Module 6 Chapter 10: Learning to Communicate PDF

Module 6 Chapter 10: Learning to Communicate What is Communication? ★ General agreeance that communication occurs when a signal given by one organism is perceived by and influences the behaviour of another organism ○ Intentionality and an understanding of the mental states of others are critical in...

Module 6 Chapter 10: Learning to Communicate What is Communication? ★ General agreeance that communication occurs when a signal given by one organism is perceived by and influences the behaviour of another organism ○ Intentionality and an understanding of the mental states of others are critical in distinguishing human from animal communication Listening to Voices ★ The mother’s voice is rich in information that can be readily heard as a fetus ★ Infants of all languages prefer infant-directed (ID) speech over adult-directed (AD) speech ○ Vocal melodies of ID speech are appealing to infants ○ ID speech also does a better job of conveying emotion and social situations with its contours and intonations; 5 month olds respond to the different contour types, even in a language they havent heard before These contours and intonations convey info about the infant’s world to them Though the infants understand praise and prohibition contours, we dont know they understand anything about the speaker’s intentions at this age Infants show an increased sensitivity to emotion in the voice at this age Making Sense of Faces ★ 8 months: infants can tell that happy faces are diff from angry faces in terms of their features ★ 1 year: infants are on their way to developing the complex mental abilities necessary for understanding other minds and unspoken inferences via facial expressions ★ In the visual cliff experiment, 1 year olds decided to cross or not cross when referencing their mother’s facial expressions towards them (happy or fearful) ○ In situations of uncertainty, infants look to their mothers for guidance (social referencing) in a nonverbal way ○ The infant might also be avoiding the cliff because of discomfort from seeing the strange expression, or past experiences with fear expressions being followed by an unpleasant event This second reasoning can’t infer any mind-reading or inference ability in the infant ○ While 3 month olds look to a mother purely for the pleasurable stimuli of interacting, 12 month olds may look to the mother’s face to seek info about the world around them ○ The 12 month olds performance represents a huge advance in communicative competence, even if the mental processes cant be teased apart fully ○ Insights into the development of communciation and infants’ understanding of other minds dont come from one study but rather from convergent studies of diff behaviours Following Gaze and Pointing Gestures ★ 9 months: infants shift from responding directly to stimuli to responding to stimuli AND attempting to share their experiences with others ○ Ex. instead of smiling at a toy the infant will smile at a toy and look to his mom as if to say “isnt this cool!” Gaze Following Before 8 months: the adult is responsible for establishing joint reference when both the adult and infant are focusing on an object. They follow it, comment on it, and if the adult calls attention to a diff object, the infant will focus on the adult not their gaze 12 months: infants have switched to learning how to follow an adults gaze in most cases ○ Ex. if an adult across from the infant looks to the right or left, the infant will follo their gaze in the right direction Duration of looking in the proper direction is positively associated with faster vocab growth up to 2 years old Due to more opportunities for joint attention with caregivers who can label new objects for them? ○ This translates to non-human objects that seem to have some sort of intentional actions The object either resembled a face or interacted with the infant somehow, so it seemed like an intentional “thing” to the infants 12 months: infants learn that things that provide intentional cues are more likely to provide meaningful info about things in the environment We dont know if infants are actually asking themselves “why are they doing this?” ex we dont know if they are consciously inputting intentionality on the person or thing ○ This eventual ability to understand another’s behaviour as intentional may be the difference between how human vs chimp language evolved Pointing Another cue that adult’s use when directing a child’s gaze/attention 12 months: the ability to interpret a point starts to develop (as opposed to just looking at the hand) ○ 9 months: the infant may be able to interpret the point as long as the object is close to the pointer’s finger ○ By 14 months: infants are more flexible with following, words with pointing can be helpful 9 months: infants start to use pointing by themselves ○ 14 months: regularly pointing themselves ○ New pointers may even point with no one around; noncommunicative Communicative pointing (pointing and then looking to adult for confirmation) may predict greater vocab growth at up to 2 years of age Learning to Communicate through Language First Sounds Babbled sounds might provide foundation for infant’s first words The Stages of Babbling: 1) (0-2 months): reflexive vocalizations (crying, sneezing, burping) directly related to their physical states. Account for 90% of sounds at 2 weeks, drops to 50% at 8 weeks 2) (2-3 months): infants begin “coo”ing 3) (4-6 months): experimenting with the wide array of noises they can possibly make with their vocal tracts. Results in varying