Early language acquisition 2013년 1학기 언어와 심리 담당교수: 홍우평

Main points Comprehension and production of gestures(communication prior to language) reveal a basic understanding of communication processes Sound system + communicative gestures ⇒ productive speech The development of one-word speech: the acquisition of the lexicon & the use of single words to express larger chunks of meaning First word combinations: neither an imitations of adult speech nor fully grammatical by adult standards

Intro Children’s development until they have mastered the basic linguistic structures of the language at about 3 years of age Infant’s communication skills prior to language The master of the phonology One-word utterances → early attempts to acquire the grammar (English vs. ASL)

Prelinguistic communication Intro Infant’s understanding of communication(e.g. how actions can be used as means for achieving desired goals) precedes and facilitates much of the child’s acquisition of phonology, syntax, and semantics. There are some important underlying functional similarities in the communication skills of younger and older children.

Prelinguistic communication The social context of preverbal infants Speech to children prior to birth Anecdotal evidence from mother-to-be: kicking e.g. Experimental evidence: sucking rate studies indicate that the infants had heard and retained the stories presented to them in utero. Newborns prefer their mother’s voices over those of strangers

Prelinguistic communication Speech to children in the first year of life Child-directed speech(baby talk, motherese) of caregivers: higher in pitch, more variable in pitch, more exaggerated in intonational contours than adult-directed speech (phonological differences) Evidence suggesting that infants prefer to listen to baby talk rather than adult-directed speech: head turn experiments Mothers use speech that directs attention to particular aspects of their message: in a way that highlights attention on new words at the expense of older ones

Prelinguistic communication Encouraging infants to participate in conversations (a sample dialogue of p. 250) – pulling intentionality out of a preintentional child

Prelinguistic communication Prelinguistic gestures Intro Children’s smiles/cries elicit parental behavior, but are not true forms of intentional communication (do not display flexible, goal-directed behavior) – simply a built-in response with predictable consequences Development of communicative intent At around 8 months of age (infants begin to show problem-solving behavior): pointing and showing, in a communicative manner – meant to communicate something or not?

Prelinguistic communication Criteria to determine whether a behavior displays an intent to communicate: (i) waiting (ii) persistence (iii) development of alternative plans Children are able to approach individual/social goals with a sense of purpose and with a degree of flexibility not present earlier Beginning of intentional communication True intentional communication: children apply their understanding of means-and-ends relationships to social goals: early prelinguistic gestures Assertions (declaratives) – the use of an object as a means of obtaining adult attention Requests (imperatives) – the use of adults as means to an object

Prelinguistic communication The child’s communicative advances: a result of fundamental changes in cognition during infancy (understanding intentionality) Using familiar behavior for novel ends: making sounds and gestures to get adult attention, provoke humor, etc. Using novel means to achieve familiar goals Prelinguistic children use gestures to get the receiver’s attention and to communicate. The transition to speech acts can then be viewed as learning how to do with words what already has been done without words.

Prelinguistic communication Communicative competence and early comprehension Children also use the communicatively based strategies for comprehension prior to developing full mastery of the various structures of their language. Children often respond to complex speech by using a simple, action-based comprehension strategy: a consistent preference for actions responses across a wide range of sentence types (imperatives or questions) Meaning (a primitive system of intentions) precedes and guides both comprehension and production

To be continued …..

Early phonology Intro

Early phonology The development of speech perception Categorical perception in infancy Recording sucking responses Infant’s sucking rates co-varies with the categorical differences of the phonemes presented Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the related studies is that infants are not limited to those distinctions that are phonemic in their native language – categorical perception is innate!

