HESP 400 Exam 2 Material
From First Words to Sentences - 3/12/24
Grammatical Development
Cookie
All-gone cookie
Cookie gone
I ate my whole cookie, Mommy!
Once children have about 50 words, they start putting two words together
This is the beginning of grammatical development
Verb phrase elaboration:
Negative sentences
Question formation
Compound/complex sentences
Tracing Grammatical development: Negative sentences
Negative marker “no” adds linguistic complexity. Where child can only produce two-word utterances, say when adds "no” something else is deleted.
More cookie.
No peas.
But not: No more peas.
What is the big change from about 2-4.5 years of age?
Then
No more juice
no-no go night-night
no want bear
Then
I not go bed
I no like spinach
Me no do it
And then
I didn't do it.
Suzy doesn't like me
Finally
Johnny wasn't wearing a hat.
I didn't want to go home
The dog couldn't catch him.
No peas (2 words; earliest in development)
No more kisses (no subject)
I no want spinach (subject but no auxiliary)
She can't swim (auxiliary and contracted negative)
I'm not going swimming with my stupid brother (more complex; so latest in development)
Tracing grammatical development: Acquisition of questions
Yes/No questions
Yes/No Question = formed by reversing the subject of the sentence and the auxiliary
Require a Yes or No response
Mommy is happy.
Is Mommy happy?
Fido wants to go home.
Does Fido want to go home?
Wh-Questions
Formed by inverting the subject and the auxiliary and by placing a wh-word (who, what, where, when, why) at the beginning
Requires a more complex response.
Dinner is served at 5 pm.
When is dinner served?
I want to go home.
Why do you want to go home?
Here's an example of a child learning to use questions in English.
First:
Doggie?
Mommy bye-bye?
All-gone juice?
Whassat?
Next:
What that doggie doing?
You are going to the store?
Where Jane is?
What you doing that for?
Finally:
Are you going to store, Mommy?
What are you doing in there?
Are you mad at me?
Why are you breaking that?
Is that a new toy?
What is the big change that occurs at approximately age 2.5 to 4 to help this occur?
Going to school; Children get the opportunity to conversate in this environment
Daddy mad? (no verb)
What big boy doing? (wh-word but no auxiliary verb and no subject-verb inversion)
Are you riding that bike? (subject-verb inversion)
When are you coming to my house? (wh-word and subject-verb inversion)
An example of a child learning to use compund/complex sentences in English
First:
I like cookies and I like milk.
I got up and I ate breakfast.
Mommy drove me and Daddy drove Johnny
Next:
I eat candy and my tummy hurts
Johnny fell down and he hurt hisself.
Susie hit me and I don't like her.
Finally
I like girls that are nice.
She saw that I peeked during the game
The one who is last loses her marbles.
What is the big change you notice from about 4 to 6 years?
My dolly likes sparkles and she likes cupcakes. (Unrelated clauses in compound sentence)
I fell and I got a boo-boo (Casually related compound sentence)
I know who ate my cookie. (Complex sentence)
My friends who come to my birthday party are good guys. (relative clause)
Errors Children Make
No I amn't.
All my friends are childs.
My feets smell.
I always brush my tooths.
I failed down and got a booboo.
I goed home with Ryan.
My big brother broked his arm.
How would you describe these errors?
Children have never heard adults say this, so where do they come from?
Over-generalization errors
Frequently, correct production precedes incorrect ones.
Child says fell for three months, and then, all of a sudden starts saying falled
Child says children for three months, and then all of a sudden starts saying “childs”
U-Shaped Development
Children's grammar gets worse before it gets better
Over-generalization errors occur after the period during which the child produced the irregular forms
Correct → Incorrect → Correct
Different from other aspects of linguistic development.
This is not regression!
This is abstraction of a general pattern; application of this pattern across the board
Critical mass theory
Children need about 50 items in their productive vocabulary to make a generalization
Children start over-generalizing regular past tense when they have about 50 verbs in their productive vocabulary
Certain forms of plural and past tense are acquired earlier than others.
