PSYC 302 LEC 10

Language Development

Language: What’s Covered?

- What is language?
o The 4 components of language
- Developmental milestones in language acquisition
o The 4 main “stages” before adult-like speech
- How do we acquire language
o Overcoming 2 main language “problems”
o Review of cues or biases to solve these problems

Symbols
- Systems for representing and conveying information
- 1 thing ‘stands for’ something else
o e.g. numbers, pictures, maps, language (e.g. X marks spot on map means
something else than just X)
- Words are social conventions (arbitrary relationships agreed upon by a social group)
o Dog = (img of dog)

What makes something a language?

- Sound transfer? Communication of Meaning?
o E.g. stop sign? (it conveys something to us), thermostat?,
- Researchers argue for generativity
- Generativity: Ability to convey an infinite number of novel concepts

4 Components of Language

-
- Phonological development: learning abt sound system of a lang (phonemes)
- Semantic Development: Learning abt expressing meaning (morphemes)
- Grammar – Syntatctic Development: Learning rules for combing sounds/words
(syntax/grammar)
 - Pragmatics – Pragmatic development: Learning how lang is used (mentalinguistic
knowledge) (e.g. can you tell me what time it is? NOT LOOKING FOR “yes”)

Language
- Language Comprehension
o Understanding what others say (or certain aspects)
- Language Production
o Actual speaking (or manually producing) those aspects
- Language comprehension precedes production!

Language Comprehension Precedes Production

- Recognize their own name at 4.5 months
- When they hear “Mommy” or “Daddy” they look towards the correct person at 6 months
(established meaning w word)
- 12 - 14 month olds listen longer to sentences with normal word order rather than
scrambled order
- 13 - 15 month olds appreciate that word combinations carry meaning beyond the
individual words e.g. “She’s kissing the keys” (vs. ball) (know to look at which one when
referring to “kissing the keys”)

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Language Development (milestones)

- Cooing “stage” (begins 6 - 8 weeks)
o produce simple speech sounds (gooo, aaahh) and vocal gymnastics (smacks,
clicks, bubbles)
o Improved motor control of vocalizations
o Imitate sounds of their partners, high pitched for Mom and lower for Dads
o Will imitate speech sounds they hear from a tape

Language Development
- Babbling “stage” (begins 6 - 10 months)
o produce vowel consonant syllables in repetition (bababa)
o Babble only a limited set of sounds, some not in their native language
o Gradually it takes on the sounds, rhythm and intonation patterns of the language
they hear around them (called prosody), babbling sounds more like lang arnd
them (can tell English babbler vs Hindi babbler)
  Adults can pick out the babbling of an infant from their own language
from infants in other languages (due to pruning and prosody: (babbling
sounds more like the common lang))
o Deaf infants exposed to sign language manually babble (repeat parts/forms they
see in certain gestures)

Language Development
- Holophrastic Period (begins 10-15 months)
o One-word utterances that express a “whole phrase” e.g “Drink”, “up”
o First words include mostly nouns (dada, ball, juice), frequent events or routines
(bye-bye, night-night), some modifiers (mine, all gone, uh-oh)
o Overextensions sometimes occur (e.g. dog for other animals, daddy for all men)
probably due to their limited vocabulary rather than a lack of knowledge
 Terms used too broadly

Language Development
- Telegraphic Speech (begins end of 2nd year ~24 mths)
o Begin to combine words into simple “sentences”
o Often 2 word utterances (only essential elements like in telegrams/text) e.g. more
juice, hurt knee, eat cookie
o gradually child begins to add first person pronouns, verb endings, plurals e.g. “I
eating cookies” then functions words etc. a, the, of, in…
o Practice on their own “Crib-talk”

Language Development
- Telegraphic Speech (begins end of 2nd year ~24 mths)
o Begin to combine words into simple “sentences”
o Evidence for internalized grammatical rules (IGR):
 Consistent word order (never “cookie eat”) (e.g. eat cookie)
 Overregularization errors (goed, foots, mans)
 When they can’t think of the correct tense word quick enough, they
use what they know (bringed instead of brought)
 Application of rules to novel words (e.g. The Wug test)
 If they just used words like “stayed, played, tucked etc…, we
wouldn’t know if they were using rule or just words they’ve heard

Example Q:
If John uses the words played and stayed would this be considered evidence for IGR? (T/F)

UG vs IGR
- UG: Universal Grammar (innate): Abstract concept, components that exists across all
lang (all lang have verbs)(brain has dedicated modules that help make learning fast and
efficient)
o Language has 2 areas: Broca’s (production) and Wernicke’s (comprehension)
o No particular language is innate, just some components that allow to learn lang
quick
 - IGR: Internalized Grammatical Rules (learned): specific to language ur learning

Is Language Learning Hard?

