Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Infants rate of acquisition – approx 7 words/day, birth-6 vocabulary size – 10-14,000 at 6 creative language use

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Infants Speech Perception in Infancy phonemes speech-sound categories across speakers Eimas and coauthors habituation studies, sucking response dishabituation indicates perceiving difference between sounds Recognize native language sounds at or soon after birth Recognize all sounds in all languages at birth – disappears by 1-year

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Infants Speech Perception in Infancy Werker and Tees—distinguishing sounds in other languages Kuhl—relearning lost distinctions language rhythms bilingual homes and language discrimination

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Infants Language Comprehension in Infancy By 6 months old, infants are fairly good a perceiving and understanding simple spoken language 1.Recognizing important words name, mommy, daddy 2.Discriminating between grammatical words and meaning words

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Infants Language Comprehension in Infancy 3.Understanding the correspondence between sound and sight emotional tone of spoken language Walker-Andrews recordings of either a happy voice or an angry voice side-by-side films of happy speaker and angry speaker infants watched the face that matched the emotion of the voice

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Infants Language Comprehension in Infancy 4.Appreciating semantic concepts Mandler and colleagues—concepts about objects distinguishing between visually similar objects animate/inanimate objects "animal" vs. "vehicle" categories concepts become more refined

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Infants Language Production in Infancy Cooing – 2 months, vowels only (aaa) Babbling – 6 months, consonants + vowels (baaa) intentional communication – at 8-10 months

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Infants Adults' Language to Infants child-directed speech / motherese adults typically use a different language style when speaking to infants Repetition, slow, high pitch, exagerated expression differences across language communities mothers who are depressed

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Children Words early words and concepts – generalize (1  many) word production comprehension of words interrelationship of memory and language

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Children Words fast mapping—using context to make a reasonable guess about a word's meaning Heibeck and Markman (1987) series of paired objects familiar and unfamiliar terms overextension underextension

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Children Morphology morphemes morphology pay greater attention to phrases with appropriate morphology create their own regular forms little or no grammatical morphemes below 15 months (drink / drinking)

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Children Morphology overregularization—the tendency to add the most customary morphemes to create new forms of irregular words (runned, goed, eated) parallel distributed processing explanation—language system keeps tally of morpheme patterns; patterns of excitation within neural networks account for overregularization rule-and-memory theory (Marcus)—children learn a general rule for past-tense verbs and also store in memory the past tenses for many irregular verbs

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Children Syntax combining words into sentences (18-24 months) two-word utterances Daddy home Dolly sick morphology and syntax Me going active process using syntax cues

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Children Pragmatics learning the social rules of language what to say, to whom, language styles, coordinating conversations

Cognition 7e, Margaret MatlinChapter 13 The Development of Language Language in Children Pragmatics adapting language to the listener Shatz and Gelman (1973) 4-year-olds speaking to 2-year-olds, 4-year-olds and adults 2-year olds speaking to infants taking turns in conversation gestures of interest; listener responses