PSYC2002 Study Guide - Final Guide: Mutual Exclusivity, Phoneme, 18 Months
Language
• An arbitrary system of symbols and rules that encode meaning for the purposes of communication.
• Why is it arbitrary - with rare exceptions, words (=symbols) bear no resemblance to their referents.
Critical Period
• Children appear to learn second languages more successfully than adults do. However, it is not clear
what this means.
• One possibility is that native-like attainment in language is impossible after a certain age, a so-called
critical period, because of maturational reasons.
• Another possibility is that it gradually becomes more difficult to learn a second language because of the
influence of the first language.
• Less is More Hypothesis: perceptual and information processing limitations in children an advantage in
acquisition.
• Johnson & Newport (1989) - 46 Korean and Chinese speakers who arrived in the US at varying ages.
o Administered a grammaticality judgement test of 260 items.
o Sharp decline
o Problems - didn't treat age as continuous but grouped it, and only 46 participants.
Pre-Verbal Period
• Acquisition begins well before children begin to talk.
• Newborns show a preference for the prosody of their native language.
• Children are born with the ability to perceive (and produce) every possible phoneme used in the world's
languages.
• Loose this ability following native language exposure.
Categorical
Speech
Perception
• Phonemes are the smallest unit of sound in a language that can distinguish between words.
o Eg: The first consonants in doe and toe are different phonemes.
o Eg: The vowels in write and ride, while different, are not distinct phonemes. Rather they are
allophones.
• Speech is continuous; just like the colour spectrum.
• Infants, like adults, perceive phonemes as categories.
Speech
Segmentation
• The speech stream is continuous: whosaprettybaby?
• How can children segment the continuous speech stream to learn words and phrases?
• Lexical stress - languages tend to prefer certain stress patterns:
o English: disyllabic words stress first syllable, eg: O-pen, CLI-mate.
o Italian: stress penultimate syllable, eg: a-PER-ta, CLI-ma.
• Infants attend to the statistics of the speech stream to identify word boundaries.
• prettybaby → prett / ybaby, pre / ttybaby, pretty / baby
• Transitional probabilities between syllables could act as a cue.
• Saffran et al. (1996) - played synthesised speech to infants in habituation-dishabituation paradigm:
pabikutibidugolatudaropi.
o Contained 'real words' (eg: pabiku), and 'non words' (eg: kutibi).
o Children attend to statistical properties of the language in order to segment speech.
Early Sounds
• Reduplicated Babbling:
• CVCV repetition, eg: babababa…papapap.
• 'Vocal play' - enables child to explore production processes and exercise vocal motor control
(feedback important).
• A limited range of sounds, mostly from their native language, but some not attested.
Pre-Linguistic Communication
• Children communicate long before they can talk.
• Gesturing:
1. Deictic: imperatives and declaratives, eg: showing, giving.
2. Iconic: representational, eg: pantomiming.
3. Emblematic: culturally-specific gestures, eg: waving.
• Early in development children use the gestural and verbal modalities equally.
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Early Word Learning
• Early word learning is laborious and probably associative (non-symbolic).
• Nelson (1973): Children's first words - daddy, mummy, dog, duck.
• Around 18 months, children know about 20-70 words.
• Period categorised by overextension of labels.
• Why - perceptual and functional similarity.
Vocabulary Spurt
• Around 18-months we (often) see an exponential increase in vocabulary knowledge.
• Coincides first evidence that children are acquiring grammatical knowledge.
• Telegraphic speech: word combinations - 'Mummy eat', 'Doggie woof', 'Hurt finger', 'All gone'.
• Children understands language is combinatorial.
Word Meaning
• There appears to be constraints on word learning that limit the hypothesis space of possible
alternatives.
1. Whole object constraint - in the absence of evidence to the contrary, assume a new word refers to a
whole object.
2. Mutual exclusivity - assume an object only has one label.
• But one concept can have more than one label, eg: animal-dog-Labrador.
• Constraints like whole object and mutual exclusivity should be thought of as probabilistic 'rules of
thumb'.
• Considered 'initial hypotheses about word meaning.
Social-Pragmatic Cues
• Conversational partners play a crucial role in providing cues to word learning.
• Adults tend to label objects children are looking at.
• Provide contrastive information based on child's knowledge state, eg: if a child knows the term 'dog':
"This is a kelpie. Kelpies help farmers take care of cows. But this is a Doberman. Dobermans are good
guard dogs".
Verbs
• Most verbs correspond clusters of meanings, called senses.
• These senses often correspond to different grammatical constructions containing the verb.
1. Mary bounced the ball.
2. The ball bounced.
3. Mary bounced (1 = 2 ≠ 3).
• Verbs are also very particular about the constructions in which they occur.
1. Mary ate → Mary ate the apple.
2. Mary sneezed → *Mary sneezed the tissue (sneeze cannot occur in transitive sentences).
How Do Children Learn Verbs?
• Children are conservative language users when they learn new verbs.
• Tomasello (1992) reported on a diary study that showed that after his daughter learnt a new verb she
would only use it in the construction she learnt it in, eg: 'eat' in passive → '…eate y Grover'.
Synctactic Bootstrapping
• Children could never learn the meaning of verbs from observation alone.
• There are reliable grammatical cues to verb meaning.
o Ernie is meeking Bert → meeking as "causative".
o Ernie is meeking → meeking as "non-causative".
• Children must have biases to interpret verb meaning on the basis of syntactic information.
• Fisher (2002): Children as young as 21-months show knowledge of structure in comprehension
experiments.
o Two nouns = causative - The frog is glorping the monkey.
o One noun = non-causative - The frog is glorping.
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
Language: an arbitrary system of symbols and rules that encode meaning for the purposes of communication, why is it arbitrary - with rare exceptions, words (=symbols) bear no resemblance to their referents. Children appear to learn second languages more successfully than adults do. Less is more hypothesis: perceptual and information processing limitations in children an advantage in acquisition. Johnson & newport (1989) - 46 korean and chinese speakers who arrived in the us at varying ages: administered a grammaticality judgement test of 260 items. Sharp decline: problems - didn"t treat age as continuous but grouped it, and only 46 participants. Pre-verbal period: acquisition begins well before children begin to talk, newborns show a preference for the prosody of their native language. Children are born with the ability to perceive (and produce) every possible phoneme used in the world"s languages. Speech is continuous; just like the colour spectrum.