- English oddities
o The farm was used to produce produce

Language Learning is an Impressive Feat

- We know 60,000+ words by the time we graduate high school
- ~ 10 words a day (or 100 1/10ths of a word)
- Learning of imaginary pairings (like capital cities or baseball averages) every 90 mins of
waking life since age 1
- Recovering facts = slow, hard
- Recovering words = fast, effortless
- Fast-mapping of words from single exposures

Fast-Mapping
- Can you bring me the chromium tray?

o
- Fast-mapping definition: Quick word-object/concept mapping through brief exposure
(one exposure) or incidental learning rather than direct teaching
- (contrary to text) the word CAN be used by contrasting familiar and unfamiliar but need
NOT be
o e.g. “Let’s use the koba to measure these things”
- Children learn “accidentally”
- Contrast item isn’t necessary for fast-mapping
- Can pick things up in casual convo w/o direct teaching

Language: What’s Covered?

- What is language?
o The 4 components of language
- Developmental milestones in language acquisition
o The 4 main “stages” before adult-like speech
- How do we acquire language
o Overcoming 2 main language “problems”
o Review of cues or biases to solve these problems

Problem 1: Parsing-problem (cutting into parts)

- Word-segmentation problem
 -
- These words string together unless you know what they mean and which go together to
form a word you can’t figure out where one ends and another begins

Solving the Word Segmentation Problem

- Infants pick up on statistical regularities (co-occurrences) (hearing many sentences in
same lang, can pick up when one sound co-occurs with another)
o E.g. you have pretty hair, pretty flower, pretty dress
 Know when you hear pre sound, it is followed by t sound
 Something followed by d-dress, g-girl, f-flower (when co-occurrence is
high, they think its probably a word)
- Co-occurrence: Within the word (pre “tty”) (pre co-occurs with tty) = must be a word

Other cues that can help children learn/parse language

- Prosody--the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonation pattern, stress,
etc., with which language is spoken
- Infant directed speech (IDS)
o Characteristics: Emotional tone, Slow and clear, exaggerated speech, exaggerated
facial expressions
o Infants like IDS better than regular speech
o Infants learn more words in IDS
o IDS is NOT universal (but very common) (some learn thru using passive lsning to
speech)
 - Scaffolding: Conversation and narrative schemes (turn-taking)(input others give you)
(e.g. given another word, itll help you identify that word knowing where it starts and ends
and helps you understand where another word may begin and end)
- Most useful cue is statistical occurrences

Problem 2: Quinean Reference Problem

- Alien sees foreign animal on grass and says “Gavagai” (could mean rabbit, funny, part of
animal, “look at that!”) (it could mean anything which is the reference problem)
- Does it refer to something?
- If so, what does it refer to?

How do they do it? (how do children figure it out?) (NOT how most researchers think
children learn)
- Behaviorist/Associative Learning Account (common sense approach)
- Example: Child toddles after dog and mother says “Dog!” That’s the dog. Your chasing
the dog. Dog! Child says “Daw”. Mother smiles and says Yes. Dog.!
o Parents label objects for the child
o Child begins to associate the word it hears with the object it sees at the time the
word is uttered
o Parent’s give positive or negative reinforcement or feedback (smiling, correcting,
etc.)

Arguments Against Behaviorist Accounts

- ~ 30 % of the time a word is uttered the object it refers to isn’t present
- When parents do label things it is mostly nouns
- They have to learn abstract terms and “non-nouns” with no word-world mappings (e.g.
friends/I/she/he)
- Parents rarely give feedback, and its often ineffective
- Children learn language in cultures where parents don’t even speak to them

Solving the Reference Problem

- Whole Object Bias
- Basic-level Bias
- Shape and Function Biases
- Linguistic Context (grammatical form of the word)
- Syntactic Bootstrapping (grammatical structure of sentence)
- Mutual Exclusivity Bias
- Theory of Mind and Pragmatics

Whole Object Bias

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- When we first learn a label, we assume it refers to the WHOLE object rather than a part
- Gavagai and point to rabbit we assume it’s the whole rabbit, not tail, hair, color
- If point to the truck and say “tire” infant will assume the Whole truck = tire