These forms are more frequent in the language.
Plural: -s, -z, acquired before -es
Past tense: -t, -d, acquired before -ed
Demonstrates interaction between lexical and morphological development.
Over-generalization and individual differences
Children do not over-generalize all irregular forms
Not all children over-generalize to the same degree.
More over-generalization among precocious talkers
Less over-generalization (more deletion) among late talkers
Over-generalization = grammatical rule that a child is applying productively
Experimental tests of rule knowledge
Children as young as 4 years of age knew:
plural of wug is wugs
past tense of blick is blicked
Lexical Items vs. Grammatical Rules
At some point, children stop over-generalizing
Irregular forms of verbs and plurals = WORDS
Regular forms of verbs and plurals = MORPHOLOGICAL RULES
To sum up:
Complex linguistic structures are acquired through predictable sequences
Children's over-generalization errors and experimental work demonstrate how children learn grammatical rules.
Lexical and morphological development are inter-connected.
Early Word Learning - First 50 Words: 3/26/24
Stages of Word Learning
Triggering
Child hears unfamiliar word
Compare to familiar words
Word form (sounds) doesn't match any familiar words
Lexical configuration
Creation of new semantic and phonological representations and a mapping between them
Lexical engagement
Word is integrated into lexicon
Interacts with semantic and phonological neighbors
Leixcal consolidation and engagement take place over time. Need many opportunities to hear and say word to get engagement.
Early Vocabulary
Comprehension before production
By 5 months: babies respond to their name
By 6-9 months: children begin to understand many frequent words
By 18 months: receptive vocabulary = 126-396 words
Compare that to productive vocabulary
12 months: 0-111 words
18 months: 1-365 words
Why does comprehension precede and exceed production?
Is this true for all children?
Yes for typically developing children and children with some disorders
No for children with autism spectrum disorders
Single Word Stage
Protoword or PCF
Consistent relationship between sound and meaning
Often associated with gesture
First Word:
relatively consistent phonetic shape that is related to adult form
consistently related to non-linguistic context
First words are learned slowly.
“First words are tentative, fragile"
Child may learn a word or two, then forget a word, then learn another two words.
Later on, children start learning words rapidly, but not during the early part of the single word period.
With first words, there is a strong association between word and object/word and action/word and event
Early words are very bound to the non-linguistic context
This seems to be how they are stored in memory.
Single word stage runs roughly from these early words to the “vocabulary spurt” or “naming explosion”
Child starts producing words at about 12-14 months
Vocabulary spurt occurs at about 18-20 months
Vocabulary spurt is when rate of word learning rapidly increases.
In between First Word (FW) and Vocabulary Spurt (VS), words go from being:
bound to specific context
then words become associated w/ more generalized concepts of objects and events
finally, words become associated w/ each other
Early Word Learning
Children start to produce words around 12 months
First words emerge very slowly over several months
Earliest stages of word learning:
Child learns arbitrary associations between words and objects or events
Relatively consistent phonetic shape
Typical Early Vocabulary
Carlos’ early vocabulary (4 words)
Malika's early SW vocabulary:
bye-bye
uh-oh
shhh (only when someone was sleeping)
up (to get out of a high chair)
duck (in response to an picture in a book)
mama
dada
kuh (when holding a cookie)
Form of Single Word Utterances
About 40 percent of early words are nouns
Phonology:
early words usually have consonant-vowel (CV) or CVCV (reduplicated) or CVCV composition =
Phonetic preferences and avoidances in very early word learning
Contain high frequency sound sequences
children prefer words that contain sounds that they can produce. (first 50 words)
Semantics: Early semantic categories
Functional relations (talking about an object with itself or its class)
existence: (labeling of objects) Child's attention is gained by an object and she notes that it exists
recurrence: child notes that an object appears after an absence
“again”
non-existence-disappearance: child notes that an object is not present or has disappeared
“all-gone", “no more", “oh no”
rejection/denial: child opposes an action or refuses an object (rejection). Negates a prior utterance (denial)
“no”
possession: mark that an object is associated with a particular person
"mine”
attribution: mark attributes, characteristics or differences between similar objects
“big/small, soft/hard
Early semantic categories: verb relations
Verb relations: talking about relations between objects and relations between people and objects
action and locative action:
Locative action refers to movement when the goal of the movement is a change in location of a person or an object
point and say "there”, “here”, “gone”
action refers to movement relationships among people and objects when the goals is NOT to change locations
eat, sleep
Protoverbs: words such as prepositions used in a verb-like context
on, in, off, out
Use: pragmatics functions of early words
What is the difference between semantic function and pragmatics functions?
