Test Bank Chapter 3 Language Development Foundations

Teaching Resources Chapter 3

Links

• [basic – intermediate] There are several sites that provide information about behavioral methods used to study the capabilities of infants. These clips include examples of infants participating in particular methods

Habituation study (Saffran Lab): http://www.waisman.wisc.edu/infantlearning/Participation_files/Language.mpg

Head Turn Preference Procedure (Mintz Lab):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZAuZ—Yeqo

Head Turn Preference Procedure (Werker Lab):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAU5CAl1U6M&feature=related

Intermodal Preferential Looking/Looking while Listening Paradigm (Fernald Lab):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=verqCmPrnY8

These sites provide information more generally about how the method works:

Overviews of several methods (Lidz Lab):

http://ling.umd.edu/labs/acquisition/?page=methods

Overviews of several methods (Gomez Lab):

http://web.arizona.edu/~tigger/index_files/studyinfo.htm

Intermodal Preferential Looking/Looking while Listening Paradigm (Naigles Lab): http://www.cll.uconn.edu/ipl.html

• [intermediate] The role of socioeconomic status on language development (as well as other aspects of development) is one that has great societal importance. Here are a few links summarizing research findings in this area:

http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-education.aspx

http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/earlycld/ea7lk5.htm

http://www.hcplive.com/articles/Nature-vs-Nurture-How-Socioeconomic-Status-Affects-Cognitive-Development

Activities for Students

• Discover that you have in fact tuned to your native language! Go to the UCLA archives (http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/main2.htm) and choose a language you are unfamiliar with. In the archives, you will find word lists and be able to listen to native speakers producing those words. Using the word list, find sounds that are transcribed with different symbols: that’s the way you can tell that the sounds really are phonetically different. Then, listen to a native speaker say words containing those sounds. Try to find two minimal word pairs (that is, a pair of words that differ in terms of just one sound) where you CAN hear the differences between the sounds and two minimal word pairs where you CANNOT hear the difference.

• Across languages, Infant Directed Speech (IDS) shares many common features, particularly with respect to intonation and emotional tone. To hear these differences, watch the movie Babies, which follows the development of four babies from different cultures from birth to around age 12 months (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020938/ for details about the movie). Identify at least 3 ways in which IDS is similar across the languages/cultures shown and 1 way in which it is different.

• Language is critical for communicating some kinds of information, but other kinds of information can be conveyed quite well through non-linguistic and extra-linguistic means. To see how this works, watch this episode of the fake soap opera ¿Que Hora Es? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WckCw_-7e3M). Identify two specific messages that are communicated outside of the language being used. Identify a limitation of relying solely on non-linguistic and extra-linguistic elements. Provide examples from the film clip.

