Language Development and Infant Learning

Course Information

• Course title: Topics and Issues in Developmental Psychology
• Course code: PSYC 21021
• Lecturer: Dr. Alissa Ferry
• University: University of Manchester

Lecture 1: Prelinguistic Speech Processing

• The course in Year 1 provides a broad overview of developmental psychology
• PSYC 21021 focuses on the development of unique human skills, like communication and social-cognitive skills
• Infants' early language acquisition is covered, including speech processing skills before language emerges

Lectures and Lecturers

• Part I: How children learn language
  • Early cognitive and social precursors to language development cover weeks 1 and 2 (taught by Alissa Ferry)
  • Early word learning (week 3, Alissa Ferry)
  • Combining words (weeks 4 & 5, Anna Theakston)
• Part II: How children learn to interact with others
  • Development of self-awareness (week 7)
  • The importance of play (week 8)
  • Moral development (week 9)
  • Understanding others and theory of mind (week 10) (taught by Bahar Koymen)

Early Language Development: Overview

• Early pre-linguistic skills (Lecture 1)
• How do infants process speech?
• Intention reading/social skills (Lecture 2)
• How do infants communicate before language?
• Early word learning (Lecture 3)
• How do infants link sounds and meaning (word learning)?

Early Language Development: Aims

• Document the early stages of language development.
• Consider the role of early speech processing in language development
• Evaluate how social skills affect language acquisition.
• Evaluate how children learn word meanings.

Language Basics (1)

• Language is generative.
• Language comprises small units combined (phonology).
• Language conveys meaning (semantics).

Language Basics (2)

• Languages have rules about how words go together (syntax).
• Examples of sentences: A bites the dog man, The dog bites a man, The man bites a dog.
• Subject-verb-object is a structure in English.
• Language is social.

Languages Across the World

• Different languages have different ways of expressing greetings.
• Examples of greetings in various languages are listed

Outline

• What sounds are in my language? (prosody, phonemes)
• How do I find the words? (statistics, prosody, frequency, pattern finding)
• How are the words organized? (frequency, pattern finding)

Infant Designs

• Preference studies: What do infants prefer to listen or look at?
• Habituation/familiarisation studies: Train infants and then measure preferences
• Change detection studies: Train infants to respond to change, and assess if infants can tell the difference between things

What sounds are in my language?

• Prosody: the pattern of stress and intonation in language. Different languages have different prosodic patterns
• Phonemes: perceptually distinct units of sound that distinguish words (e.g., p, b, d, t). Different languages use different phonemes.

Early Phonological Development: Prosody (1) and (2)

• Fetal auditory system is fully functioning during the last trimester.
• Infants prefer their mothers' voices.
• Infants can distinguish between languages with different prosody, despite not being able to distinguish between languages with similar prosody (e.g., English/Dutch).
• Infants cry with an "accent" reflecting their native language.

Early Phonological Development: Phonemes (1)

• Phonemes are sounds that distinguish words (e.g., pat/bat, sip/zip).
• Other languages may have different phoneme contrasts to English.
• The world has around 600 consonants and 200 vowels, though any particular language uses about 40.
• Children's babbling involves a wide variety of sounds which gradually narrow toward the target language's sounds during the first year.

Early Phonological Development: Phonemes (3)

• At 1-2 months, infants can discriminate between all sounds, including foreign sounds.
• Adults can only discern sounds in their native language
• Between 7-11 months, infants show a decline in the ability to distinguish sounds from non-target languages, and an increase in their ability to distinguish sounds in their target language.

Finding the words (1)

• Infants can distinguish words from their language around 7.5 months, but not at 6 months
• The ability to recognize words in speech emerges by approximately 7.5 months

Finding the words (2)

• Infants can segment words in their language from around 7.5 months, but not from 6 months
• Infants can recognize words in speech within 7 to 7.5 months

Finding the words: Statistics (1)

• Infants are skilled statisticians.
• They track the co-occurrence of syllables.
• Syllables that frequently co-occur are usually part of the same word

Finding the words: Statistics (2)

• Experiments using 8-month-olds and made-up languages tested if infants could identify words from a continuous speech stream.
• The infants listened for instances of whole words

Finding the words: Prosody (1)

• Infant-directed speech (IDS) is used by caregivers.
• IDS is characterized by higher pitch, slower speaking rates, and more exaggerated emphasis on important words, and phrase boundaries.
• IDS makes segments simpler, aiding word recognition

Finding the words: Prosody (2)

• Infants segment speech better when exposed to infant-directed speech (IDS) than adult-directed speech (ADS)

Finding the words: Frequency (1)

• Highly frequent and salient words, like "mummy," are easier for infants to learn (compared to other words)
• Also highly frequent linguistic words, like "the" or "he/she", are easily detected.
• These words function as anchors to identify boundaries of words in a speech stream

Finding the words: Frequency (2)

• Highly familiar words (like the child's own name) assist infants in segmenting words.
• Baby Maggie recognized words around her name; conversely, 6-month-olds struggle with this in the Jusczyk & Aslin (1995) study.

Finding the words: Frequency (3)

• Some linguistic categories (like articles, and conjunctions) are more frequent and easier to learn.
• Infants can use "the" to segment nouns by 8 months (Shi & Lepage, 2008).

Finding the patterns: Frequency (4)

• Italian 8-month-olds are more attentive to frequent-first patterns; conversely, Japanese 8-month-olds are more attentive to frequent-final patterns
• By 8 months, infants have begun to understand some ordering rules in their native language

Finding the patterns: Rule-Learning (1)

• Syntax requires the learning of abstract rules in a language
• Some examples of words that illustrate grammatical correctness/incorrectness are provided regarding the rules in a language: The red car (correct) vs. The car red (Incorrect); The boy is jumping (correct) vs. The boy is jump (incorrect); The girl eating cake is happy (correct) vs. The girls eating cake were happy (incorrect), etc.

Finding the patterns: Rule-Learning (2)

• 6-month-olds can learn abstract rules in language
• Those familiarized to an ABA pattern listened longer to an ABB pattern.
• Those familiarized to an ABB pattern listened longer to an ABA pattern

Conclusions and Issues

• Infants show impressive language acquisition skills in their first year of life. That includes identifying sounds, statistics, patterns, and word boundaries.
• Infants demonstrate early and specific preferences and skills for language acquisition.
• Infants' tuning strategies (sounds and word orders) emerge before speech onset

Conclusions and Issues (critical analyses)

• Assess how language acquisition skills explain the phenomenon.
• Determine what additional information or factors may contribute to learning languages.
• Note: Additional perspectives from different lectures are expected

Reference List (1) and (2)

• A list of research papers related to early language acquisition is provided.
• This list includes information on language learning at the infant stage.

Supplementary Reading (1) and (2)

• Suggestions for further readings are presented.
• The specific papers provide supplementary details to understand language learning at infancy.

Supplementary Videos

• Some video resources (TED Talks, BBC documentaries, etc) are available for supplementary learning on infants and their language-tuning capabilities

Explore the fascinating aspects of language development in infants through this quiz. Discover how infants use sounds and words, the significance of syntax, and the methods researchers use to study language preferences. Perfect for students studying linguistics or psychology related to language acquisition.