Semantic: what the words/sentences mean
Pragmatic: Using language for a social purpose (social skills)
comment: identify or describe objects, persons, events
regulate: utterance which serves to regulate other and requires a response
focus attention “look”
direct actions “up”
obtain object “Cup”
obtain response/obtain information “Daddy”
obtain participation “Play”
protest or rejection: object to actions of others/refusal of objects “No”
routines: stereotyped utterances “bye-bye”, “so big”, “oh no", “moo moo”
respond: respond to question of another “All gone!”
Vocabulary Spurt
Also known as the word spurt, word explosion, naming explosion
Lexical development starts slowly
Then, when children have around 50 words (around 18 months) = sudden shift
Word-learning rate sharply increases
Four explanations for Vocabulary Spurt
Cognitive Explanation
Developments in cognition at around this time:
stage 6 object permanence
mean-ends behavior
Categorization: spontaneous exhaustive sorting
Pragmatic Explanation
Children learn words for purposes of social interactions
Change in communicative function of single word (SW) speech at VS from regulating/protesting to commenting.
Linguistic Explanation
50 words is what a child needs to figure out how the lexicon works
50 words is enough to get the "naming insight” = realization that everything has a name
50 words is enough to start using the mutual-exclusivity constraint
There isn't a discontinuity in development
few words are easy to learn, a few are difficult, but most are in between;
Toddlers are exposed to many words each day. Gradual acquisition of words.
Words are learned in parallel. That is, children can build partial knowledge for many words at the same time.
Easy words = less exposure needed, less time to learn needed
More difficult words = more exposure needed, more time to learn needed
Result: Multiple exposures to more difficult words until hit a point where they result in learning
Children show increased rates of word-learning, but there is no fundamental change in the mechanisms of acquisition
Children with <50 words are worse at learning new words in the lab than children with >50 words.
Individual differences in vocabulary size and rate of growth
Much variability in expressive vocabulary size at age 2
Late talkers (bottom 10%): <50 words
Precocious talkers (top 10%): 500-650 words
You want a two-year old child to have 50-200 words in their vocabulary.
What factors account for this variability?
Environmental factors
Endogenous factors
Environmental factors: amount and quality of input
Related to SES, caregiver education level, caregiver responsiveness
Linguistic input related to vocabulary size and growth
Factors related to nutrition, lead poisoning, etc
Endogenous factors
General processing speed
Attention and memory skills
Hearing impairment
Language impairment
Linguistic input: 30 million word gap
42 children (Hart & Risley, 1995)
One-hour recordings
Monthly for three years
“The most important ingredient in the recipe for a child's future academic success is the sheer volume of talk that the child's parents have with the child” - Todd Risley
Problem with Hart & Risley
The original study had just 42 families
Some argue that the research shames poor people and has a negative racial connotation
The results can not be replicated
It's not actually 30 million; more like 4 million and it can vary.
