animal would be the superordinate level
Subordinate level
the most specific level within category hierarchy, ex: within animal/dog/poodle, poodle would be the superordinate level
Basic level
the middle level, and often the first level learned, within a category hierarchy; ex: within animal/dog/poodle, dog would be the superordinate level
Causal understanding and categorization:
infants have a rudimentary understanding of causal interactions among objects, such as interactions involving gravity, inertia, and support, and this understanding increases gradually during their first year
Naïve psychology in infancy
commonsense level of understanding of other people and oneself, children are born with a basic understanding of human psychology
Understanding other people
infants in their first year find other people interesting, pay careful attention to them, and learn an impressive amount about them.
Hand vs stick study (Woodward, 1998)
Infants were habituated to the event shown in, a hand repeatedly reaching for a ball on one side of a display. When tested later with displays, infants who saw the hand reach for the other object looked longer than those who saw it reach for the ball (regardless of the ball's position). The pattern of results indicates that the babies interpreted the original reaching as object-directed.
Understanding differences between people
infants understand individual differences among people, as reflected in how they at least partially base preferences among people on the people's actions and characteristics
Good and bad intentions (helper / hinderer study)
In one study using cartoons, Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) presented 10-month-olds with a video showing a ball, a cube, and a pyramid, all with "googly" eyes. To adults, at least, the ball appeared to be trying repeatedly to reach the top of a hill, each time falling back to the bottom. Then, the ball either appeared to be helped toward the crest by the pyramid "pushing" it upward or hindered from reaching the peak by the cube "pushing" it downward. Soon after, infants were shown all three objects and observed the ball either approach the previously "helpful" pyramid or the previously "unhelpful" cube. Infants looked longer when the ball approached the cube that had hindered its progress, presumably indicating not only their understanding of the "intentions" of the objects but also their surprise that the ball seemed to prefer the "hinderer" to the "helper."
Naïve psychology beyond the first year
Several important aspects of psychological understand emerge in the second year and includes insight to their emotions: sense of self, joint attention, and intersubjectivity
Sense of self
children more explicitly realize that they are individuals distinct from other people
Joint attention
two or more people focus intentionally on the same referent
Intersubjectivity
the mutual understanding that people share during communication
Theory of mind:
an organized understanding of how mental processes such as intentions, desires, beliefs, perceptions, and emotions influence behavior
False beliefs: Smarties task, Sally-Ann experiment
tasks that test a child's understanding that other people will act in accord with their own beliefs even when the child knows that those beliefs are incorrect
Pretend play
make-believe activities in which children create new symbolic relations, acting as if they were in a situation different from their actual one
Object substitution
a form of pretense in which an object is used as something other than itself, for example, using a broom to represent a horse
Sociodramatic play
activities in which children enact miniature dramas with other children or adults, such as "mother comforting baby"
Essentialism
the view that living things have an essence inside them that makes them what they are
How do children acquire biological knowledge
During earlier periods of our evolution, it was crucial for human survival that children learn quickly about animals and plants.
Children throughout the world are fascinated by plants and animals and learn about them quickly and easily.
Children throughout the world organize information about plants and animals in very similar ways (in terms of growth, reproduction, inheritance, illness, and healing)
Causality
Causal reasoning in infancy
Blicket detector experiment
Causal reasoning during the preschool period
Egocentric spatial representations
encodes the object's position relative to one's body (object-to-self relation), such as “the toy is on my left";
Allocentric spatial representations:
encodes the object’s position relative to external environment (object-to-object relation), such as “the toy is beside the desk"
Two basic number systems
small and large numbers
Numerical equality
the realization that all sets of N objects have something in common
Adding, subtracting dolls experiment (Wynn, 1992)
evidence of infant knowledge of arithmetic :
A 5-month-old sees a doll on a stage. A screen comes up, hiding the doll from the infant’s sight. Next, the infant sees a hand place a second doll behind the screen and then sees the hand emerge from behind the screen without the doll, thus seeming to have left the second doll with the first one. Finally, the screen drops down, revealing either one doll or two. Most 5-month-olds look longer when there is only one doll, suggesting that they expected that 1 + 1 should equal 2 and that they were surprised when they saw only a single object. Similar results are seen with subtraction: 5-month-olds look longer when the apparent removal of one of two objects results in two objects being present than when the removal results in one object being there
cardinality
the number of objects in the set corresponds to the last number stated.
Still face experiment
Mother and infant, around 4 months. Experimental group: first mother must interact with their child normally but then told to maintain a neutral expression, not talking or touching- keep a “still face.” Shows how distressed infant becomes when mother does not interact with them
Watson’s behaviorism
child is shaped entirely by their environment and social interactions provide positive and negative reinforcement to behavior
Little Albert test
baby, “Little Albert”, was introduced to a white bunny; each time the baby approached the bunny; a loud clang occurred, soon he became fearful of the white bunny and anything white and furry
Intermittent reinforcement
inconsistent response to a behavior; for example, sometimes punishing unacceptable behaviors, and other times ignoring it
Bandura, Bobo the doll study
Bandura argued that most human learning is inherently social in nature and is based on the observation of the behavior of other people; the Bobo the doll study
Bobo Doll Experiment: vicarious reinforcement
Bobo doll experiment where researchers had preschool children watch a short film where an adult was highly aggressive towards a Bobo Doll, the adult punched the doll and performed other acts towards it. Three groups of children observed the adult receive different consequences; one group saw the adult receive praise, another saw the adult be punished, the last group saw the adult receive no consequences. Researchers wondered if vicarious reinforcement would play a role in how children would reproduce the behavior. Children who saw the adult punished imitated the behavior less than those in the other two groups. Children in all conditions learned from observing the adult’s behavior and remembered what they had seen. Also, boys were more physically aggressive toward the dolls than girls were.
Vicarious Reinforcement
observing someone else receive a reward or punishment
Reciprocal determinism
child-environment influences operate in both directions; children are both affected by and influence aspects of their environment
Self-socialization
active process during development whereby children’s cognitions lead them to perceive the world and to act in accord with their expectations and beliefs, through their activity preferences, friendship, and so on
Hostile attributional bias
a general expectation that others are antagonistic to them
Achievement motivations: Learning vs performance goals
Learning to actually master a concept vs. Only doing work for recognition
Entity vs Incremental theories of intelligence
Entity: belief that abilities are fixed and cannot change, when one fails they feel helpless and don’t believe they can improve; performance goals, only doing it for credit/recognition vs. Incremental: belief that abilities are learned and can change through effort, when one fails they feel as though they can improve with hard work; learning goals, learn to actually gain knowledge