Early phonology The role of language experience The ability to perceive phonemic distinctions from other languages declines in strength during the firs year of life: perceptual reorganization The ability to distinguish between probable and less probable sound sequences is important in the ability to segment speech into words: prettybaby bidakupadotigolabubidaku Experiment

Early phonology The role of prosodic factors Infants could distinguish between utterances in their maternal language and those in another language by 4 days of life – based on prosodic cues such as intonational contours

Early phonology The development of speech production Babbling: a form of play in which various sounds are practiced and mastered before they are used in communicative ways Cooing (by the end of the 2 months): exercising some control over the articulatory organs to produce a great variety of sounds (in the back of the mouth) Reduplicated babbling (6~7 months): babababa Variegated babbling (11~12 months): bigodabu (sentence-like intonational contour) – beginning to acquire the phonology of native language

Early phonology Transition to speech Children come to use “true” words Greater motor control of the speech apparatus Cognitive maturation which enables infants to express communicative intent The dawning awareness that things have names Children’s invent of their own symbols to refer to objects/events: idiomorphs - used in highly consistent ways (a transitional stage between babbling and true words) ca ca for milk ABCDE for ice cream Whew! (hello)

Early phonology Idiomorphs underline several important aspects of development Indicating that children’s language is creative Indicating children’s consistency in referring to objects Phonological processes in early words (table 10-1, p. 261) Reduction: deletion/elimination of sounds Coalescence: phonemes from different syllables are combined into a single syllable Assimilation Reduplication

Early phonology Why do children make these errors? The child cannot discriminate between the sounds that are confused? (↔ fis phenomenon) The child cannot produce the omitted sounds? (↔ ability to imitate adult’s pronunciation) Simplification errors are a more general linguistic process – a complex phonological sequence might ‘overload’ children’s information processing capacity It is not possible at present to firmly conclude that any of these 3 ideas are correct…..

One word at a time Intro The child begins to acquire the lexicon of the language (one word stage: 1 yr. ~ 2.5 yr.) The appropriate use of various words, and correct pronunciation – common toys, members of the family, favorite events etc. Children are developing the ability to make comments about the world around them (using only one word at a time)

One word at a time Lexical development Early words Mainly nominals that refer to concrete aspects of their environments: ‘here and now’ Not limited to (general) nominals – specific nominals (Mommy), action words (up, go), modifiers (dirty, pretty), personal/social words (please, want), function words (what, for), etc.

One word at a time Overextension and underextension Overextension: too many items into a word class: dog for all four-legged animals Underextension: using a word in a more restrictive way than adult usage: shoes only for mothers’ shoes Why over/under-extension? Miscategorization of the objects? The correct names not yet acquired? An attempt at humor?

One word at a time The role of adult speech Original word game The basic problem: no one-to-one association between a word and its referent A given referent may be named by several words A given word may apply to more than one referent The whole object? A part of the object? Caregivers tend to choose the basic-level terms which are intermediate in a hieararchy → acquisition of semantic network Caregiver’s ostensive definition (That is an X) mainly (95%) refers to the whole object

One word at a time The manner in which caregivers play the original word game seems ideally suited to promoting the child’s lexical development Cognitive constraints: some clear biases or preferences children have in learning new words (working assumptions) Whole object bias: dog as a label for the entire object Taxonomic bias: dog as a label for a group of animals Mutual exclusive bias: only one name for one object

One word at a time Holophrases A single-word utterance to express more than the meaning usually attributed to that single word Water – I want water / There is water Approaches to holophrases Holophrase as an implicit sentence: children at the holophrase stage have some syntactic knowledge but are not able to express them formally Dog: The dog is drinking water

One word at a time More functional view: children use single words as adults use sentences but do not actually have the grammatical knowledge implicit in a sentence: children use the environment (context) as the rest of their utterance (table 10-2, p. 268)

Early grammar Intro Word combinations by about 2 yrs. of age Differences between learning English vs. Korean Important similarities at least in early stages: basic child grammar (Slobin)

Early grammar Measure of syntactic growth Child’s chronological age? 2 measures of syntactic development MLU (mean length of utterances in morphemes): an index of child’s ability to combine morphemes in a productive manner (Brown) IPSyn (index of productive syntax)

Early grammar MLU-defined stages of language development I (~ 1.75): putting words together II (~ 2.25): learning to modulate the meaning of the utterances by the use of grammatical morphemes III (~ 2.75): learning more complex constructions (questions, negatives, etc.) IV (~ 3.5) V (~ 4)