Linguistic input: Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA)
16-hour recordings
Computer-generated reports (10-16 hours)
Adult Word Count
Child Vocalizations
Conversational Turn Count
Auditory Environment
Development of semantic-lexical networks
The more words the child knows, the more difficult it is to store all of them on an individual basis
Vocabulary system is organized around commonalities between words
Organization around similarities in meaning = semantic network
A shift in vocabulary organization
At around 7: Semantic networks become organized around similarities in meaning (taxonomic organization)
Word Association Task
Before age 7: responses to cues are related thematically.
Eat - ice-cream
After age 7: responses to cues are related taxonomically
Eat - drink
Development of networks = efficient way to store words in the mental lexicon
The Whys and Hows of Language Sampling - 3/28/24
Pros and Cons of Language Sampling
PROS
Standardized tests don't provide information in a natural context
CONS
Time consuming - Need a minimum of 50 lines
Need a representative sample of the child's language
A language sample is more ecologically valid for young children than standardized testing
What can you examine with a language sample?
Phonology
Semantics
Syntax
Pragmatics
Any aspect of language production
Step 1: Collect a representative sample of a child's language
Record child in a natural context with a familiar person
Potential problems can include:
Unnatural clinical settings
Caregiver may try to elicit more language by doing things and drilling child with questions
Step 2: Transcribe the language sample
This is the most time-consuming step!
Programs that can help:
CLAN
SALT
Use a digital recorder or record with a smart phone
CLAN: can see the waveform as you transcribe so you can easily listen to something over again
Step 3: Decide on the analysis
This will depends on what your purpose is
Research: What are you studying?
Clinical: What is your concern about this child
Programs that can help with analysis:
CLAN (KidEval)
SALT (similar)
These programs can do standard analyses of NDW, TNW, MLU, acquisition of morphemes. They are also easy to code if you want to study something else (e.g. pragmatics, dialect, etc.) Can also study parent-child interaction.
Step 4: Compare child's performance to developmental norms
What are you examining?
Is information available on typical children's performance?
There is information on lexical diversity, MLU, acquisition of morphemes. No information on much else
Brown's 14 Morphemes
Sequence of Acquisition
Frequency in parental input?
No
Most frequent morpheme (articles) not earliest acquired
Early-acquired morphemes (prepositions) not high frequency
Semantic complexity (number of meanings)
Earliest forms 1 meaning
Progressive -ing - temporary duration
Plural - number
Past tense - earliness
Later forms 2 meanings
Copula be, 3rd person singular - number and earliness
Latest form 3 meanings
Auxillary - number, earliness, temporary duration
Syntactic complexity (number of rules)
Earliest forms only lexical categories (nouns, verbs)
-ing added to verb - progressive
-s added to noun - plural
‘s added to noun - possessive
Later forms involve functional categories
Inflection - tense (past, 3rd person singular, auxillary)
Mean Length of Utterance
MLU = mean length of utterance = total morphemes / total utterances
Ex: Preschools = 3 morphemes / 1 utterance, MLU = 3
Morpheme = smallest unit of meaning
Often better way to measure syntactic development than age
MLU generally increases with age, but great variability at each age
18 mo - 1.0 - 1.6
24 mo - 1.5 - 2.2
30 mo - 2.0 - 3.1
36 mo - 2.5 - 3.9
42 mo - 3.0 - 4.6
48 mo - 3.5 - 5.3
Counting Morphemes
False starts or repetitions (dysfluency) - do NOT count
Exception: reception for emphasis
Compounds, proper nouns, ritualized reduplications - 1 morpheme
e.g. Winnie the Pooh
Gonna, hafta, wanna (catenatives) - 1 morpheme
Auxillary + main verb - 2 morphemes
Can eat; have eaten; must eat; is eating
Inflections
Regular inflections count as separate morpheme: mother's, boys, walks, walked, walking - all 2 morphemes each
Irregular forms - went, feet, has - 1 morpheme
Over-regulation - mouses, eated - 2 morphemes
Contractions - 2 morphemes
Don't, Can't, won't, etc
Practice
How many morphemes?
