CD - input and interaction

CDS - CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH is a special register adopted by adults and older children when talking to young children.
1. learning language from parents is only the fuel that allows language to function. CHOMSKY - 1965 - the input available to the language lraning child is fairly degenerate in quality. fraghments and deviant expressions.
  1. SNOW - 1972 - parents adapt their speech in numerous ways at every level of linguistic analysis.
2. CHARACTERISTICS OF CDS - distinct mode of speech, we talk in different ways to different people in different settings. adopt a special register for each occasion. CDS is a distinct register when comparing it to ADS (ADULT DIRECTED SPEECH) - SNOW - 1972.
  1. PHONOLOGY - people tend to exaggerate their intonation, producing great swooping sounds over an extended pitch range. overal pitch tends to be higher than normal. - GARNICA - 1977. raise pitch when infant shows signs of positive emotional engagement.
    1. infants prefer to listen to it.
    2. VOCABULARY - adult-child conversation with a toddler tends to be about here and now rather than future. there is an emphasis on concrete rather than abstract concepts. object words are placed at the end of sentences. topics are dictated by the interests of the child.
      1. MORPHOLOGY - complex system of word endings in russia. instead will rely heavily on diminutive forms such as doggie, horsie etc... alternate between diminitive and morphologically simplified forms within the same sentence so as not to overwhelm the child
        sentences in CDS are well formed grammatically. noun phrases, more grape juice are grammatical and short. MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE (mlu) IS LOWER. shorter and simpler sentences. the subject of CDS sentences has a strong tendency to be an agent or "doer".
        SEMANTIC BOOTSTRAPPING - BROWN - 1957 - SYNTAX comes when children use semantic knowledge they have developed. learners use knowledge of the meaning of a word to infer its syntactical category.
3. DYNAMIC REGISTER - adult speech changes continually in concert with the child's developing language. change from infant-directed speech to child directed speech. changes are subtle but continue all the way through childhood until the speech directed to the child is more like adult-directed speech.
  1. CHILD-DIRECTED SPEECH SUMMARY
    1. CDS benefits from confining to topics that interest the learner / child. presents the child with a series of lessons. the complexity of speech addressed to the child is largely determined by cues from the children themselves. language acquisition is a self paced lesson. the input of the child is NOT as CHOMSKY - 1965 - assumed DEGENERATE.. there is variation in the quantity and quality of cds available.
LINGUISTIC NATIVIST CLAIMS - poverty of the stimulus, minimal input necessary.
1. the poverty of the stimulus problem. only minimal input needed to trigger parameter setting.
USAGE-BASED CLAIMS - the importance of input frequency, input frequency in lexical development, input frequency in grammatucal development. 2. the importance of interaction, joint attention and language development, television and language development and pragmatics (where language and social cognition interact.
1. THE INPUT IS CENTRAL to the language learning process. input frequency is important for syntactic development as well as for lexical and morphological development.
  1. children learn the grammatucal categories and sentence structures of their target language entirely based on the language they hear.
    1. usage based theories focus on the role of joint attention and the role of input frequency.
LANGUAGE INPUT AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT - the most frequent word in english is NOT the word that english speaking children learn first. other factors, semantic salience (prominence) and complexity. joint attentipon and intention reading and memory issues. other biases - mutual-exclusivity and whille object bias
1. SALIENCE OF THE FORM IN THE INPUT AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT. - LOW phonological salience = unstressed words or morphemes, words or morphemes which are not sentecne-final. words or morphemes of brief duration in time.
2. LANGUAGE INPYT AND LEXICAL DEVELOPMENT - not controversial, all theorists of lexical development agree that the input frequency must play an important role in word learning.
  1. FREQUENCY EFFECTS IN GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT.
    1. COMPARING ACROSS LANGUAGES - ALLEN AND CRAGO - 1993 - particular types of sentence structures which are learnt relatively late by english speaking childre, are learnt early by children learning languages in which those sentence structures are heard very regularly.
    2. HUTTENLOCHER ET AL - 2002 - CHILDREN studied from age 42 months to 50 months. looked at syntax comprehension - picture pointing and teacher observation. correlation between teacher observation and change in syntax comprehension.... ???
    3. MATTHEWS ET AL - 2005 - children hear high, medium or low fequency verbs and FOUND that two year olds were more likely to produce ungrammatical orders with low frequency verbs than high freq / familiar verbs.
    4. BANNARD AND MATTHEWS - 2008 - studied children age two and three and heard frequently occurring chunks or infrequent chunks (sit in chair . sit in truck). measured correct repitition and duration of repetition.. FOUND correct repition more likely to frequent sequences than to repeat infreq ones. 3 year olds faster to repeat the first three words of an frequent sequence than an infrequent one.
input = the particular language forms that the child hears, while interaction refers to the way in which those forms are used in adult-child discourse. imitation is a form of interaction.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES RESULTING FROM DIFFERENCES IN PARENTAL INPUT.
1. QUANTITY AND DIVERSITY OF WORDS IN CHILD DIRECTED SPEECH. correlated with quicker word learning in children at 14 - 26 months.. parents from upper middle class families say 1000s more words - HART AND RISLEY - 1995
  1. HART AND RISLEY - 1995 CONT... grouped parents into three bands of socioeconomic status. found high SES children were exposed to more words and more variety of words. high levels of parental prohibition are associated with poor language growth. HIGH SES children produce complex structures themselves at an earlier stage than low SES children.
  2. HURTADO ET AL - 2008 - children of talkative mothers were more efficient at producing speech. tendency for high SES parents to be more talkative and use more gestures.
