Cognitive Psychology
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
Aimen Zafar Butt
Gender differences in language
development
Gender differences in language could be pervasive or
could just occur in some parts of the system
Languages are hierarchically organized and composed of a
number of subsystems,
We’ll be discussing language differences for some of these
systems.
Phonology
Phonology is defined as the study of sound patterns and
their meanings, both within and across languages. An
example of phonology is the study of different sounds
and the way they come together to form speech and
words - such as the comparison of the sounds of the two
"p" sounds in "pop-up."
Phonology= sound system of a language
It also include intonation and stress patterns. E.g you’ve
had lunch?!
Individuals and even families have characteristic ways of
speaking
Some gender markers have been claimed for phonology,
Women sometimes use rising intonations at the end of
sentences even when not asking questions
Women use more variety in intonations, whereas men are
more monotonic
Morphology
In linguistics, morphology (/mɔːrˈfɒlədʒi/) is the study of
words, how they are formed, and their relationship to
other words in the same language. It analyzes the
structure of words and parts of words, such as stems,
root words, prefixes, and suffixes.
Morphology= rules for word formation and variation.
Morphemes= smallest unit in language that carry definable
meaning, used to change word from singular to plural etc.
caring>uncaring, care>careful
Children develop systematic knowledge of morphology
during preschool years
Use of diminutive (little -y or –ie morpheme that
transform word into baby talk e.g. doggy)
Gender differences in use of diminutives:
women use more of these when talking to children
More of these are used to little girls than little boys
Syntax
Syntax is the order or arrangement of words and phrases
to form proper sentences. The most basic syntax follows
a subject + verb + direct object formula. That is, "Jillian
hit the ball." Syntax allows us to understand that we
wouldn't write, "Hit Jillian the ball."
Syntax= rules in any language for arranging words to produce different kind of
utterances: declarative sentence, passive imperatives( a sentence that expresses
command, advice or a request is an imperative sentence. It includes ‘let’ and
‘be’. For example: let he elders be respected, le the task be finished), questions,
and negatives(Negative Sentence is negative by nature and negation such as: no,
not, never, nothing, nobody is present by nature. Example : Ravi does not hate
drinking juice..)
Gender differences: the difference exist in tag questions (little requests for
affirmation that are appended at the end of a sentence). We use tag questions for
confirmation.
Women are thought to produce more of these
For example: it’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?
Pragmatics
Pragmatics= use of language to accomplish various ends, these
rules dictate the choice of wording and interpretation of
language in social context. An example of pragmatics is how
the same word can have different meanings in different
settings.
Speaker vary politeness of their utterances, and their speech
depending upon the person they are addressing and on their
current role
Gender differences: women are more polite than men, they
are more likely to avoid direct imperatives, and phrase their
request in form of question.
Discourse
Discourse= connected speech (how sentences are related
to one another).
E.g. pronoun can not be used unless the noun to which
refers is used first.
Gender differences: differences has been reported in
narrative style;
Women tell stories (narratives) that include more directly
quoted speech,
Men stories contain an indirect way of indicating what
someone has said
Reference
Lisi, A.M. & Lisi, R.D. (2002). Biology, Society, and Behavior: The
Development of Sex Differences in Cognition. Westport CT: Ablex Publishing.
https://books.google.com.pk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=za8YHOZZ9CIC&oi=fnd&pg
=PA127&dq=%EF%83%BC%09Gender+differences+in+language+development&ot
s=PisfbAAy3q&sig=kgIoT34QIEIIg_DmzMidXEjX1yo#v=onepage&q=%EF%83%BC%0
9Gender%20differences%20in%20language%20development&f=false
Child’s Learning of morphology
In an experiment by Jean Berko, preschool and first grade
children, ranging from four to seven years in age, were
presented with a number of nonsense words and asked to
supply English plurals, verb tenses, possessives,
derivations and compounds of those words.
The answers were not always right so far as English is
concerned; but they were consistent and orderly answers
It was also found that boys and girls did equally
well on these items.
