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Chapter 3: Foundations of language development in domain-general skills and communicative experience. Best Ingredients for Language Acquisition - Human child [UG] + an environment enabling experience [examples of grammatical sentences] Universal grammar (UG) - A genetically innate sy...

Chapter 3: Foundations of language development in domain-general skills and communicative experience. Best Ingredients for Language Acquisition - Human child [UG] + an environment enabling experience [examples of grammatical sentences] Universal grammar (UG) - A genetically innate system consisting of principles & parameters which do not need to be learned, but rather exposure to a language triggers the parameters to adopt the settings that are used by the speakers of that language Speech as Communication (pages 74-80) - Humans have a fundamental desire to share thoughts, which drives language learning (EX: deaf children in groups (Nicaragua) invent languages, unlike isolated children - Children w/older siblings as conversational partners are more skilled at participating in conversations - Children are more likely to learn language through live interaction than media exposure - Social gating: infants don’t bother to analyze auditory signals unless they come from live humans - Social Cognitive skills of infants - ~10 months: First babies only have the capacity to share oneself with others primary intersubjectivity. Later babies can share their own experiences with others secondary intersubjectivity. Around 12 months of age communicative pointing emerges infant points and looks at a potential communicative partner at the same time. - ~10-12 months: - Communicative pointing (12 months) - Gaze following (10-11 months) - Joint/shared attention (9-15 months): children & adult focus on the same object/event. Early nonverbal, later symbolic (gestures/words) - Predicts language development. More joint attention correlates w/advanced language skills - Leads to development of back-and-forth turn-taking in later stages - Autistic children w/better joint attention show less language impairment - 18 months: children can follow speaker’s lead; individual differences matter less - Intention: children first learn to understand that other’s have intentions then learn to discern those intentions by imitating intended behaviors, not mechanical actions - 9 hallmarks: eye gaze shift, persistence, changes in communication attempts, pausing after attempts, expressing satisfaction/frustration, terminating once satisfied - Intentional communication (EX: DATA Slide 32) - Child makes eye contact w/partner - Child’s gestures & vocalizations begin to become more consistent - Child waits for and expects a response from partner - Child persists in attempt to cmomunicate until getting desired response - Intention reading: Infants use a human speaker’s eye gaze to link words to objects. - Infants associate novel words w/novel objects when speakers show surprise - Overheard speech provides another way for children to learn language - Communicative Use of Gesture - Gesture is considered the beginning of symbolic communication; predicts the child’s language development that follows - Communicative pointing is the first common gesture, followed by iconic gestures like reaching or opening/closing a hand to signal ‘give’. Iconic gestures are symbolic because they are conventionalized (repeated use, not physically tied to the object) - EX: gesturing for objects, requests, attributes (Box 3.1) - Early pointing predicts vocab growth. The number of objects pointed early predicts later comprehension vocab  - Early gesturing predicts language delays in children with pre- or perinatal brain lesions - Early use of gesture + word combinations predicts the age of two-word speech production - Types of gestures predicts types of speech combinations (N + N or V + N) - Gestures - indicate developing communicative interest & meaning. - Allow communication experience before language develops - Elicit response from caregivers, helping children learn language - Mother-child interaction: mothers often respond to gestures by translating them into speech, aiding language development Methods of Studying Infants (how and why they’re different) - Habituation procedures: babies get bored w/repetivie sounds; reduced responses show familiarity - Sucking habituation paradigm: A new sound leads to increased responses, indicating discrimination Measured using nonnutritive nipple sucking w/pressure transducer (used from birth) - Conditioned head turn procedure: for older infants. Infants learn to turn their heads toward sound changes when followed by a visual reward. Used to test discrimination of auditory stimuli - Intermodal preferential looking paradigm: infants shown two videos w/matching audio stimulus. If infants look longer at the matching video, it suggest language comprehension - Looking-while-listening procedure: same