Language

NOTES – Language:

 

Steps to Master Language:

1.    Recognize your own language: Identifying the patterns and sounds specific to one's language.

2.    Recognize words (segment speech): Distinguishing where words begin and end in continuous speech.

3.    Understand and remember word meanings: Connecting sounds to their corresponding meanings.

4.    Extend word meanings to new items: Generalizing known words to new objects.

5.    Speak words: Vocalizing words to communicate.

6.    Combine words (sentences): Forming basic sentences.

7.    Understand/use syntax: Mastering sentence structure and grammar.

 

Learning and Memory in Language:

  • Association: Linking sounds with words and meanings.

  • Generalization: Applying learned words to new contexts and speakers.

  • Recognition: Identifying objects and retrieving the correct name.

  • Retrieval: Recalling words, sounds, and meanings.

 

Patterns in Language Learning:

  • Domain-general skills: Language acquisition leverages broader cognitive skills, not domain-specific mechanisms.

  • Pattern recognition: Learning the patterns of sounds (e.g., which sounds combine to form a word) and grammar (e.g., which word types fit together).

 

Language Acquisition Milestones:

  • Recognizing own language: From birth.

  • Cooing: 1–4 months.

  • Babbling: 4–10 months.

  • First word: 10–14 months.

  • First sentence: 18–30 months.

  • Longer sentences 30+ months.

  • Understanding words: Around 4–8 months.

  • Vocabulary spurt: 16–20 months.

  • Using grammar: 36+ months.

 

 

Language Comprehension vs. Production:

  • Comprehension: Understanding what is said (develops earlier).

  • Production: Speaking or expressing language (comes later).

 

Vocabulary Growth and Socio-Economic Status (SES):

  • Vocabulary size differs based on SES:

    • High and middle SES families are generally more talkative, leading to faster word learning (Hart & Risley, 1995).

    • Low SES children have a delayed vocabulary, producing fewer words by 18 months and less complex sentences (Huttenlocher et al., 2010).

    • By 24 months, there is a 6-month language gap between high and low SES children (Fernald et al., 2013).

 

Recognizing Language and Cadence:

  • Fetal hearing: Starts around 15-18 weeks.

  • Infants prefer familiar sounds, such as their mother's voice or their native language(s).

  • Cadence: The rhythm of speech; infants can recognize and recall cadence, as shown in DeCasper & Spence’s (1987) study where newborns preferred stories heard during the last six weeks of pregnancy.

 

Speech Segmentation:

  • Challenge: There are no clear breaks between words in spoken language (e.g., "opportunityisnowhere").

  • How infants find word breaks:

    • Pitch, pauses, and statistical cues (the likelihood that certain sounds follow one another).

    • Transitional probability: Infants as young as 8 months use this to identify words from a continuous speech stream (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996).

 

Infant-Directed Speech (IDS):

  • Characteristics of IDS that help infants learn language:

    • Higher pitch.

    • Wider pitch range.

    • Exaggerated intonation.

    • Simpler structure.

    • Slower pace.

    • Repetition.

  • IDS aids segmentation by making it easier for infants to isolate words, and it is universally present across languages (Thiessen, Hill, & Saffran, 2005).

 

Child-Directed Speech (CDS):

  • Older children: CDS continues to aid in vocabulary acquisition for older children as well, leading to larger vocabularies (Schwab & Lew-Williams, 2016).

  • Adults: Even adults benefit from CDS when learning a new language (Ma et al., 2020).

 

Recognizing Words:

  • At 4.5 months: Infants recognize their own names (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995).

  • At 6 months: Infants understand words like "mommy" and "daddy" (Tincoff & Jusczyk, 1999).

  • At 6-9 months: Infants begin to understand familiar words for objects (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012).

 

Early Word Recognition and ASD Screening:

  • ASD detection: Early word recognition behaviours, such as recognizing one's name at 9 months, can help prescreen for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Infants who show atypical patterns in this behaviour may be diagnosed earlier (Miller et al., 2017).

 

Success in Speech Processing:

  • Both monolingual and bilingual children develop language similarly, though small differences in microstructure may provide insights into learning processes (Werker et al., 2009).

 

Categorization and Language Learning:

  • Categories in early language: Most input infants receive pertains to categories (e.g., nouns).

    • Children tend to learn words that correspond to solid, shape-based categories (Samuelson & Smith, 1999).

  • Shape bias: Children show a shape bias in word learning, associating new words with object shapes rather than materials. This bias can be trained through targeted vocabulary training (Samuelson, 2002).

 

 

 

 

Influence of Language on Categorization:

  • Language can shape how children categorize objects, as shown in studies where presenting new words affected how infants classified novel objects.