Online Movies

Movies on CD

Quicktime Movies

Sample Test Questions

1. The importance of communication for the development of language is that:
   1. virtually all of language development can be explained in terms of communicative needs.
   2. children appear to require a live communicative context to motive their learning.
   3. communication plays no role in the process of language development.
   4. young children have no need to use language to communicate.
2. Joint attention is:
   1. a social-communicative act in which a person pays attention to transitions, or joints, in an event
   2. a social-communicative act in which a person asks another person to join them in an activity
   3. a social-communicative act in which a person jointly attends to both an object and another person
   4. a formal computational process required for attending to multiple stimuli
3. Which of the following is NOT an example of early intention reading?
   1. an infant monitors a speaker’s gaze to infer the object they are labeling.
   2. an infant infers the probable goal of an adult by watching them attempt an action.
   3. an infant expresses her intentions by crying when she is hungry.
   4. all of the above are examples of early intention reading.
4. Children’s early use of gesture is:
   1. largely unrelated to children’s language development.
   2. an impediment to children’s language development because it allows for communication outside of language.
   3. only important for children learning sign languages.
   4. predictive of children’s language abilities and development.
5. To investigate whether or not an infant understood the meanings of words she did not yet understand, a researcher showed the infant pairs of objects on the screen and monitored her eye-gaze as one of the objects was labeled. This method is called:
   1. the conditioned head-turn procedure.
   2. the intermodal preferential looking paradigm.
   3. the habituation method.
   4. the Near-infrared spectroscopy method.
6. Which of the following constitutes true evidence that infants can hear and learn about sounds in-utero?
   1. the fact that 6 weeks after birth, infants prefer to listen to specific passages of poetry they were read in-utero.
   2. the fact that infants cry when they hear loud sounds after birth.
   3. the fact that by 12 months of age, infants have tuned their perception to their native language.
   4. the fact that babies are born with fully developed ears.
7. Categorical Perception of phonemes refers to the fact that:
   1. Linguists can categorize all of the perceived sounds into phonemes.
   2. we hear sounds as belonging to a single phoneme category, even though the acoustic differences between sounds are along a continuous dimension.
   3. the phoneme /b/ has a shorter voice onset time (VOT) than the phoneme /p/ has.
   4. infants tune their perceptual system to categorize phonemes over the first year of life.
8. Infants are called “universal listeners” because:
   1. they spend so much time listening to everything going on around them.
   2. they categorically perceive phonemes.
   3. they can discriminate among a large – perhaps universal – set of phones.
   4. they possess a universal grammar (UG) which allows them to process what they listen to into a grammar.
9. Infants who tune their perceptual system to their native language phonemes more quickly:
   1. are not able to make categorical distinctions among phonemes.
   2. are also more likely to retain the ability to perceive non-native phoneme contrasts.
   3. show later difficulties with non-auditory aspects of language development.
   4. show more rapid language development in the word learning stage.
10. Studies of infants’ statistical learning abilities have shown that:
    1. infants calculate simple t-tests to determine where word boundaries are.
    2. infants can keep track of statistical properties of their input, but they require hours (if not days) of exposure to make useful inferences.
    3. infants can use the statistical properties of their input to help them find words and also higher level elements such as grammatical categories.
    4. infants cannot calculate statistics.
11. Which of the following provides evidence that, at least in part, children’s language development depends on their general cognitive skills?
    1. the fact that the left hemisphere of the brain is largely responsible for storing and representing language.
    2. the fact that children require input from a real live human being to be successful in language development.
    3. the fact that the size of children’s phonological memory predicts their vocabulary size.
    4. the fact that there are disorders that can specifically target language ability.
12. If a very young child has early problems with a low-level aspect of language, such as processing individual sounds in a sequence, her troubles may compound over time and lead to difficulties with higher level aspects of language, such as syntax. This phenomenon is called:
    1. a developmental retrogression.
    2. a developmental progression.
    3. a developmental cascade.
    4. a developmental sequence.
13. Which of the following are true about Infant Directed Speech (IDS)?
    1. IDS contains more prototypical vowels than Adult Directed Speech.
    2. IDS carries consistent emotional messages across different languages.
    3. Infants prefer to listen to IDS over Adult Directed Speech.
    4. all of the above are true statements about IDS.
14. Which type of feedback about their grammar usage are children likely to get from their parents?
    1. Direct feedback: when children say things incorrectly (e.g. “I holded the doll”) parents tell the child they said it wrong (or, they said it silly) and tell them the correct way to say the sentence.
    2. Indirect feedback: when children say things incorrectly (e.g. “I holded the doll”) parents are more likely to ask for clarification and when children say things correctly, (e.g. “I held the doll”) parents are more likely to repeat the sentence back to the child.
    3. Children do not receive any explicit feedback about their language use.
    4. Both A and B describe common types of feedback children receive about their language use.
15. Compared to children raised in high Socioeconomic households, children from low Socioeconomic backgrounds:
    1. hear substantially less language input and have substantially smaller vocabularies at age 3 years.
    2. hear substantially less language input but have equivalent sized vocabularies at age 3 years.
    3. hear approximately the same amount of language input but have substantially smaller vocabularies at age 3 years.
    4. hear approximately the same amount of language input and have equivalent sized vocabularies at age 3 years.
16. Why do children have difficulty learning language by watching people on a video? Discuss the aspects of input that are critical for language development that are present in videos and those that are absent.
17. Describe the changes in infants’ perception of speech sound over the first year of life. To what extent do you think these changes reflect domain-specific or domain-general learning processes?
18. Identify two ways in which the input to individual children learning the same language can differ in their language development. How do these differences influence the course of language development?