Next finding was that there were some
differences between the preschoolers and the
first graders.
These were predominantly on the items that the
group as a whole did best and worst on: since no
child in the preschool could supply the irregular
past rang, and a few in the first grade could, this
difference was significant.
Rule-Learning by 7-month old infants
In the study of Marcus et al. (1999), researchers
investigated the rule learning abilities of seven-month-old
infants.
They conducted an experiment to find out if seven-monthold infants were able to extract a rule from speech.
Infants were presented with an artificial grammar and
were familiarized to tri-syllabic synthetic sequences
organized in ABA or ABB patterns.
The goal was to see if infants could extract the rule from
the familiarization and apply it to novel sequences.
Familiarization phase: ('de-we-we'), ('de-di-de')
Test phase: In the test phase infants were presented with
new syllables with new phonological content, which
means they cannot rely on transitional probabilities
between ‘words’. The test phase contained three blocks
and in each block infants heard two consistent and two
inconsistent utterances.
Results: results showed that looking times to the
inconsistent grammar were longer than to the
consistent grammar, indicating that these infants
had the ability to extract the pattern and apply it
to novel sequences.
Three experiments show that 7-month-old infants attend longer to sentences with
unfamiliar structures than to sentences with familiar structures. The design of the
artificial language task used in these experiments ensured that this discrimination
could not be performed by counting, by a system that is sensitive only to transitional
probabilities, or by a popular class of simple neural network models. Instead, these
results suggest that infants can represent, extract, and generalize abstract algebraic
rules.
Bilingual Development: Child – Adult
differences
How Do Children Become Bilingual?
One of the first documented studies of childhood
bilingualism is only 100 years old when Jules Ronjat who
was a French linguist married to a German woman.
one person–one language strategy
Even in current times, there remains a strong belief that
growing up with two languages could be confusing to
children. But no evidence suggest this.
Even newborn infants exposed to two languages prenatally
can tell their languages apart based on simple rhythmic
differences
Children grow up bilingual under many different
circumstances.
A language’s status as a minority or majority language can
have a big impact on whether bilingual children will grow
up to use this language.
A majority language is a language used by most of the
population and is often recognized by the government as
an official language.
In contrast, a minority language is only spoken by a small
percentage of a population and may or may not be
officially recognized.
Children almost always acquire a community’s majority
language (Dutch in De Houwer’s study).
Language acquisition in childhood often follows a use‐it or
lose‐it principle.
Languages that do not continue to be heard or spoken are
lost through a process called language attrition, which can
happen to either the first or to later‐learned languages.
Similarities and Differences Between
Bilingual Children and Adults
There is considerable evidence for a sensitive period for
language acquisition: on the whole, languages can be
more easily and completely mastered when exposure
begins early in life.
On the other hand, despite the sensitive period for
language, individuals can and do become bilingual at any
age, from infancy to adulthood.
Language acquisition depends not only on
linguistic abilities but also on other cognitive
capacities such as memorization and
categorization, as well as the motor skills
necessary to control the tongue, jaw, and lips.
On the one hand, this puts children at a
language‐learning disadvantage to adults, as they
have less developed extra linguistic skills.
However, children’s limitations can sometimes be
to their advantage.
Elissa Newport (1990) has put forward the Less is
More Hypothesis.
She proposes that, because of their cognitive
limitations, young children have to analyze
language in very small chunks, much smaller than
the chunks that adults can analyze.
As such, they are better at ignoring
inconsistencies in the input, and finding regular
patterns and rules.
Children’s language‐learning experiences can also be
systematically different from those of adults.
Young children are spoken to in a special speech register,
known as child‐directed or infant‐directed speech (IDS).
Infant‐directed speech (IDS): exaggerated intonation
contours, longer pauses, simplified sentences, and
repetition.
Many studies have shown that IDS is beneficial to infant
language development.
Interestingly, some research has suggested that IDS might
also be helpful to adults learning words in a new language
