Chapter 3 Exam 2

• Assimilation: incorporation of new information into schemes, gives meaning to content
• Accommodation: adjustment, change, modification of existing scheme
• Scheme: general psychological structure
• Sensorimotor stage:

  • here and now
  • differentiation and coordination of action schemes
  • practical intelligence
  • development of object permanence
• Language: the principal method of human communication, consisting of words used in a structured and conventional way and conveyed by speech, writing, or gesture
• Characteristics of human language:

  • Arbitrariness
  • Productivity (infinite generativity)
  • Semanticity
  • Displacement
  • Rule governed
• Phonology: level on which a language's sound system is described

  • studies the rules for combining sounds to make words, and the use of stress and intonation in spoken sentence
• Phoneme: smallest unit of sound which signal a difference in meaning
• Syntax: acceptable ways of combining words to form phrases and sentences

  • in any system of syntax, individual words belong to a particular form class (noun, verb, adjective)
  • syntax rules govern how phrases are formed
  • morphology + syntax = grammar
• Morphology: the rules for combining morphemes to form words or to modify word meanings

  • Morpheme: smallest unit that carry meaning
  • Grammatical morpheme: specific morphemes that carry little meaning but that change the meaning of words and sentences in a systematic way
• Grammar: admissable combinations and constructions in language
• Semantics: the meaning of words and sentences

  Pragmatics: rules that dictate the way language is used to accomplish social ends
• Main theories of language learning:

  1. Behaviourism
  2. Nativism
  3. Interactivist view
• Behaviorism:

  • language is learned according to the same laws as all other types of behaviors (imitations, association, shaping)
  • language comprehension (receptive language) is learned through classical condition
  • language production is learned through operant conditioning and imitation
• Behaviourism criticism:

  • rarely studied children
  • no shaping and tutoring
  • ignore biological basis for language development
  • strength of association cannot explain grammaticality judgements
  • cannot explain infinite generativity
• Nativism (Chomsky):

  • language is mainly syntax
  • environment only triggers the maturation of the language acquisition device (LAD) which is learned in short time
  • no catalogue
• Poverty of stimulus argument: even if children heard completely error-free input, this would not provide enough information for them to learn the abstract principles on which language is based
• Nativism has no catalogue: knowledge of a system of rules according to which grammatically correct sentences are generated (universal grammar)
• Nativism strengths:

  • universality and uniformity of language development
  • sensitivity to verbal input
  • deaf children
  • some evidence for critical period
• Nativism weaknesses:

  • no fixed language centers in brain
  • does not seem to be a single system of grammar that underlies all language
  • many language constructions are acquired late and require learning
  • individual differences
• Nativism criticisms:

  1. Recasting: rephrase utterance in a grammatically correct form
  2. Expansion: repeat and expand utterance
• Interactivist view:

  • children are biologically prepared for language but require extensive experience
  • children play an active role in acquiring language
• Interactivist strengths:

  • nature and nurture are important but more important is the active participation in social exchanges
  • predicts individual differences
  • links preverbal and verbal communication
• Interactivist weakness:

  • no unified interactionist position
  • debate over importance and role of social interaction
• Early speech production:

  • connections between sight and sound
  • crying (birth)
  • intentional vocalization: cooing (2 months)
  • vocal play: some isolated syllables (4 months)
  • respond to social and affective communication early in life
• Speech perception:

  • at birth:
  • own language vs foreign language
  • ability to discriminate speech sounds in all languages of the world involves categorical perception
  • 6 months: discriminate between well-formed phrases and ill-formed phrases
  • perceptual narrowing
• Speech production:

  • babbling: reduplicated or canonical babbling
  • conversational babbling: adult-like stress and intonation; questions and statements
  • protowords: consistently used by child but no conventional meaning (10-12 months)
• Comprehension:

  • understanding of some words around 6 months
  • lose ability to discriminate between phonemic contrasts that do not occur in native language
• 12 months:

  • first words produced
  • Holophrases: stand for a whole sentence
• 18 months:

  • Vocabulary spurt: 10-20 new words a week
  • Two-word utterances (telegraphic speech)
  • combine two words, focus on high-content words
  • Underextension and overextension of word meanings
  • Generally, comprehension is ahead of production
• Telegraphic speech: the use of short, precise words without grammatical markers such as articles, auxiliary verbs, and other connectives
• Child-directed speech:

  • short sentences with high pitched, exaggerated expression
  • clear pronunciation
  • distinct pauses between speech segments
  • present-oriented
  • repetition of new words in a variety of contexts
  • CDS is not static
  • 5 months: emotion laden
  • 13 months: information laden
• Problem of reference: The problem of how to define the meaning of a word.
• Constraints on word learning:

  1. Whole object assumption
  2. majority of words are at the basic level; bias to assume that novel words refer to objects
  3. Mutual exclusivity
  4. once children have labels for objects they can exclude these objects as referents when they hear a new word
• Constraints approach: innate constraints are postulated to eliminate a myriad of possible hypotheses about the word meaning

  • Problems:
  • not language specific
  • need to be overcome in learning parts of an object
  • do not address other problems (temporal continuity)
  • children do give multiple labels to an object