Week 1
What is the difference between a Recast and an Explicit Correction?
Explicit Correction: parents try to teach children the rules of language by explicitly correcting them when they say something wrong
Recast: parents provide a good example of language use for children without explicitly correcting them
The blackbox inside a child's mind that contains the hidden rules and knowledge needed to learn language is called the ______________. (Hint: the acronym is LAD)
Language Acquisition Device
Languages use different metaphors to describe time. Most words decribing time relations were originally words describing _______, which were themselves orginally words describing _______.
spatial relations, body parts
Hartshorne et al. (2018) investigated the effect of the age of exposure of several hundred thousand second language learners and found a continuous decline after around the age of 17 for native language proficiency/ultimate attainment. This suggests that it’s more likely there is a _________ period for learning aspects of language
Sensitive
Order the following groups of deaf children in terms of earliest age of full language exposure:
-Deaf-of-Hearing Children with Cochlear Implants
-Deaf-of-Deaf Children
-Deaf-of-Hearing Children with Hearing Parents learning to sign with their children
Deaf-of-Deaf Children > Deaf-of-Hearing Children with Hearing Parents learning to sign with their children > Deaf-of-Hearing Children with Cochlear Implants
Explicit correction is not helpful for children because parents more often correct the _________ of the language rather than the _________.
meaning, form
Name one example of domain-general knowledge in children.
pattern-matching, grouping and chunking, tracking probabilities/frequencies
The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis is the idea that the language someone speaks affects how they think and perceive the world. What is the difference between the Strong and Weak versions of this hypothesis?
Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The language you speak determines the thoughts you can think.
Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The language you speak has some influence on the thoughts you think.
In a community where there is no pre-established/shared human language (e.g. a group of immigrants who come from different language backgrounds), a __________ is a language that is created by the children when they acquire a __________ as their native language.
creoles & pidgins
Label the lobes of the brain according to their primary function. [See diagram]
Frontal, Parietal, Temporal, Occipital
Is motherese required for successful language acquisition? Why?
No, it is not required because there are some cultures where children don't recive any child-directed speech and yet still manage to acquire language.
Label the following diagram for the different theoretical approaches. [see diagram]
Empicirisim, Nativism, Generativism, Constructionism
The idea that children use what they knowledge about a particular aspect of syntax (e.g. knowing that 'say' take sentential complements) to generalize to other aspects of syntax (e.g. knowing that 'think' take sentential complements) is called _________.
Syntactic Bookstrapping
Here are two graphs from Johnson & Newport (1989) where Korean and Chinese natives were tested on their knowledge of English [see diagrams]. Which aspects of language is dependent on age of exposure and which is unaffected?
Morphology/verb agreement is affected by age of exposure, Basic Word Order is not.
Describe Naigles's (2002) "Form is easy, Meaning is hard" Hypothesis.
Children with ASD should not demonstrate as severe delays of [syntactic] development as they do of semantic and pragmatic development
Name two ways to assess children’s comprehension abilities.
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Act-out tasks, Pointing tasks, Grammaticality judgment tasks
Describe what it might mean to be a modern nativist and constructionist.
Choi et al (1999) used a preferential-looking paradigm to investigate children's sensitivity of language-specific principles of semantic organization. In the following trial, are Korean- and English-learning infants predicted to look at the same image or different images? [see diagram]
Different
Describe Newport's (1990) "Less is More" Hypothesis.
Language is actually easier to figure out if the input is limited to smaller chunks and is often used to explain why children are better at learning language than adults.
Aphasia is a language impairment that arises from damage to an area of the brain that is relevant for language processing beyond the motor cortex or memory systems. Refer to the diagram and label the speech as being an example of one of the two aphasias.
Broca's and Wernicke's Aphasias.
When using computational modeling as a method to investigate learning strategies for language, what would it mean if the results of the computational model matched the behavior of actual children?
If the modeled child can reproduce the behavior we see in children. This learning strategy could be what they’re using to generate that behavior although another learning strategy could be possible as well.
What is the Poverty of the Stimulus?
Input is too impoverished for children to converge on the right language rules without it or
Children appear to be able to learn language (an infinite set) from finite input (a finite set) without using negative evidence.
Describe in a few sentences the Standard False-Belief Task (aka the Unseen Displacement Task).
Sally puts a ball in a basket and goes away. Ann comes and takes the ball out of the basket and put it in a box. When Sally comes back, where will she look for her ball?
Describe a counterargument to the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis.
The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis suggests that this ability is due to children’s innate domain-specific knowledge about language. An alternative view is that there may be non-linguistic innate knowledge or abilities that lead to the creation of language structure in the absence of input.
Label the following table with the correct functional neuroimaging methodology according their pros/cons.
EEG/ERP, MEG. NIRS, fMRI