Psycholinguistics 10
Early language Acquisition
Prelinguistic Communication
• Social Context of Preverbal Infants
• Child-directed speech, or baby talk or motherese:
This speech tends to be higher n pitch, more
variable in pitch and more exaggerated in its
intonational contours. Infants prefer to listen to
baby talk rather than adult-directed speech.
Mothers also use this speech to draw the bay’s
attention to particular aspects of their message.
• Child-directed speech encourage infants to
participate in conversations. This makes the child
think of language as a social activity with rules
and as an activity of communication with one
another.
Prelinguistic Gestures
• Criteria for communication intention: waiting,
persistence, and development of alternative plans.
• At 8 months, infants become more purposeful in
their behavior.
• Prelinguistic children use gestures to get the
receiver’s attention and to communicate. The
transition to speech acts can be viewed as learning
how to do with words what already has been done
without words.
Early phonology
• The child’s first attempts at producing sounds
have more to do with practicing with sound
system than with communicating with others.
• Phonological findings with the neighbor’s child:
• The errors are systematic, not random.
• Children can produce a distinction in imitation
that cannot be made accurately in conversational
speech. (ZeteZeke)
• Children can perceive a distinction that she cannot
produce.
The development of speech perception
• Eimas (1971) categorical perception: infants are born
with perceptual mechanisms that are attuned to
speech categories. (Infants sucked at a pacifier while
given different VOTs)
• Lasky (1975) tests also prove that infants are born
with the ability to perceive a number of phonemic
distinctions and categorical perception is innate.
• The ability to perceive phonemic distinctions from
other languages starts to decline about 1 month of
age, and there was considerable decline at 8 months.
They can segment speech into words.
• Infants are able to discriminate prosodic cues almost
at the birth (4 days of life).
Development of Speech Production
• Babbling (6 to 7 months)
• Duplicated babbling: repeat consonant-vowel
sequence, e.g. bababababa
• Variegated babbling (11-12month): syllable strings
consist of varying consonants and vowels, e.g.
bigodabu
• Infants begin to impose sentence-like intonational
contours on their utterances. Their vowels begin to
sound similar to those in their native language.
• Role of babbling: a form of play to practice sound,
noncommunicative.
Transition to speech
• At 1 year old, children begin to use both gestures
and speech to communicate meanings.
• Idiomorph: their own symbols to refer to objects
or events.
• Significance of idiomorphs:
• Children’s language is creative.
• They learn that it is important to be consistent
when referring to objects.
Phonological process
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Phonological Processes Used by Children
Type
Examples
Reduction
Tore for store
Coalescence
Paf for pacifier
Assimilation
Nance for dance
Reduplication
Titty for kitty
Reasons
• The child cannot discriminate between the
sounds that are confused.
• The child simply cannot produce the
omitted sounds
• These errors are part of a more general
linguistic process.
Lexical Development
• Early words: here and now, concrete
nominals, moving objects
• Acquisition order: general nominals,
specific nominals, action words, modifiers,
personal and social words, function words
Overextention and underextension
• Children sometimes use too many items into their
word classes (overextention), sometimes use a
word in a more restrictive way (underextention).
• Role of adult speech
• Adults use basic-level terms when helping
children to learn the language.
• Adults provide ostensive definitions (That is an X.)
to help children understand what part of the whole
object is referred.
• Gestures also help to teach children to name
objects.
Cognitive constrains
• Children are constrained to consider only some of
the possibilities.
• Whole object bias: when children encounter a new
label, they prefer to attach the label to the entire
object rather than to part of the objects.
• Taxonomic bias: they will assume that the object
label is a taxonomic category rather than a name
for an individual object.
• Mutual exclusivity bias: if a child knows the name
of a particular object, he will generally reject
applying a second name to that object.
Early Grammar
• Children tend to combine content words and leave
out function words: this suggests that the child has
an understanding of this grammatical distinction
as well as an intuitive appreciation that content
words may be more informative than function
words.
• Children know that particular words are put in
particular positions in the sentence.
• These utterances are in the form of an agent and
an action or a proposition.
Early Grammar
• Brown (1973): these early utterances are
expressing semantic relations. Table 10-3:
11 semantic relations comprise 75% of
children’s two-word utterances.
• Semantic bootstrapping: children use their
knowledge of semantic relations to learn
syntactic relations.
True speech
Single-word utterances.
• Two-word
utterances,
Grammar"
• Connective grammar
• Recursive grammar
or
"Pivot
Single-word utterances
• The child begins to use single-word utterances
when he is around 12 to 18 months old. His
vocabulary grows remarkably:
•
15-24 months
50 words
•
72 months
14,000 words
(including inflections and derivations; root
words = 8000) About 9 words a day, or 1 word
per waking hour
• The utterance is a speech of content words, chiefly
nouns and verbs: it lacks function words.
Two-word utterances, or "Pivot
Grammar"
• It can be described as a kind of
telegraphic speech.
• Just like a sentence = word + word, we
have forms like: P+O, O+P, O+O, O
A semantic relation approach to twoword utterances
• Two-word utterances do not combine
any two isolated words, only words
that are semantically related are
combined. Word order is made use of
to show different meanings. So the
"Teddy
bear
monkey"
can
be
expressed as
"Teddy bear", "Bear
monkey", "Teddy monkey", but not as
"bear teddy", "Monkey bear", and
"Monkey teddy."
A semantic relation approach to twoword utterances
• The following word-orders are popular in
two-word utterances:
• Agent --- action (Granny come)
• Possessor --- possessed (Mommy sock)
• Entity ---- attribute (pillow here)
A semantic relation approach to twoword utterances
• We can easily see how two-word utterances
develop into adult's grammar
• (agent+action) + (action+object) ----•
agent+action+object
• Daddy throw Throw ball Daddy throw ball
• (action+object)+(possessor+possessed)—
•
action + possessor +possessed
•
Bring shoe My shoe ---- Bring my shoe
Connective grammar
• Overgeneration: The child may make some
premature guesses as to the notions which are
grammatically marked in his language.
• There are two theories about overgeneralization.
• Rule-and-memory model: Children have
access to a rule. In addition children
have store past tense forms of irregular
verbs in memory. Then a stored irregular
form takes precedence over the rule.
• Parallel distributed processing model:
The mental representation of verbs is a
set of connections in a network rather
than rules such as the past tense rule.
Recursive grammar
• In this stage, the child not only uses
grammar, but also realizes that language has
a grammatical system. He builds up a sense
of grammaticality, so self-corrections are
frequent by age three.