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Child Language AcquisitionLIGN 170, Lecture 12
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Roadmap• Today – basic overview of early language
development in children
• Tuesday – theoretical issues with relevant studies and findings; bilingual language development
• Thursday - Interaction of developmental disorders and language development
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Today• Early language perception
• Early language production
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Language perception• At birth, infants
• already prefer the sounds of their mother’s voice
• can discriminate between mother’s native language and other languages
• Low-frequency language information heard in utero
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Discriminating sounds• Adult speakers have difficulty discriminating
between language sounds that are not phonemic contrasts in their native language
• Young infants do not demonstrate this difficulty initially:
• Can discriminate any contrasting phonetic sounds in the world’s languages
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• How can we possibly know that?
Are /s/ and /ç/ different sounds for you,
sweetie?
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Testing infants• Some helpful things infants do for
experimenters:
• They look longer at new stimuli compared to familiar stimuli
• They suck faster when exposed to new stimuli
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Testing infants• Habituation - dishabituation method
• Habituate infant on one stimulus
• Show new, different stimulus
• Does the infant react to the new stimuli as new?
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Testing infants• Habituation-dishabituation measures
• Time looks to stimulus
• High-Amplitude Sucking Paradigm
• Does the infant start sucking faster on a pacifier (that’s hooked up to a monitoring device)?
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Testing infants
ba ba ba ba ba ba.
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Testing infants
ba ba pa ba ba ba.
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Testing infants
ba ba pa ba ba ba.
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Testing infants
ba ba pa ba ba ba.
Can manipulate range of phonetic features,
like VOT
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Limited-time offer• However, infants can discriminate all phonemes for
a limited period of time:
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At 4 to 6 months• Non-native vowel discrimination goes away
• Vowels:
• One study looked at German infants
• Non-native vowel contrasts initially distinguished
• After 6 months this ability seemed to disappear
• Non-native sounds lumped into target language categories
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At 10 to 12 months• Non-native consonant discrimination goes
away
• Only native consonants are discriminated
• The (speech) perceptual system is being reorganized around these time periods (4-6 months & 10-12 months)
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Theory• Exposure and habituation to the sounds of
the target language impedes an infant’s ability to perceive phonetic contrasts that the native language does not make
• There are innate language abilities that are lost due to experience with a first language
• One is born with all language sounds available, but sound distinctions are lost because as sound system develops
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Something gained, something lost
• Loss of perceptual ability is related to development of phonemic categories for the first language - phonemic organization
• Discrimination is lost only for distinctions that are necessary for perception of one’s own language
• Example: need to loose aspiration distinction in English• /p/ is /p/ and /ph/
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Something gained, something lost
• Evidence from allophone perception
• 6- to 8-month-olds can discriminate between non-contrastive English allophones (e.g. /p/ and /ph/)
• 10-to-12-month-olds cannot
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Something gained, something lost
• Phonemic organization account predicts:
• People should be able to still discriminate between sounds in categories that aren’t present in the language
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Something gained, something lost• Discrimination of 3 different types of Zulu clicks:
• Apicodental: Tongue tip released from back of upper teeth (Tsk!)
• Alatoalveolar: Tongue tip and blade released from midline of hard palate behind alveolar ridge (Tock!)
• Lateral alveolar: Asymmetrical, tongue released from lateral portion of alveolar ridge (commonly used as a horse command)
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Something gained, something lost• English-speaking adults are easily able to tell these
apart, because they cannot be assimilated to any native phonemic categories
• Four groups of infants:
1) 6-8 months old
2) 8-10 month old
3) 10-12 months old
4) 12-14 months old
No difference between groups
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Something gained, something lost
• Phonemic organization account
• Click evidence supports idea that loss of discrimination at 10-12 months is the result of phonemic organization
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Responding to infant directed speech
• IDS, also called motherese & care-giver speech
• 7-week-old infants prefer infant-directed speech to adult-directed speech
• Regardless of gender of speaker
• Older infants show this preference as well, but younger infants are more responsive, both in terms of attention and affect
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Responding to infant directed speech
• Infants (4-5.5 months) prefer vocal features of infant-directed speech even with facial features held constant
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Responding to infant directed speech
• Undergraduates rate infants listening to IDS as more appealing
• Suggests that IDT may facilitate the establishment of an emotional relationship between adults and infants
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Responding to infant directed speech
• English- and Cantonese-learning infants (aged 4.5-9.0 mo)
• Both sets showed a robust attentional and affective preference for IDS over Adult-directed speak in Cantonese
• Preference for IDS apparently not language-specific
• (Almost) all cultures modify their speech for infants
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Content vs. intonation• What kinds of information can infants take
in?
