Developmental Psychology - Language Acquisition
Introduction
Welcome to the lecture on developmental psychology, specifically language acquisition.
The lecturer is Tina Seabrook.
Next week's lecture will cover the development of learning, memory, and metacognition.
Overview of Language Development
Focus on language development in the first few years of a child's life.
Humans have a unique ability to create and use language compared to animals, particularly in vocalizations.
Human language is exceptionally flexible.
The lecture will cover theories of language development and factors that affect it.
The course of language development will be systematically charted from before birth to around age five.
Applications of language development theories to real-world scenarios will be discussed.
There will be a 15-minute break halfway through the lecture.
Practice multiple-response questions, similar to the exam format, will be included, with the questions available on Blackboard.
The Challenge of Language Learning
Language is a complex form of knowledge humans acquire.
Children in all cultures understand and use language early in life, often before they can walk.
The central question is how young children acquire such a complex system of information.
The challenge involves discovering the internal structure of a system with tens of thousands of words generated from a small set of sounds.
These words can be assembled into an infinite number of combinations (sentences), with only a tiny subset being correct.
Young children must converge on the structure of this system to communicate effectively.
Milestones in Language Acquisition
0 months: Cooing and making vocalizations that increasingly have meaning.
6 months: Babbling (e.g., "mum mum," "dad dad," "baa baa").
12 months: Saying first words with attached meaning (e.g., "mama," "dada").
There's variety in the time children hit each step.
2 years: Combining words to convey richer meaning (e.g., "daddy gone," "mama milk").
3 years: Using multiple words and the emergence of grammar (e.g., "Where's daddy gone?").
4 years: Sentences become more complex with structure following standardized principles.
5 years: Using complete, grammatically correct sentences (e.g., "Why does daddy need to go to work?").
Components of Language Development
Comprehension: The ability to understand what others are saying.
Production: The ability to produce language and make vocalizations.
To achieve these, children need to understand several components:- Phonology: The system of sounds, including how vowels and consonants are produced (phonemes).
Semantics: The meaning of words and their combinations.
Grammar: The structure of language and how to arrange words into sentences in the correct order to convey meaning. This includes understanding past vs. future tense and pluralization.
Pragmatics: The social rules of language learning, including initiating and maintaining conversation, overcoming miscommunications, and communicating effectively in different environments.
Adjusting speech depending on the audience (e.g., adult vs. sibling).
Theories of Language Development
Language acquisition often seems effortless for children.
Theories range from learning-based to nativist perspectives with interactionist views in the middle.
Learning Theorists: Believe language is learned from the environment. Spanish children speak Spanish because they are in a Spanish-speaking environment.
Nativists: Argue that children worldwide share similar linguistic achievements at similar times (linguistic universals), suggesting a biologically programmed activity.
Interactionists: Suggest language development results from a combination of learning and innate biological factors.
Empiricist Perspective
Skinner: Argued that language is learned and that it's no accident that children end up speaking the same language as their parents.
Parents, caregivers, and teachers reinforce grammatically correct speech, shaping a child’s speech development.
They selectively reinforce babbling that sounds most like words, giving more attention to the child.
Reinforcement is withheld until the child combines actual words together.
Children learn the correct names of objects faster when reinforced.
Social Learning Theorists
Bandura: Argued that children learn particular words from their parents by listening and imitating the language of older people who know more sophisticated language.
Caregivers teach language by modeling it, which children then imitate.
Nativist Perspective
Humans are biologically programmed to acquire language.
Children all over the world reach certain linguistic milestones at similar ages, even though cultures vary vastly across the world.
These linguistic universals are taken as evidence that children are biologically programmed to learn a language.
One of the big names or advocates for the native nativist perspective was Noam Chomsky,
Noam Chomsky: Proposed the concept of a Language Acquisition Device (LAD), an inbuilt processor activated by verbal input containing a universal grammar.
Chomsky argued that even the simplest languages are too complex to be explicitly taught by parents or discovered by trial and error.
Slow Ben: Argued for a language-making capacity (LMC) rather than innate knowledge, suggesting children have cognitive and perceptual abilities specialized for language learning.
Interactionist Perspective
Language development is a combination of biological and cognitive development and the environment a child is in.
Children are biologically prepared to learn language, but not because of a LAD. Rather, they have a powerful brain that matures slowly.
Factors Affecting Language Development
The brain is crucial with major language centers in the left hemisphere (Broca's area and Wernicke's area) becoming increasingly specialized between birth and puberty.
Damage to Broca's area can affect people's ability to produce speech, whereas damage to Wernicke's area can affect people's ability to understand or comprehend speech.
Early years in particular are very important for language development.
Case studies like Genie (raised in extreme deprivation) support the existence of critical periods.
Sensitive Periods
Studies on immigrants to the U.S. (Chinese and Korean people) show that the age at which they first acquired English predicted how well they performed on an English proficiency test later on.
If you start learning a language after puberty, you're quite unlikely to ever reach exactly the same proficiency as a native speaker.
The age in which you start learning a language seems to be important.
Role of Parents and Caregivers
Parents and caregivers engage in something called child directed speech, they talk to children in a way that is different to how you would talk to another adult.
This involves amplifying expressions, exaggerating and repeating information, making lots of eye contact, and talking in a higher-pitched voice to attract attention.
As children get older, parents start to increase the length and the complexity of child-directed speech to match their child's speech development.
Playing nonverbal games (e.g., peekaboo) helps teach turn-taking and aids in pragmatic language development.
Course of Language Development
Speech Perception: Starts before birth. Sounds can travel through the mother's womb.
Cat in the Hat Study: Infants displayed a preference for the story they had heard in the womb, measured by sucking on the nipple where higher sucking is regarded as a measure of attention. This suggests language development begins prenatally.
