6. Language Development in Infants

Flashcards about language development

When does hearing begin?

Changes in heart rate in response to sound can be observed, indicating hearing begins prenatally.

What did De Casper & Spence (1986) demonstrate?

Babies are actively processing speech before birth and can recognize stories they heard in the womb.

What is 'Transnatal learning'?

Learning that occurs during the prenatal period that is remembered during the postnatal period

What was the key finding regarding the sucking response in De Casper & Spence's 'Cat in the Hat' experiment?

Babies altered their sucking pattern to hear the familiar passage from 'The Cat in the Hat'.

What did Christophe and Morton (1998) discover about language discrimination in infants?

Babies can distinguish between languages with different rhythmical patterns (prosody).

What is a phoneme?

The smallest sound unit that carries distinctions between one meaning and another.

Why is phoneme discrimination and perception important for infants?

It's crucial to be able to tell apart different phonemes (e.g., /b/ and /p/) and to perceive different variants of the same phoneme as the same (i.e., to perceive all instances of /p/ sound as /p/).

What is the High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) paradigm?

A paradigm used to test infants' discrimination of speech sounds by measuring changes in their sucking rate.

In the Eimas et al. (1971) study, how did infants respond to hearing a different phoneme (/p/) versus a variant of the same phoneme (/b/)?

Babies who heard /p/ increased their sucking rate, while those who heard a variant of /b/ did not.

How does phonetic discrimination ability change from infancy to adulthood?

Newborn babies have the potential to make any phonetic discrimination, but adults often lose the ability to hear distinctions not in their native language.

How does language experience influence speech perception, according to Werker & Tees (1984)?

Language experience shapes an infant's speech perception by fine-tuning their system to relevant contrasts in their native language.

Conditioned headturn paradigm

Whenever there is a change in the auditory stimulus, an electric toy is lit up and activated, so Infants are trained to look at the toy whenever they hear a change

What is perceptual narrowing of speech in infancy?

Infants are initially universal language perceivers, but their system becomes fine-tuned to relevant contrasts in their native language.

According to Kuhl et al. (2003), how can foreign language exposure affect speech perception?

Exposure to a foreign language can reverse the decline in non-native speech perception.

What is the impact of foreign language on decline in non-narrative speech perception?

Foreign language can reverse decline in non-narrative speech perception

What did Jusczyk & Aling (1995) demonstrate about infants' ability to extract words from fluent speech?

By 7.5 months, infants have some ability to detect words in fluent contexts.

Preferential listening paradigm

Infants sit on their caregiver's lap in a test booth and how long the infants looks at the 'source' of the sound (the flashing light)

What are the characteristics of infant-directed speech (IDS)?

Higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, shorter utterances, longer pauses, and simplified sentence structure.

How do babies use syllable stress

Babies could use presence of stressed syllable as a guide to the beginning of a word (would be corrected most of the time)

What is transitional probability?

Transitional probability is the probability of one syllable following another.

What did Saffron et al. (1996) and Johnson and Jusczyk (2001) reveal about infants' ability to use transitional probabilities?

At 8 months, infants can segment a continuous stream of speech based on statistical cues alone.

What are three methods for measuring word comprehension in infants?

Parental reports (Communicative Developmental Inventory), home observations/video recordings, and in-lab object selection tasks.

In Tincoff & Jusczyk (1999) how did infants respond in the 'mummy' or 'daddy' experiment?

Infants looked more at the video matching the word heard.

What is fast mapping (Heibeck & Markman, 1987)?

Young children's ability to acquire a word rapidly on the basis of minimal information and exposure.