• Intonational cues predominate up to 15 months
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Content vs. intonation
yes, yes, that’s good!
no, no, don’t touch!
yes, yes, that’s good!
no, no, don’t touch!
Positive intonation Negative intonation
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Content vs. intonation
yes, yes, that’s good!
no, no, don’t touch!
yes, yes, that’s good!
no, no, don’t touch!
Positive intonation Negative intonation
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At 8 months...• Intonational cues only
yes, yes, that’s good!
no, no, don’t touch!
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At 8 months...• Intonational cues only
yes, yes, that’s good!
no, no, don’t touch!
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At 15 months...• Fine when intonation matches content
yes, yes, that’s good!
no, no, don’t touch!
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At 15 months...• Really unhappy when intonation conflicts
with content
yes, yes, that’s good!
no, no, don’t touch!
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Content vs. intonation• What kinds of information can infants take
in?
• Intonational cues predominate up to 15 months
• Thereafter, semantic content can conflict with intonation
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Intonation & IDS• Prosody of IDS (but not adult-directed
speech) appears to be useful for segmenting the speech stream and for structural bracketing
• But IDS is not strictly needed -
• Infants are very good at detecting sound patterns and segmenting speech sounds in artificial speech
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Early Language Production
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Infant Speech Production• Return to the larynx
• At birth – the larynx is relatively high, and entire vocal tract is quite different from adult
• At 3 months – larynx begins to descend (won’t hit adult location until ~3 years old)
• At 4 months – the vocal tract begins to resemble an adult vocal tract
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Infant Speech Production• Because of their maturing vocal
tract, some sounds are genuinely difficult for young children to produce
• In particular, early vowels are often central, and only later go the extremes of [i] and [u].
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Stage I (0-8 weeks): Basic biological noises
• Reflexive
• Hunger, pain, and discomfort resulting in crying
• Vegetative
• Sucking, swallowing, coughing, burping
• Airstream mechanism and vocal folds used to produce pitch patterns in a rhythmical fashion
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Stage II (2 to 5 months): Cooing and laughing
• Cooing sounds develop alongside crying
• Quieter, lower-pitched, and more musical than crying
• Short vowel-like sounds preceded by a consonant-like sound produced at the back of the mouth
• No rhythm or intonational contour
• Laughing sounds emerge at around 4 months
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Stage III (5 to 7 1/2 months): Vocal play
• High-pitched CV-like segments over one second long, frequently repeated (longer in duration than cooing)
• Wider intonation ranges (high to low)
• Large inventory of consonant and vowel sounds, with periodic focus on particular places of articulation
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Stage IV (around 6 to 12 months): Babbling
• Features of babbling: • 1) Sounds are a subset of possible sounds found
in spoken language• 12 most frequent sounds in babbling = 95% of
all consonants heard in the infants’ subsequent language production
• 12 least frequent sounds (often fricatives, affricates, and liquids) = 5% of subsequent production
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Stage IV (around 6 to 12 months): Babbling
• Features of babbling: • 2) syllabic organization
• 3) reduplication • Same two sounds repeated: bababa papapapap
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Stage IV (around 6 to 12 months): Babbling
• Features of babbling: • 4) variegated babbling (follows reduplication –
around 12 months• Sounds change from syllable to syllable
(bamipabo)• 5) lack of meaning/reference• 6) rhythm and intonation reminiscent of speech • 7) continuity of phonetic form and syllabic type
between a child’s babbling and first words
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Stage IV (around 6 to 12 months): Babbling
• Features of babbling: • Less varied than vocal play
• More language-like in that it includes more language sounds
• Continues after speech begins (as late as 18 months)
• Considered part of linguistic development• Infants will often seem to “practice” when alone
• Suggests that babbling is related more to practicing speech sounds than communication
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Language environment & babbling
• Babbling of children in different language environments is not judged different by subjects
• However, studies of 10-month olds from different language backgrounds (French, Arabic, English, Cantonese) have shown that their production of vowels parallels differences in the adult vowels in each language.
