psycholinguistics 10

8/12/2019 Psycholinguistics 10

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Psycholinguistics 10

Early language Acquisition


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Prelinguistic Communication Social Context of Preverbal Infants Child-directed speech, or baby talk or motherese:

This speech tends to be higher n pitch, morevariable in pitch and more exaggerated in itsintonational contours. Infants prefer to listen to

baby talk rather than adult-directed speech.Mothers also use this speech to draw the bays attention to particular aspects of their message.

Child-directed speech encourage infants to participate in conversations. This makes the childthink of language as a social activity with rulesand as an activity of communication with oneanother.


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Prelinguistic Gestures Criteria for communication intention: waiting,

persistence, and development of alternative plans. At 8 months, infants become more purposeful in

their behavior. Prelinguistic children use gestures to get the

receivers attention and to communicate. Thetransition to speech acts can be viewed as learninghow to do with words what already has been donewithout words.


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Early phonology The childs first attempts at producing sounds

have more to do with practicing with soundsystem than with communicating with others.

Phonological findings with the neighbors child: The errors are systematic, not random. Children can produce a distinction in imitation

that cannot be made accurately in conversationalspeech. (Zete Zeke)

Children can perceive a distinction that she cannot produce.


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The development of speech perception Eimas (1971) categorical perception: infants are born

with perceptual mechanisms that are attuned tospeech categories. (Infants sucked at a pacifier whilegiven different VOTs)

Lasky (1975) tests also prove that infants are bornwith the ability to perceive a number of phonemicdistinctions and categorical perception is innate.

The ability to perceive phonemic distinctions fromother languages starts to decline about 1 month ofage, and there was considerable decline at 8 months.They can segment speech into words.

Infants are able to discriminate prosodic cues almost

at the birth (4 days of life).


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Development of Speech Production

Babbling (6 to 7 months) Duplicated babbling: repeat consonant-vowelsequence, e.g. bababababa

Variegated babbling (11-12month): syllable

strings consist of varying consonants and vowels,e.g. bigodabu Infants begin to impose sentence-like intonational

contours on their utterances. Their vowels begin to

sound similar to those in their native language. Role of babbling: a form of play to practice sound,

noncommunicative.


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Transition to speech At 1 year old, children begin to use both gestures

and speech to communicate meanings. Idiomorph: their own symbols to refer to objects

or events. Significance of idiomorphs: Childrens language is creative.

They learn that it is important to be consistentwhen referring to objects.


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Phonological process

Phonological Processes Used by Children Type Examples Reduction Tore for store Coalescence Paf for pacifier

Assimilation Nance for dance Reduplication Titty for kitty


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Reasons

The child cannot discriminate between thesounds that are confused.

The child simply cannot produce theomitted sounds

These errors are part of a more generallinguistic process.


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Lexical Development

Early words: here and now, concretenominals, moving objects

Acquisition order: general nominals,specific nominals, action words, modifiers,

personal and social words, function words


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Overextention and underextension

Children sometimes use too many items into theirword classes (overextention), sometimes use aword in a more restrictive way (underextention).

Role of adult speech

Adults use basic-level terms when helpingchildren to learn the language. Adults provide ostensive definitions (That is an X.)

to help children understand what part of the whole

object is referred. Gestures also help to teach children to name

objects.


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Cognitive constrains

Children are constrained to consider only some ofthe possibilities. Whole object bias: when children encounter a new

label, they prefer to attach the label to the entire

object rather than to part of the objects. Taxonomic bias: they will assume that the object

label is a taxonomic category rather than a namefor an individual object.

Mutual exclusivity bias: if a child knows the nameof a particular object, he will generally rejectapplying a second name to that object.


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Early Grammar Children tend to combine content words and leave

out function words: this suggests that the child hasan understanding of this grammatical distinctionas well as an intuitive appreciation that content

words may be more informative than functionwords. Children know that particular words are put in

particular positions in the sentence.

These utterances are in the form of an agent andan action or a proposition.


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Early Grammar Brown (1973): these early utterances are

expressing semantic relations. Table 10-3:11 semantic relations comprise 75% ofchildrens two-word utterances.

Semantic bootstrapping: children use theirknowledge of semantic relations to learnsyntactic relations.


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True speech

Single-word utterances. Two-word utterances, or "Pivot

Grammar" Connective grammar Recursive grammar


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Single-word utterances The child begins to use single-word utterances

when he is around 12 to 18 months old. Hisvocabulary grows remarkably:

15-24 months 50 words 72 months 14,000 words(including inflections and derivations; rootwords = 8000) About 9 words a day, or 1 word

per waking hour The utterance is a speech of content words, chieflynouns and verbs: it lacks function words.


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Two-word utterances, or "Pivot

Grammar" It can be described as a kind of

telegraphic speech.

Just like a sentence = word + word, wehave forms like: P+O, O+P, O+O, O


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A semantic relation approach to twoword utterances

Two-word utterances do not combineany two isolated words, only wordsthat are semantically related arecombined. Word order is made use ofto show different meanings. So the"Teddy bear monkey" can beexpressed as "Teddy bear", "Bear

monkey", "Teddy monkey", but not as"bear teddy", "Monkey bear", and"Monkey teddy."


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A semantic relation approach to twoword utterances

The following word-orders are popular intwo-word utterances:

Agent --- action ( Granny come )

Possessor --- possessed ( Mommy sock ) Entity ---- attribute ( pillow here )


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A semantic relation approach to two

word utterances We can easily see how two-word utterances

develop into adult's grammar

(agent+action) + (action+object) ----- agent+action+object Daddy throw Throw ball Daddy throw ball

(action+object)+(possessor+possessed) action + possessor +possessed Br ing shoe M y shoe ---- Br ing my shoe


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Connective grammar Overgeneration: The child may make some

premature guesses as to the notions which aregrammatically marked in his language. There are two theories about overgeneralization. Rule-and-memory model: Children have

access to a rule. In addition childrenhave store past tense forms of irregularverbs in memory. Then a stored irregularform takes precedence over the rule.

Parallel distributed processing model:The mental representation of verbs is aset of connections in a network ratherthan rules such as the past tense rule.


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Recursive grammar

In this stage, the child not only usesgrammar, but also realizes that language has

a grammatical system. He builds up a senseof grammaticality, so self-corrections arefrequent by age three.

psycholinguistics 10

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