speech addressed to language-learning infants and children:
short sentences
greater repetition/questioning
higher/more varied intonation
domain specific knowledge (vs domain general knowledge)
Knowledge specifically about human language
domain general knowledge (vs. domain specific knowledge)
Abilities that are useful for other kinds of input besides language input are used to learn language. There is no knowledge or ability that is unique to language learning.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
unconscious process inside child’s mind, used only for learning language.
LAD contains some domain-specific knowledge about the structure of language (this is often called Universal Grammar (UG)).
recasts
will just give the child a good example of the correction, without straight-out correcting them. ex He runned! mom: yes, he ran fast!
empiricism (vs. nativism)
all knowledge and reason come from experience
nativism (vs empiricism)
mind has some pre-existing structure it imposes to interpret experience
High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) procedure
a technique used to study infant perceptual abilities. Typically involves an infant's sucking rate as a measure of her attention to various stimuli.
Used for: testing infants’ ability to discriminate speech sounds
discrimination task
identification task
voice onset time (VOT)
a measure that describes the pint during the production of a speech sound at which vocal fold vibration (voicing) begins
categorical perception
refers to the failure to discriminate speech sounds any better than you can identify them
or the inability to discriminate sounds within a phonemic category