2. individual children have different experiences of language, variation in the amount and quality of child directed speech provided. TWO POINTS RAISED - CDS might be a minority phenomenon not universal. 2. parents who do supply CDS differ in quality and quantity in how they speak to their children.
LINKS BETWEEN MATERNAL TALK AND PROCESSING SPEED ANC VOCABULARY SIZE
1. HURTADO ET AL - 2008 - even within socio-economic class, mothers who say more utterances, use more word tokens, use more word types and who say longer utterances at 18 MONTHS..... at 24 MONTHS will have significantly larger vocabularies and have significantly quicker online reaction times in identifying word referents.
  1. HURTADO ET AL - 2008 CONT.... - these effects are large. in HURTADO'S study, the children of mothers who talked more heard on average 7X more words, 5X more utterances, 3X more different words and sentences that were 2X as long.
THE ROLE OF JOINT ATTENTION
1. levels of early shared attention is correlated with later word learning and sentence production.
  1. ATTENTION-HOLDING STRATEGIES - adult display, demonstration and pointing when the child was 2. contributed uniquely to child verbal IQ at 3 years - SCHMIDT ET AL 2002
  2. CHILD'S FOCUS OF ATTENTION AND LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT - 6% of children are diagnosed with specific language impairment (language disorder, normal non-verbal IQ and normal hearing).... however often weaker at joint attention and imitation. intervention programmes train parents to work with the child's current focus of attention.
THE ROLE OF INTERACTION
1. the natural experiment in language without interaction is TV.
2. KUHL ET AL - 2003 - 9 month old american- english learning infants can learn certain mandarin phonetic distinctions after 12 sessions of "live interactive exposure" but not from exposure via television.
  1. KUHL ET AL - 2003 - CONT.. found that before the age of two years, children are not capable of learning new words from television. live interaction is clearly superior.
    1. PATTERSON - 2002 - children roughly two years old learned new rods from a shared book reading activity but not at all from TV viewing.
      1. JIM, a hearing child born to deaf parentss, only exposure to english via television, his language was delayed and odd.
3. beyond the age of two years it is possible to learn some vocabulary from TV. programmes that are not designed for toddlers have no effect, TELETUBBIES is associated with low vocabulary as doesn't contain much language however prgrammaes like DORA THE EXPLORER DO have an influence on child word learning.
4. OTHER examples of language without interaction.... adult-adult conversation, radio and song lyrics. AKHTAR - 2005 - has found that children as young as 18 months can learn new words that they overheard from adults, ASSUMPTION is that limited exposure of this kind is enough to trigger language acquisition. HOWEVER interaction is essential to acquire syntax,
5. LEARNING FROM FEEDBACK
  1. respond well to REQUESTS FOR CLARIFICATION - with time, doing so helps them to learn how to be more explicit.
  2. CORRECTIVE INPUT
    1. RECASTS - ADULT REPETITION OF THE CHILD WITH MINOR VARIATIONS TO THE ORIGINAL UTTERANCE. E.G. "c - "MILK IN THERE" m - "THERE IS MILK IN THERE"
      1. prime function of recasts is to maintain the flow of conversation. all children make errors. NATIVISTS suggest that the child receives no help from the linguistic environment in eradictating errors. the child receievss "no nagative evidence", no info on what is and isn't s grammatical.. child responds to correct form offered by the adult.
    2. BROWN AND HANLON - 1970 - DISAPPROVAL - parents signal their displeasure with ungrammatical sentences by saying "don't say that"..
    3. NEGATIVE FEEDBACK - adults clarify what the child has said. "knights have horse" "they have what?" children usually realise their mistake after the CLARIFICATION QUESTION.
6. IMITATION
  1. researchers have largely ignored imitation as a serious factor in child language acquisition - TIEDEMANN - 1987
  2. the child cannot imitate grammar, create novel sentences all the time, can't just wait for the right moment to use an imitated sentence.
  3. SKINNER - says the child's efforts to speak are rewarded by the parents. termed OPERANT CONDITIONING. operant conditioning very different to imitation. CHOMSKY talks about the children's strong tendency to imitate.
  4. imitation is complex. complexities are overcome as ability to imitate is inborn, infants can imitate adult tongue protrusion hours after birth.
    1. brain possesses a functional capacity for imitation operating via mirror neurons. discovered in broca's area.
  5. CLARK AND BERNICOT - 2008 - both children and adults are very repetitive. young children respond better when new information is at the end of a sentence (sentence-finally
  6. INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN IMITATION
    1. MCEWEN ET AL - 2007 - imitation ability has an impact on language development. good non-verbal imitators had higher vocabulary scores.
    2. PLOMIN - 1990 - heritability of imitative capacity.
      1. SOME parents encourage this behaviour by imitating themselves.
        CHAIN OF IMITATION, mothers imitate child, child imitates back. when they engage in this chain they are more lexically advanced later on;.
    3. imitation is a social behaviour, strong desire to interact with other people
PRAGMATICS
1. PRAGMATIC rules define effective and appropriate language use, using .language in a way that ones communcative goals are achieved without causing misunderstanding.
2. ability to adapt our language to the context in which we are speaking and people we are speaking to.
3. PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT
  1. developing skills include using the right expression to refer to something. understanding implicatures, such as "i ate some of the biscuits" means not all, four year olds don't understand this.
  2. being able to talk in different registers and narrative skills.
  3. development in preschool years in children's ability to take into account other people's point of view.
    1. children sometimes refer in a way that is ambiguous from their addressee's perspective such as pointing to something they can't see etc.
SUMMARY
1. INTERACTION - facilitative and essential for word-learning, essential for grammatical development.
2. INPUT FREQUENCY - facilitative for word learning, facilitative for grammar learning.
3. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS - speak to children a lot.

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CD - input and interaction

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	Created by becky.waine almost 11 years ago