as intermodal preferential looking paradigm task but also measures eye movements toward videos paired w/audio. Assesses both comprehension & processing speed of language Early attention to Speech & Speakers - Newborns prefer human speech over nonspeech and environmental sounds - Filtering: Infants focus on communication signals while ignoring irrelevant noises. - Infants are drawn to faces and link speech to facial movements; 2-month-olds show distress when a voice is out of sync with a face - Sound-Movement Matching: By 18 weeks, infants recognize facial movements that align with speech sounds - Brain Responses: 4-month-olds expect speech to match a forward-looking face (Parise et al., 2011). - Perceptual Skills: Infants can distinguish speech, connect it to faces, and use cues like eye gaze for understanding. Infant Hearing & Prenatal Learning - Hearing sensitivity: newborns can hear speech but are less sensitive than adults. The auditory system functions before birth - Evidence of fetal hearing: fetuses at 38 weeks discriminate/responsd to their mother’s voice vs a stranger’s voice voice (heart rate changes). Newborns prefer their mother’s voice over a stranger’s - Memory in utero: infants recognize sounds their mothers regularly read during pregnancy (EX: newborns prefer familiar passages read during pregnancy - Newborns sense & perceive more than they can express (Lec 3, slide 19); babies have a mechanism that sorts relevant from irrelevant - Babies as young as 2 months can understand speech & visual cues - Language discrimination: french infants can distinguish french from other languages but not two unfamiliar ones Infant Speech Perception - Discrimination of Speech sounds: Infants distinguish between different speech sounds, essential for language learning.Ability to perceive sound differences like /p/ vs. /b/ is innate, not dependent on experience. - Infants can discriminate contrasts from other languages not spoken in their environment. - EX: English-learning babies recognize vowel contrasts in French or consonant contrasts in Hindi.  - Categorical Perception: Infants perceive continuous sound differences (e.g., voice onset time, VOT) as discrete categories, e.g., /b/ vs. /p/. This indicates specialized perceptual abilities for speech acquisition. - also observed in non-linguistic contexts (e.g., chinchillas). - Suggests phoneme boundaries are a feature of mammalian auditory systems, not unique to humans. - Within-category differences are perceptible, but between-category differences are emphasized. - Early Tuning of Speech Perception: Infants become better at distinguishing sounds in their native language and less adept at non-native sounds due to experience. Key Findings: - English-learning infants lose non-native sound discrimination by 10-12 months; non-native language learners retain it. - Effects of language experience on vowel and tone perception appear as early as 6 months. - Distributional Learning: Infants categorize sounds by statistical frequency patterns. - Bimodal distributions (frequent sounds at endpoints) improve discrimination compared to unimodal ones. - Language Development Benefits: Better native contrast discrimination leads to larger vocabularies and faster language growth. Discriminating nonnative sounds can slow language development. - Flexibility: Infants learn to ignore nonnative contrasts, though some can still be distinguished with training. Cognitive Foundations; Conceptual Understandings of the Meanings Language Encodes - Children understand/perceive the world differently (EX: Book/Cup Experiment) - Before talking, children understand that objects are separate, stable, and individual things. - Xu and Carey’s (1995, 1996) study: - 10-month-olds see objects as single entities. - 12-month-olds recognize objects as distinct entities. - Other Conceptual Understandings: - Children group objects into categories. - Children recognize properties of objects, relations between objects, and early motion event categorizations. - Language aligns with these conceptual understandings, allowing easier mapping of words to meanings. - Object permanence Learning and Development (Statistical Learning) - Domain-General Mechanisms of Learning: Chomsky rejected purely associative learning mechanisms. - Piagetian Theory: Language is symbolic and develops through sensorimotor experiences, but this did not fully explain language acquisition. - Statistical Learning: counting the frequency with which one stimulus is followed by another. Infants can detect patterns in sound sequences through statistical learning. - Example: Saffran et al. (1996) showed that 8-month-olds distinguish "words" from "nonwords" by tracking conditional probabilities in sequences. - involves recognizing sound co-occurrence patterns and is non-language specific but crucial for language acquisition. Memory & Attention - Phonological memory: Capacity to remember sound sequences predicts language development. - Measured by nonword repetition tasks (e.g., repeating "grall"). - Predicts vocabulary growth, grammatical development, and foreign language learning. - Children with language disorders show lower nonword repetition accuracy. - Experience influences phonological memory; bilingual children’s memory relates to exposure to their respective languages. - Central executive in WM: Manages mental resources during tasks with competing demands. - Affects language development, as multitasking can hinder attention and comprehension.  - Example: Difficulty in tasks like the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT) [children are presentented w/sentences like ‘Pumpkins are purple’ and they have to say if the sentences are true or false and they have to remember the last word in each sentence for alter recall] correlates with language disorders. - Early attention skills (e.g., sustained attention) predict future vocabulary growth. - Memory, sleep & language learning - Sleep enhances memory consolidation and language learning. - Napping after exposure to sound sequences helps infants retain patterns better. - Language acquisition relies on memory processes (attention, storage, consolidation) like other learning domains. Relation of Early Foundation Skills to Later Language - Joint attention & phonological memory predict language success. Deficits are linked to delays. - Key Predictors: - Word recognition at 7–12 months and auditory processing at 7.5 months predict later language skills. - Indirect Influence: Early skills like processing efficiency affect later language growth by supporting input use. - Developmental Cascade: Early low-level skills shape higher-order cognitive and language abilities over time. Role of environment - Children's environments provide essential cues for language learning, countering Chomsky's view that speech is error-prone and insufficient. Sources of Support: - Speech Information: - Statistical learning helps children identify phonetic categories, segment speech, and infer syntactic categories and word meanings. - Cues in Speech: - Syntactic Bootstrapping: Links between verbs and their syntactic environments aid meaning. - Phonological/Prosodic Bootstrapping: hypothesis that children use phonological cues [Intonation, pauses, and stress patterns] to break into grammatical structure - Infant [Child]-Directed Speech (IDS): (e.g., "motherese") uses higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, and clear pronunciation. - Infants prefer IDS as it simplifies input, engages attention, and enhances learning. - Easy to recognize patterns=clues (slide 26) - Can find clues from phonological properties of speech they hear to use for syntactic structure (EX: open class words tend to be stressed, closed! =stressed, intonation curves reveal phrase boundaries) - What is it about infant directed speech that makes it so interesting to babies? - exaggerated intonation contours produce a stimulus with high contrast - slow rate of infant-directed speech causes vowels to be prolonged, which makes them more discriminable - repetitious - Single word utterances helps infants segment words from speech stream - Contextual referents are present; may help child later w/labelling referents - Gestures accompany CDS - Explicit learning & correction - Feedback: Early studies showed parents rarely correct syntactic errors but correct factual errors and mispronunciations - Parents provide implicit feedback by reformulating errors and repeating correct sentences - Debate exists on the effectiveness of feedback, with statistical learning suggesting pattern recognition, not correction, drives language acquisition - Maternal Responsivity: Mothers scaffold early communication by responding to infant vocalizations, pulling infants into exchanges - Responsive mothers lead to less crying, earlier word production, and faster vocabulary growth - Quality & Quantity of Input - Environmental Support & Language Development: Children with varied communicative experiences show differences in language growth. Responsivity and contingency (e.g., following children’s focus) are critical - Parental Influence: High speech quantity and quality (vocabulary, grammar, and conversational exchanges) enhance language development. - Teacher Influence: Teacher speech complexity and conversational exchanges positively impact syntax and oral skills development. - Peer Influence: Interactions with peers of higher expressive language skills boost language growth, especially for less-advanced children. - Socioeconomic Status (SES) & Language: Higher SES parents provide more supportive input (more words, richer vocabulary, and affirmative feedback). - SES-related differences in talk quantity and quality lead to disparities in vocabulary size and language skills by age 3. - Variability Within SES Groups: Individual differences in parental speech exist within SES strata, affecting children’s vocabulary and grammar development.