He / start / to / fall / down / all / the / bee / s / and / they / come / out 13
(The) the / dog / barked 4
and / then / the / bee / house / is / down 7
and / then / the / bee / s / they / wanna / (get all those all those d*) get / that / dog 10
and / then / the / kid / said / “Frog” 6
What is the MLU for this short sample? 40/5 = 8
Which of Brown's morphemes do you see?
Plural, regular past, irregular past, article, copula
Also context for 3rd person, possibly possessive
Over-regularization: 4 stages of inflectional development
Stage 1: No inflection, correct production of irregular form (went)
Stage 2: Start to learn rule for regular form (walked)
Stage 3: Over-regularization errors on irregular forms (*goed)
i.e. overuse of regular rule
Stage 4: Mastery of correct regular and irregular forms (walked, went)
irregular forms appear early but are mastered later
Counting Utterances
Young children do not always use complete sentences, so how can you tell?
Topic shift
Intonation
Pauses
What to do with endless “and”
New sentence / line every time a child says “and”
From First Words to Sentences - 4/2/24
KidSpeak
The childs in my class were laughing
My feets are itchy
He goed to the store
My sister felled down yesterday
A 3-year-old says the above utterances. What kind of mistake is he making (across all four utterances)?
Acquisition of Syntax and Morphology
Cookie
All-gone cookie
Cookie gone
My cookie is gone, Mommy!
Once children have about 50 words, they start putting two words together
This is the beginning of grammatical development
Syntactic Development
Usually begins during the child's 2nd year
However, immense variability across children
Different paths for comprehension and production
Comprehension of grammar at the single-word stage
Around 12 months, children prefer to listen to correct word order
Around 17 months, children can use word-order to interpret sentences.
"Cookie Monster is tickling Big Bird"
“Big Bird is tickling Cookie Monster”
Same with learning syntax as with learning words:
comprehension precedes and exceeds production
Comprehension of grammar at the two-word stage
Children respond better to well-formed commands to poorly-formed commands
Throw me the ball
Throw ball
Children perform better when instructions are grammatical
Find the dog for me
Find was dog for me
But their own productions are not grammatical
Me ride
Mommy cookie
More book
How Do Children Develop Pragmatic Language? - 4/9/24
Communicative Competence
Linguistic competence:
ability to produce and understand well-formed meaningful utterances
Communicative competence:
ability to use language appropriately in social interaction
Pragmatic knowledge
knowledge of conventions that govern language use
Discourse knowledge
use of language in conversation
Sociolinguistic knowledge
knowledge of how language use varies as a function of socio-linguistic variables
Incredibly important and..
can be difficult to acquire for some children
Pragmatic Knowledge
The same utterance can have more than one pragmatic function
Those cookies sure look good
The same pragmatic function can be expressed by more than one utterance.
Function (request - asking for a cookie)
Speech Act Theory: All utterances perform an act
Each speech act has three components
Locution (locutionary act)
the linguistic form
Illocutionary force (or act)
the intended function behind the words
Perlocution (perlocutionary act)
the effect of the words on the listener
Success of Speech Acts
Occurs when communication was successful, not when the perlocutionary act = illocutionary act
Communication is successful
-even though the goal was not attained
Often the illocutionary act has to be inferred
Communication is not successful
Response is perfectly legitimate, but
Intent (illocutionary act) was not inferred correctly
Factors in the Development of Pragmatic Competence
Child-internal factors:
Infants seek out social communicative interactions.
These interactions are encouraged by caregivers
Social factors:
Use of social words is incorporated into routines from very early on
Social play from infancy
Children can take turns in non-verbal interactions before they can take turns in conversation
Discourse Competence
Discourse:
More than a single utterance
Between two or more people
Conversational Skills
Initiating
Turn-taking
Establishing reference
Terminating
Development of Conversational Skills
Children respond to talk with actions
Then, children learn to respond to talk with talk
In general, children are better at the non-linguistic than the linguistic conventions of conversation:
E.g. turn-taking vs. topic maintenance
By about 5 years of age, children can consistently:
Repair miscommunication
Repetition
Revision
Substitution
Environment/Parental Input
2nd-born children have better developed conversational skills than 1st-born children
Success of communication with a child to a large degree depends on the conversational partner.
