What are strategies that children use when learning new words? Explain 3
Question 2: What are the characteristics of infant-directed speech?
Summary of chapter:
“Infants are born with some extraordinary abilities, which position them well to begin to learn language. They are able to imitate facial expressions and to perceive the full range of speech sounds that exist in all the world’s languages.
The fact that infants appear equipped with useful abilities at birth is most consistent with nativist views of language development and least consistent with the view of the behaviorists that all knowledge, including language, is acquired through specific learning experiences.
By the end of the first year of life, infants lose the ability to distinguish the speech sounds that they do not hear regularly. Starting at 4 months, infants begin communicating with others, first through babbling, then by gesturing, and finally through producing words.
Between 12 and 24 months, infants go from knowing few or no words to knowing 100 or more words. During this time of rapid vocabulary growth, infants rely on multiple strategies to learn new words, including asking adults for the names of objects.
These facts are consistent with each of the major theories of language development and do not help us determine which theory of language development is better than the others.
The behaviorist approach can explain the learning of vocabulary through imitating, classical conditioning, and operant conditioning.
The social-interactionist approach can explain infants’ learning of speech sounds and vocabulary through learning experiences that occur between caregivers and children, and the statistical learning approach can explain the learning of speech sounds and vocabulary through the infant relying on basic cognitive learning mechanisms that are not unique to language.
Advocates of the generative approach have proposed that word-learning strategies may be innate, which can account for why language development proceeds relatively quickly for all children, regardless of the language that they are learning, but they have not yet provided detail regarding how innate mechanisms of language learning interact with the environment to bring about the changes that are observed in infants, ability to perceive and produce speech sounds.
Last, the chapter described how parents and caregivers play an important role in the health and well-being of infants; however, their role in language development is not yet clear.
There are some cultures in which the adults do not routinely talk to preverbal children, yet those children acquire language normally.
Recent laboratory studies suggest that the mere presence of a person in the room when language is being used may result in the infant paying greater attention to language, which may result in increased learning.
The overall picture that language development does not critically depend on caregiver input is consistent with both the generative and statistical learning approaches and least consistent with the behaviorist approach, as parents are likely to be the largest source of language experience and language learning opportunities for the child.
The results that show that language learning may be facilitated in infants by the presence of a person is consistent with the social-interactionist view; however, the evidence obtained so far suggests that social factors play less of a role in language development than advocates of this view claim.”