Basic-level Bias
- Basic-level bias: they learn basic level (e.g., dog) before subordinate (e.g., poodle,
hound) or superordinate (e.g., pet, mammal, animal)
- First time they hear word, they assume it at the basic level

Shape and Function Biases

- Function bias:
o Shape is a good cue to function
o When shape and function are pitted against ea other, function usually wins

o
o Even though those are different shapes, because they share common function,
they assume they all share common label (e.g. call them all a Taddle)
- Shape bias (wins if they don’t know the function)
 o
o Shape is a good cue to function
o When shape and function are pitted against ea other, function usually wins
o For shape change, they don’t know if the label “modi” refers to this one (50/50)
o For texture change and size change, they assume modi does refer to these ones as
well no matter if they change in color/texture/size, just needs to be same shape

Linguistic Context

- Meaning of “sib”: changes depending on the syntactic context

o E.g. Sibbing (action) vs some sibs (may refer to the sand), the sib (must apply to
the bowl)
o Gives us an idea of what the word is
o Requires understanding some grammatical rule

Syntactic Bootstrapping (grammatical structure)

-
- “Cookie Monster is gorping Big Bird.” Children can figure out what “gorping” means by
using the syntactic structure of the sentence. They know that “gorping” is what Cookie
Monster is doing to Big Bird - -not what Big Bird is doing.
o Using linguistic context to figure out what gorping means (e.g. its an action)
o Use whole sentence (boostrapping) to figure out its what cookie monster is doing,
not what big bird is doing
Mutual Exclusivity Bias (one thing should not refer to another)

-
- Where is the blicket?
o Child will assume left is blicket if they’ve seen a hammer and know what it is
from before
o Blicket probably isn’t another word for hammer and will apply it to new item
- There are cases where some objects have more than one label though (its not a perfect
rule)

Theory of Mind and Pragmatics (how lang is used)

- A few examples:
o Joint attention—eye gaze & intention reading
o Selective social learning – (e.g., deciding who is most knowledgeable source)
 Children try to figure out who is most competent source/more
knowledgeable
 E.g. jenny mislabels all the objects
 E.g. ben labels all correctly
o New objects kids don’t have labels for
 Ben says I think that’s a Ferber, jenny said other object is a Ferber
 Children prefer more knowledgeable
o Tomasello’s bucket study
 See if child can use nonverbal cues
 Experimenter says: I want to find my Phep, reach into bucket look
disappointed put it bk in, look in 2nd bucket look meh and put it bk in,
etc… then ask child to grab the phep
 They were able to read facial expression when he reached in 3rd bucket
with “ah 😊” expression
 Also Provides support/evidence against association account: They are
doing more than just associating word w object
 Also evidence
o An intention reading explanation of Mutual Exclusivity

Q: What is evidence against the association account?

- A. Bucket study
- B. Joint attention
- C. Selective social learning
- D. Mutual exclusivity
Mutual Exclusivity/Lexical Contrast

-
- Where is the blicket?
- They have bias that labels should be mutually exclusive
- OR
- They are using theory of mind to figure out what the speaker is referring to (reading
others intention)

Theory of Mind and Word Learning (reading others intention)

-
- “Can you give me the bem?”
- Bem should apply to yellow due to mutual exclusivity

Pragmatic (theory of Mind) Account of Lexical Contrast (reading others intention)

- Can you give me the bem?
o The speaker wants 1 of the 2 objects. If she wanted me to give her the one she
called jop she would have done so in some way I would understand. But instead
she used a different word--She must intend to refer to something different.
- Must infer they want other one

Another example (take out mutual exclusivity by not looking at language, took out the
word of the item) (more about reading the others intention)
 -
- “can you give me the one I keep in the bedroom?”
o Same Speaker Results: The other one--not the one my uncle gave me
 Cuz if she wanted the red one she’d refer to it as the one “my uncle gave
me” but she didn’t, so we infer it’s the other one
o Different Speaker Results: 50/50
 New speaker, so it cant be that her uncle gave her the red one, can’t read
new persons intention, so it can refer to either one

Review: Solving the Reference problem

- See list above

What we covered
- What is language?
o The 4 components of language
- Developmental milestones in language acquisition
o The 4 main stages before adult-like speech
- How do we acquire language
o Overcoming 2 main language “problems”
o Review of cues or biases to solve these problems