Learning to talk, talking to learn

• What does it mean to learn language?


  • Perceive, comprehend, produce
  • Form and meaning
  • Phonology – perceive, segment, produce speech sounds
  • Syntax – rules for combing words, grammar
  • Morphology – word forms and inflections
  • Semantics - meaning
  • Pragmatics – how we communicate, language use
• Nature vs nurture


  • Language-specific areas of the brain
  • how much is hard-wired is subject to debate
  • Early exposure to language is critical
  • how much and what type of language is subject to debate
• Nativist Theories of Language Acquisition

  • Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
  • Learning/experience cannot account for all aspects of language acquisition
  • Children must have innate knowledge of language: AKA Universal Grammar
• Arguments for Nativist Theories

  • Speed and uniformity of development
  • Poverty of the stimulus
• Experience-based language development


  • Language is a behaviour learned entirely from the environment, there is no innate knowledge
  • Interaction-based – learning from social interactions, learning closely matches the input
  • Connectionist/statistical-based – language is learnt by tracking the nature of the input, finding patterns in the language
• Child-directed speech (CDS)


  • Also known as 'motherese' or 'parentese'
  • Phonology: Exaggerated intonation; lengthened vowels; slower production
  • Syntax: Shorter, simpler utterances
  • Vocabulary: Here and now topics; Abbreviations and diminutives
  • Facilitates language learning
  • May be universal (although magnitude differs)
• Theories of word learning

  • Association (Smith, 2000)
  • Constraints (e.g., Markman, 1988; Clark, 1987)
  • Syntactic bootstrapping (Gleitmann, 1991, Fisher 2002)
  • Social pragmatic theory (e.g., Bloom, 2000; Tomasello, 2003)
• Association


  • Idea that child thinks new words refer to whichever salient object their attention has been drawn to
  • Doesn't easily explain how abstract words are acquired
• Constraints


  • Whole object constraint
  • Taxonomic assumption
  • Mutual exclusivity assumption
• Mutual exclusivity


  • Is this ME constraint specifically lexical and inbuilt?
  • Markman: Yes, specifically lexical and innate
  • Clark: ME is just a specific manifestation of general pragmatic principles
  • Callanan: The pragmatic principles themselves can be learnt
• Syntactic bootstrapping


  Linguistic context can help us guess the meanings of words
• Social-Pragmatic Theory


  • Children learn words easily because:
  • Their world is very routine
  • They engage in joint attention and intention reading
• Not all of these theories of word learning are mutually exclusive
• Children draw on many strategies and sources of information to learn words
• Lack of a unified developmental theory of word learning (though see the Emergentist Coalition Model, Hollich et al., 2000)
• By the age of 6 children have something in the region of 10 – 14, 000 words in their lexicon
• The learning rate continues to accelerate until about 8 – 10 years when children learn something like 12 new words a day
• Enormous individual differences in rate of language learning
• • Early individual differences in conventional language learning predict:
  • later vocabulary
  • grammatical development
  • narrative development
• Language skills at age 5 are the most important factor in reaching the expected levels in English and maths at age 11 and are positively correlated later academic achievement
• Children with poor vocabulary skills (at 5 years old) are twice as likely to be unemployed when they reach adulthood
• 60% -70 % of young offenders have low language skills
• Ineffective acquisition of early language is associated with behavioural problems including higher levels of disruptive and antisocial behaviour
• There is a higher rate of past, early language problems among adults with anxiety or social phobia disorders
• Language as a public health problem


  Language as a primary indicator of child wellbeing (association with social, emotional & learning outcomes)
• What impacts on language development?

  • Bronfenbrenner (1979)
  • Pace et al., 2017
• Child Directed speech


  • Quantity and quality language input affects language growth
  • Sheer amount of speech (> Adult words > child language)
  • Diversity/complexity of vocabulary and grammar
  • Large effect sizes for quality
• Caregiver Contingency at 11months predicts infant vocabulary to 18m
• Decontextualised talk at 3 predicts vocabulary at 4.5
• SES


  an individual's location in multiple environmental hierarchies, usually involving economic resources, educational achievement, and occupational status
• Disparities between infants from higher- and lower-SES families in vocabulary and language processing efficiency are evident at 18m
• By 24 months there was a six-month gap between SES groups in processing skills critical to language development
• The UK prevalence rate for early language difficulties is between 5% and 8% of all children, and 20% for those growing up in low-income households
• One child in three of the poorest children in England starts primary school without the language skills they need to succeed
• Difference or deficit?


  Language for life or language for testing?
• Impacts of social distancing measures due to Covid-19 may have devastating long-lasting consequences for young children in low-income families
• Variation within SES groups, the importance of overheard speech and non-dyadic interactions
• Large SES differences in studies measuring only child-directed speech, but no SES difference in all speech in a child's environment
• Quantity of speech to infants, three times greater in urban compared to rural samples
• Ratio was much larger than that found for samples of high versus low socioeconomic status in USA