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

2. 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

3. 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)

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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

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

8. 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?

9. 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

10. 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.

11. 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

12. To be continued …..

13. Early phonology
Intro

14. 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!

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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)

19. 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

20. 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…..

21. 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)

22. 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.

23. 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?

24. 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

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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)

28. 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)

29. 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)

30. 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)