1 / 12

Effective Methods for Studying Language Development in Young Children

This review explores effective methodologies for studying language acquisition in children, highlighting the Head-Turn Preference Procedure, Habituation Procedure, Conditioned Head Turn Procedure, and Picture Fixation Procedure. Each method assesses children's responses to auditory stimuli, providing insights into language development. Key findings include how infants discriminate speech sounds based on voice onset time (VOT) and tackle the word segmentation problem through statistical learning. Understanding these methods and their implications furthers our knowledge of language development and cognition in early childhood.

tory
Télécharger la présentation

Effective Methods for Studying Language Development in Young Children

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Review, Dr. Sarah Creel Adrienne Moore 2-27-08 section COGS1

  2. What are Effective Methods for Studying Language in Kids? What Do We Know About the Development of Language (as a result of applying these methods)?

  3. Methods for Studying Kids • Head-Turn Preference Procedure • Habituation Procedure • Conditioned Head-Turn Procedure • Picture Fixation Procedure • Also know definition of Dependent Measure

  4. Headturn Preference Procedure • Kids show interest by turning their heads toward something • Dependent measure = how long they listen to different sounds, indicated by how long they keep their heads turned toward the sound’s source

  5. Habituation Procedure • Definition of habituation: when response to a stimulus decreases due to repeated exposure to the stimulus • Kids show that they’ve noticed something is new/different by ending a habituation pattern (response increases again) • Two types of dependent measures: • High Amplitude Sucking (suck rate) • Visual Habituation (looking time)

  6. Conditioned Head Turn Procedure • Definition of conditioning: learning to respond a particular way to a stimulus after repeated exposure to the stimulus paired with something inherently rewarding (recall Dr. Johnson!) • First teach kids that sound Y  reward (bear) • Kids show they can detect that X is different from Y by not looking for Y’s reward • Dependent measure = how frequent or how long are head-turns to sound Y vs sound X

  7. Picture Fixation Procedure • Kids show that they know what a spoken word refers to by looking at its picture • Dependent measure = quantity or duration of eye movements to a given picture

  8. Two Big Questions about Development of Language • How do kids discriminate speech sounds • How do kids solve the word segmentation problem

  9. Discriminating speech sounds 1 • VOT (voice onset time) distinguishes [p] & [b] • This is an example of categorical perception (recall Dr. Cottrell!) • Method – high amplitude suck habituation • Kids appear to have the same categories as adults • they can distinguish [p] & [b] but not other sounds that differ by 20 ms VOT

  10. Discriminating speech sounds 2 • Language Specific Refinement Results -- Young infants vs older infants • Young infants can tell apart any two speech sounds used in any language • Older infants are worse at perceiving differences between speech sounds, they can only distinguish the differences used in their language

  11. The word segmentation problem • How do you find words within a continuous speech stream? • Statistics • Distributional Analysis • Transitional Probability • thatsaprettybabyisntit: ba-by vs by-is • And Biases • Stong-weak (“berry”) in English vs weak-Strong (“beret”) in French, for example

  12. Other • Babbling • What do kids talk about and why? • Present-referent identification – Quine (midterm 2)

More Related