Parental speech contains a lot of questions
Parents who maintain children's topic are more likely to receive a response from the child
How do children learn to converse?
Adults' role: model turn-taking, topic maintenance, etc
For example, children first learn to maintain their own topic, and then learn to maintain someone else's topic
Young children can maintain topic better with adult than with peers? Why is this?
Conversations are demanding:
in terms of linguistic and nonlinguistic abilities
Cognitive development
Better cognitive skills result in more mature conversational skills
Linguistic development
Better linguistic skills result in more mature conversational skills
Developmental of conversational skills: Cohesion
Staying on topic makes a conversation cohesive
Cohesion devices:
linguistic devices that are used to link utterances in conversation
develops around 3 to 4 years
makes utterances contingent on one another for meaning, providing for continuity in discourse
Anaphoric reference: the use of pronouns to refer to the previously mentioned referent
Speaker 1: Where is Mary?
Speaker 2: She is outside
Grammatical ellipsis: redundant parts from preceding sentences are deleted in the following sentence
Speaker 1: I like green beans.
Speaker 2: I don't.
Conversations between children
From very early, children have conversations with each other
Young children prefer to initiate interactions with adults
4 year olds can engage in successful conversations with each other
Ability to engage in conversation depends on the context
Development of Sociolinguistic Competence: Style-switching
Particular settings and conversational partners involve specific styles of language (also called registers)
Language use is adjusted based on many factors
Child must learn to shift registers depending on these factors
Development of sociolinguistic competence: Register
4-year-old children can adjust their speech to conversational partners of different ages/status
Speech to infants
Speech to 2-year-olds
Speech to adults
Speech in pretend play
Young children can use both direct and indirect requests
The type of request used often depends on the status of the listener
Young children can modify the style of requests depending on the age/status of the listener:
Direct vs. indirect requests;
addition of please;
questions
Influences on Sociolinguistic Development
Cognitive skills
must pay attention to aspects of the social situation
knowledge of scripts
Linguistic skills
indirect requests are typically more linguistically complex
more challenging for children with language delays/disorders
Parental feedback
Parents are very good at giving children active instructions when it comes to social norms.
Say please
Don't interrupt
Different social norms:
Children should be seen and not heard or Tell grandma what you learned in school today
Different social norms
Be sure to be quiet at the doctor's and do what she says or
Do you have any questions you want to ask the doctor today?
Summary
To become competent speakers of a language, children must:
acquire the social and cultural conventions that govern language use,
learn to use language in longer segments
learn to adjust its use to different social situations
Preschool children have begun to acquire pragmatic, discourse, and sociolinguistic skills
These skills continue to develop during the elementary school years
There are complex interactions among cognitive, linguistic, social, and cultural factors that shape the development of communicative competence.
In order for children to become fluent learners, morphology, phonology and syntax is needed.
Intro to Language & Literacy - 4/16/24
What does research say?
Phonological awareness is critical for learning to read. Students with a weaker foundation in pre-literacy skills are more likely to struggle as they learn to read.
These skills include:
Oral language
knowledge of letters
awareness of the sound structure of words
a basis in the mechanics of reading
the overall motivation to read
Brain Mechanics
Consider what your brain must do each time you see a word:
First your brain must recognize a complex pattern. It must then convert this image to a sound as you hear the word that was printed on the page. The brain must then match this sound with its meaning. What's more, this whole process must occur in the blink of an eye, over and over again just for you to fluidly read a page of text.
The ability to match a sound with its meaning is a process that is built over years of experience with language. But the ability to decode printed symbols, or letter, into sounds requires substantial training and practice.
Genetics
Some of the traits written in our genes that make it more difficult to learn to read run in families. if learning to read was slow and effortful for parents as a child, there is a chance that their child will also find reading more difficult than their peers.