vowel-like sounds and hoots and squeals 4) (6-7 months): canonical syllables in babbling = syllables strung together that sound like real words. Restricted set of vowels and consonants; “gaga”, “mama”, “dada”. We cant infer that infants have yet assigned any meaning to these words, tho many parents would conclude they are trying to say “mom” and “dad” a) At 11-12 months, reduplicated babbling (gaga) turns to variegated babbling (bagoo), involving stringing together different syllables 5) (12 months): “jargon” babbling with longer strings of consonant-vowel combos with diff. Innotations and stress patterns. Rate of babbling is comparable to adult convo rate. Babbling and conventional words occur together until about 19 months, when babbling drops off Set of syllables in early babbling is fairly consistent across linguistic environments, made up of sounds that occur often in most languages ○ Range of babble may be more anatomical or physiological than environmental ○ Babies tend to babble in sounds they hear more often from adults in their culture earlier than other sounds they dont hear often Mother’s verbal response tends to increase rate of vocalization in infants ○ Verbal feedback may maintain and increase infants level of engagement in a given social situation ○ Opportunity for infants to learn new phonological structures Deaf children go through a period of vocal babbling; slightly delayed in onset of reduplicated babbling with a reduced repertoire of sounds ○ They develop manual babbling ○ Deaf and hearing infants exposed to sign language produce two distinct types of hand/arm movements: high-frequency and low-frequency (low mimics the rhythmic patterns of sign language) First Gestures Hearing infants communicate via showing, giving, pointing, and ritual requests before they speak first words ○ Not symbolic, but can be intentional and communicative if infant understands effect can have on convo and persists until goal is reached By 10 months, many gestures meet this criteria Gestural schemes persist along with language development Gestures may be related to language development because they provide practice communicating via conventional signals ○ Both pointing and word comprehension involve joint reference to a particular object Symbolic gestures? ○ Infants exposed to ASL were shown to produce signs around 8.6 months ○ Hands may develop more quickly than articulatory system ○ Signs may be more recognizable to parents than under-developed words ○ Many early signs have a high degree of iconicity (the signs look like what theyre trying to communicate, “I’m hungry” for example) ○ For a sign to be a symbol, it must have intentionality and be pretty context independent With this standard applied, symbolic signs and first words both emerge around 12-13 months Some children will produce faster with sign, some with speech, and some with sign AND speech at the same rate Early Comprehension 8 months: infants are attuned to the sound system of the ambient or surrounding language, can recognize recurrent patterns in sequences of speech sounds ○ Essential for recognizing words in fluent speech 6 months: infants might have learned the association between a parent and a parent’s name ○ Infants would look longer at a video of the named parent than a video of the unnamed parent Parent checklists: infants understand an average of 50 words used in their home by 1 year and 150 by 16 months ○ This varies ○ Changes in speech-processing efficiency or cognition cant necessarily be measured this way By tracking infants’ gaze patterns in the process of understanding, we can document impressive progress in the efficiency of spoken word recognition over the 2nd year of life ○ From 15-24 months, infants become efficient at recognizing familiar words even before the word is completely spoken. Theyre becoming highly efficient in spoken-language processing Word Learning and Social Understanding ~1 year: many infants begin speaking their first words ○ Common types of words across diff languages and cultures (parents, pets, common social phrases) ○ Consist of single words or phrases mushed into a single word (“gimme”) Emerging Knowledge that Others Have Minds 18 months olds showed that infants learn word associations by following the speaker’s gaze to understand which object they are talking about ○ If the speaker named a first toy while looking at a second toy, the infant assumed they were speaking about the toy they were looking at (the 2nd one) ○ Children with autism have trouble using the speaker’s gaze (contrary to the infant) and make mapping errors because of this Understanding intentionality is not an all-or-none ability Before 12 months: infants can engage in activities where they share attention with another, as long as they dont have to follow their attention or provide any purposeful cues to direct another's attention ○ They start to understand others have intentions After 12 months: infants begin understanding what other’s intentions are ○ This means they can follow another’s attention and also manipulate it ○ Helps word learning; infants can understand an utterance as specifically intended for a specific referent ○ 18 month olds: recognized the speaker was referring to one object even though the infant was attending to a diff object ○ 2 year olds in one study successfully chose a previously locked box when asked to look for the “toma”; previously, the speaker had said “lets get the toma” but unsuccessfully fiddled with the locked box. The infants knew what the speaker was talking about even though they hadnt seen the actual toma