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Language environment & babbling
• Toward the end of the 1st year, infants are also more likely to babble in ways that respect the distribution of syllable types within their language environment:
• French infants less likely to produce closed syllables (/bam/ vs. /ba ma/) than English-exposed infants.
(Adult French has a much lower occurrence of closed syllables than Adult English)
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Babbling & Sign Language
• Deaf infants also babble
• Often delayed (11-24 months) compared to hearing infants
• Often different in character (e.g. fewer different kinds of consonants)
• This indicates that exposure to a spoken language influences babbling
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Babbling & Sign Language
• Infants (hearing and deaf) who are exposed to sign language will babble manually:
• Circular motion of clasped hands, with index and middle fingers of right hand opening and closing
• Middle finger and thumb together, index finger pointed wrist flexes back and forth
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Stage V (9 to 18 months): Melodic utterance
• Variations in melody, rhythm, and intonation become a major feature toward the end of the first year
• Begins to sound language-like
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Phonological ErrorsConsistent phonological mistakes into and through year 2: 1) fricatives replaced by stops: see ==> tee2) velars replaced by alveolars: gone ==> dawn3) consonant clusters avoided: sky ==> Kai4) final consonants omitted: hat ==> ha5) unstressed syllables dropped: banana ==> nana6) consonant/vowel harmony: window ==> wow-wow7) liquids replaced by glides: lion ==> yion
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First words• Around 12 months
• Focus on words related to the here & now, concrete things:
• toys, clothes, food they eat
• Words for things that they can influence
• “ball” likely to be learned earlier than “chair” or “tree”
• They tend to give absolute meanings to words – so that an elephant is always “big”
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First words• Two kinds of errors kids can make:
• Overextensions – refer to all four legged animals as dogs
• Underextensions – refer to only the family dog as dog
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The mapping problem• Child says “What’s that?” and points to:
• So... how could this possibly go wrong?
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Potential problems• More than one referent could apply to word
• “Teacup”
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Potential problems• More than one word may apply to a referent
• tea?
• teacup?
• saucer?
• a drink?
• cup?
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Apparent solutions• Whole object bias – children prefer to attach
new labels to the whole object
• Mutual Exclusivity bias – children prefer to have only one name for an object
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Doing a lot with a little: Holo-phrases
• “Water!” could mean
• “Hey, that’s a glass of water!”
• “Hey, I want that glass of water!”
• “Hey, give me some water!”
• “Hey, look at that dog drink that water!”
• “Hey! why don’t you drink some of that water?”
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Early “multiword” utterances
• Children begin using single words around 12 months
• During 2nd year, two-word utterances begin
• In the meanwhile...
• Children will also pick up whole phrases as single words at the early (1- and 2- word) stages
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Also between one and two years...
• Gesture-word combinations
• Predicate-Agent Combinations
• A `Fall-down’ gesture (a palm flipping over in the air, an iconic gesture) while saying `mouse’
• Predicate-Patient Combinations
• Pointing at a box while saying `open’
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Summary• Birth
• Discriminating language sounds
• Preferring mother’s language
• Birth to 1 year
• Phoneme comprehension
• Babbling
• First words
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Summary• 1 to 2 years
• Gesture + Single Words
• Holo-phrases
• Two-word stage
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Midterm
0
8
16
24
32
40
80 70s 60s 50s Below
Score Distribution
Example Curve70-80: As60-69: Bs40-59: CsBelow: Ds
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Broken down by question
0
2
4
6
8
10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Average Score
0
31
62
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Number of times answered