Outside factors may impact how a child learns. Difficulty with reading is not tied to intelligence. Likewise, children who struggle are not simply lazy. Many brilliant minds, like Michael Phelps, Tom Cruise, and Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, have struggled with reading skills but have achieved incredible things
Research is very clear
Curriculums that combine oral language sound-letter relationships and phoneme "play” benefit all children, even children at risk for reading disabilities
Phoneme "play” involves breaking apart the sounds that makeup words and then blending those sounds to make new words. Playing games that emphasize how lip movements make different sounds and how sounds combine to make different words can help children learn this skill.
Phonological Awareness Instruction
Reading to and with children is one of the best tools parents and teachers have
Not only do books with rhymes help practice the sounds of words and letters. Books also expand vocabulary. They often include words that a child doesn't hear in conversation. Talking about the stories you read in books can strengthen a child's narrative skills
Reading together and practicing these skills will strengthen a child's pre-literacy toolkit, giving them a strong foundation even before they set foot in their kindergarten classroom.
Culturally Responsive literacy Instruction - Make Connections
Its important to help children make connections when reading together. This not only helps improve how well your little one comprehends the story, it can also deepen their vocabulary knowledge
Connection to self: these are the connections made between your child and his/her personal experiences
Connections to Previously Read Stories: These are the connections made between the book currently being read and one previously read
Connections to the World: These are the connections made between a child and their world. An example of this would be to go on a mini field trip to a museum that has an exhibit on astronomy after reading both books on stars
Children who develop a language variety within their homes and communities are called bidialectal.
Bilingual Language Development - 4/23/24
Who is considered bilingual?
Bilingual: an individual who uses/needs two (or more) languages to succeed in the environment at any point in the lifespan
Balanced Bilingual
L1 - Dominant or L2-Dominant Bilingual
L1 = first language
L2 = second language
Bilingual Language Development
Bilingual IS NOT monolingual + Bilingual
Sequential vs. Simultaneous
Simultaneous bilinguals
both languages before age 3
Sequential bilinguals
L1 from birth, L2 after age
Language Use and Exposure
L1 spoken and heard in home, L2 spoken and heard in school
Both L1 and L2 are spoken and heard in home
1-parent, 1-language
Parents each speak both
Parent speaks in L1, child answers in L2
Dominance shift
Attrition - loss of L1
Vocabulary Acquisition
Reach 50 words by around the same age (18 months), if count words from both languages
Distributed vocabulary
Translation equivalents - about 30% of vocabulary in toddlers
Lexical gaps - only know word in one language
Tend to score lower than monolinguals on vocabulary tests, but are they really impaired
Morpho-Syntactic Development
Same structures, but the rate or sequence may differ due to cross-linguistic influence
Code-Switching
Code-switching: the alternation of two languages within a single conversation, sentence, or phrase
Rule-governed
L2 Learners
English Language Learners
0-6 mo: Pre-production - “silent period”
6-12 mo: early production
1-3 mo: speech emergence
3-5 yrs: intermediate fluency
5-7 yrs: advanced fluency
Types of L2 Proficiency
BICS: Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills
CALP: Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency
Can You Turn a Language “OFF"?
Stroop task - words presented in different colors
Name the color of the ink and ignore the word
Bilingual version
Words in L1
Name ink color in L2
If you can turn off L1, this should be easier than doing the whole task in one language
If both languages are always “on”, you should still get interference in the bilingual version
Managing 2 Languages
A variety of studies suggest both languages are always “on”
Consequences of this constant need to manage conflict?
More tip-of-the-tongue experiences
Slower naming, even in the first language
But potential for cognitive benefits
Cognitive Consequences of Bilingualism
Recognition of abstract relationship between words and objects and role of social context
Potentially less reliance on mutual exclusivity as a word-learning mechanism
Increased experience managing competition between two languages may help with executive function more generally