Discrimination of phonemes
By 1 to 2 months after birth. Infants can discriminate between different phonemes
Over the first six months of life, infants can discriminate between sounds of all different languages in a way that adults cannot.
As the infant gets older, they become less and less able to discriminate between those different sounds that are not part of their native language.
This is call neural commitment, where the brain becomes increasingly specialised towards the language that they're surrounded by.
Want a child to be bilingual or trilingual or whatever, it's the best thing you can do is to expose them to that language as early as possible.
Communication
Early on, infants communicate by crying. Crying can indicate hunger, anger, pain, and
The cries become more social and more targeted, and many parents say that they can differentiate between different types of crying.
From about one month, babies begin to produce vowel sounds, which is known as cooing.
From about one month they also start to engage in proto conversations, which is where mothers vocalise when their infants stop vocalising to stimulate turn taking, and to develop the pragmatics of language acquisition.
These sounds are cross-cultural, so they have a strong biological basis.
Proto imperative conversations, which is where the child is requesting an object or an action.
Proto declarative interactions, which is where they are commenting on an option or on an object or an action.
Imperative imperative interactions started around 12 months and proto declarative twelve to 14.
Speech production development
From about one month, the um child is cooing, laughing can start after 4 to 6 months.
From 6 to 10 months, they start engaging in something called canonical babbling, which is where they.
Babble. Repetitive vowel consonant sounds.
They gradually develop intonation as they do so
Learning to understand language and actually their ability to understand language comes before they produce their first word.
Comprehension of Words
By 10 months, infants understand around 30 words; by 13 months, around 100 words.
Eye-tracking studies show that even younger infants can understand and differentiate between different words.
By 6 to 9 months, infants know the meaning of many nouns, even though they aren’t saying them yet.
How Infants Understand the Meaning of Different Words
Constraint Theory: Infants have assumptions that help them infer meaning.- Whole Object Constraint: Expectation that a word will refer to a whole object rather than a part of an object.
Mutual Exclusivity Constraint: If they hear a new word when they see a novel object and an unfamiliar object side by side, they might expect that the word is the the word that they're hearing for the first time is the name of the novel object,
Children construct a semantic system where they learn gradually, over time, how words relate to one another.
First Words in First one to two years
The infants start to produce their first word, which happens between 10 and 15 months around the first birthday.
That first word is often a sound that is not a real word,
but is something that they use consistently, um, to reference a particular object or situation.
Condense meaning
The language doesn't have the full grammatical structure that you or I would use.
This period between 12 and 18 months is known as the whole of phrase period,
The reason for this is that during this whole of phrase period, children often have a fairly limited lexicon.
They you see them start to overextend, and use a word for a whole host of other related objects.
Between 16 to 24 months, this vocabulary spurt where suddenly children start.
vocabulary spurt
Children get a spurt in vocabulary, and the relationship children have with the caregiver to actually teach them helps contribute to the child's burst in vocabulary.
Classifying children language skills
This study classified the first 50 words that children knew and and used first.
Of the first 50 words that they acquired, most of those words were what we call general nominal
learning new words
They engage in something called false mapping, which is where they rapidly connect new words with their objects in their environment.
They also infer meaning from contrastive language.
Children will also infer intentionality based on the actions of other people.
They also engage in something called syntactic syntactical bootstrapping,
Two words
At around 18 to 24 months, children start combining two words, together to infer meaning.
And they engage in something called telegraphic speech, which is short and simple speech, but fairly effective speech.
and with increasing age, the mean length of words in a given utterance increases quickly from two words to three words.
Children Start grammar.
that's when we also start to see the emergence of grammar.
they'll add ING to the end of a word to indicate a verb.
Development of Grammar
Around 2 to 3 years we find the grammar starts to come in.
With the development of grammar is that they might start saying things that they haven't actually heard before
Once they start, start to have some understanding of grammar, they will use those rules to the best of their ability.
Grammar errors
We see with the development of grammar we see over regularisation,
Over time children get more complex sentences, conjunctions embedded clauses.
Between the ages of one and four, they have these really quite huge strides in grammar use in the development of grammar.
Language development use cases & achievement
Language development development relates to academic, the number of words that children know is linked with how rich their linguistic environment is and also their caregivers vocabulary.
Hotham and Risley study.
There was a clear association between social class and the number of words that the children knew.
Early vocabulary knowledge. A number of words the child knows early in their life is linked to achievement in school later on.
As a result, there have been a lot of initiatives to narrow the gap between, um, vocabulary knowledge across the different social classes.
Use of technology on kids
Technology.Um. The environment is really quite important for language development and children's acquisition of language over the first few years.
increasingly, children are exposed to lots of technology.
The study from 2010 looked at is whether that's really the case.
They looked at the effectiveness of a DVD that claimed to help infants language development.
And what they found is that the parents teaching on their own was led to the best language acquisition performance.
Combining that with what we talked about in the last paper, 20:12
it's important to consider not just the amount of speech that children are exposed to, but also the quality of the interaction.
Quiz Notes
Nativist Perspective:- Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device
Innate biological programming.
Critical periods for language learning.
Universal grammar.
Terms
Whole Object Constraint: Children expect words to refer to whole objects, not parts.
Newport and Johnson Study: Suggests language learning ability declines after age seven, with proficiency similar to native speakers achievable before that age.
Overextension: Using a word too broadly (e.g., "car" for all transport).
Child-Directed Speech Examples:- Higher pitched voice.
Exaggerated facial expressions.
Repeating information.
Sing-song voice.
Simple words and phrases.
Telegraphic Speech:- Simple, two-word statements with missing grammatical markers (e.g., "want ball," "mummy sleep").
Hollow Phrase Period: Using a single word to convey a richer meaning (e.g., "gone" for "daddy has gone").