phonemes

the basic sound units of language, we have around 50

phonemic perception

at birth, we can distinguish all of the phonemes, but eventually we lose some of them

babbling

starts at 3 months, speaking phonemes, and infants of deaf parents who use sign language tend to babble in signs

Conditioned/Anticipatory Head Turn

infants are conditioned to turn their heads upon hearing a sound unique to the one they had previously heard, this proved that they understood tone change at 6-8 months old, by 10-12 months old, they only recognized sounds from their language

Kuhl's research

American and Chinese kids, using anticipatory head turn - control group (tested on phonemes) - Group with a Chinese woman on TV (Children watched her read book on TV) - Live Chinese woman (Book read live to children weekly) Proved that language is social, as American infants who were in the live group were still able to hear mandarin phonemes at 10-12 months of age

Quine's rabbit problem

the idea that pointing to a rabbit can mean so many things, as rabbits have many parts

Built-in constraints when it comes to word-learning

words refer to whole objects, mutual exclusivity, direction of gaze, emotional response

mutual exclusivity in word learning

the idea that every object is represented by only one word, so if given an object with an unknown name, the one they don't know is likely the one they've never seen

Direction of gaze in word learning

children can tell where an adult is looking when referring to an unknown word/object

Nature/learning theory

behaviorist position (B. F. Skinner), children learn language by reinforcement

Challenges to nature/learning theory/behaviorist

parents reinforce meaning, not grammar novel constructions- they can state a combination of objects they've never seen over-regularizations: grammar rules are applied too broadly when first learned

Noarm Chomsky and Nature or Nativist Theory

we have a language acquisition device, so language is developed upon common grammar

generative system

language is formed by a few words, which can be combined to form an infante number of sentences

morphemes

the smallest units of meaning in a language

syntax

rules specifying how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, ect) can be combined

pragmatics

knowledge about how language is used

language is ______

species-universal, meaning that it is achieved by all typically developing children, as other species who may use a form of communication lack syntax

Brain-language lateralization

right-handed children often learn language in the left hemisphere, while the opposite is true of left-handed children those who learn sign-language learn in the left hemisphere of their brain

Language is _________ in a _______.

Developed; sensitive period

IDS

Infant-directed speech, slow exaggerated speech, paired with exaggerated facial expressions, used across cultures is preferred by infants

Prosody

characteristic rhythm and patterns within a language, the first step of language acquisition

each language has it's own _____

prosody

Categorical preception

the perception of phonemes as belonging to categories

VOT

Voice onset time, the length of time between when the air passes through the lips, and when the vocal cords start vibrating - VOT changes by phonemes, which is how we can detect different phonemes

Word segmentation

discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech, which infants learn this for their native language

distributional properties of speech

in any language, certain sounds are more likely to occur together than others, and infants are sensitive to this

Children can listen for their name as young as _____.

4.5 months, hearing their name and then an object mentioned can help them to learn the other word

babbling

6-10 months, shows that an infant is ready to learn

Steven Pinker

Children can put things into sentences, even if it's new content, they have the basic grammar to form sentences, and pluralize/put things in past tense, even if they are new things

Connectionist/Statistical learning

nothing needs to be built in for language, instead we learn patterns and regularities, since computer simulations can even learn rules like this

Neville & Bavelier (1999)

Bilinguals and where language processing takes place the brain has the most plasticity for grammar learning of another language at a young age, so at older ages, they aren't as good at grammar in foreign languages

Johnson & Newport (1989)

Korean immigrants, kids 3-7 years old when they started learning English learned as much as a native, while anyone older's brain was too specialized no matter how long they'd been in the US

Representation issue

young children (2.5 and younger) cannot let a smaller scale representing something larger

Deloche et al (2010)

"Do babies learn from baby media?" Wanted to have internal and external validity, longitudinal study 12-18 months four groups, children were pretested and postested on 25 words - some received a video with parent interaction - Video with no parent interaction - Parents taught content live - Control with no video or interaction only the parent teaching group had statistical significance, proving that babies don't learn from baby media also proved parent testimonials don't work

How do children learn to listen?

Through parent-infant games, like peek-a-boo, and parental response to babbling

Early word recognition

at 6 months, infants can recognize words, like "momma"

Overextension

Overly broad interpretation of the meaning of a word; children may overextend when they want to express more than they initially have words for

Underexpression

Overly narrow interpretation of a word's meaning; children may underexpress when they want to express more than they initially have words for

Children have a vocabulary of around 50 words at

18 months, they learn from parents talking to them and labeling things for them

Cross-situational word learning

determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels, meanings, and contexts

syntactic bootstrapping

using grammatical structure to infer the meaning of a new word

Sentence forming starts

by the end of year 2, but they understand word combinations around 17 months old

Telegraphic speech

children's two-word utterances that leave out non-essential words

At first, conversations are

egocentic

collective monologue

conversations children have that nothing to do with previous sentences

Dialogic reading

asking children questions while reading that cannot be answered with a simple pointing on the page, which improves kid's vocabulary

Private speech

talking to oneself, Piaget said it was egocentric, Vygotsky said it helps

Berk Study 1

found that children K-2's private speech was rarely egocentric, but helped them go through steps while teachers were gone

Berk study 2

Similar to study 1, but focused on 2nd grade math, found that with more skill, students had less audible private speech

Dual representation

treating a symbolic artifact both as a real object and as a symbol other than it's self; like the small room representing the big room in the Snoopy study

by age ________, students start to draw more meaningful things

3-4