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Review, Dr. Sarah Creel. Adrienne Moore 2-27-08 section COGS1. 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)?. Methods for Studying Kids. Head-Turn Preference Procedure
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Review, Dr. Sarah Creel Adrienne Moore 2-27-08 section COGS1
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)?
Methods for Studying Kids • Head-Turn Preference Procedure • Habituation Procedure • Conditioned Head-Turn Procedure • Picture Fixation Procedure • Also know definition of Dependent Measure
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
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)
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
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
Two Big Questions about Development of Language • How do kids discriminate speech sounds • How do kids solve the word segmentation problem
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
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
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
Other • Babbling • What do kids talk about and why? • Present-referent identification – Quine (midterm 2)