Characterizing Bilingualism And Early Bilingualism; Lexical Development (Chapter 1, 2)

Front 1

Define: orthography, morpheme, pragmatics

Back 1

spelling; smallest linguistic units that bear meaning; how people use language differently in different contexts (like irony)

Front 2

psycholinguistics can be divided into 3 main areas:...

Back 2

1) study of how we comprehend input
2) study of how we create output
3) language acquisition- simultaneous and consecutive

Front 3

balanced vs dominant bilingualism

Back 3

balanced means the level of proficiency is equal in both languages. this does not mean that it must be high proficiency children who speak very little can still be equally proficient in both languages.

Front 4

what dimensions concern bilinguals? (4)

Back 4

their competency in the languages, the age of acquisition, the way the words and meanings are organized in bilingual memory, and the social status of the languages

Front 5

Distinguish between compound, coordinate, and subordinate bilingualism

Back 5

compound- pairs of corresponding words in the languages are mapped into memory on one representation of meaning
coordinate- mapped onto separate representations
subordinate- there is one meaning but the non dominant language doesn't map directly, but rather through the dominant language

Front 6

Additive vs Subtractive bilingualism

Back 6

subtractive is when learning the second language interferes with first. Additive it doesnt interfere. subtractive usually occurs when the native language is not helpful in their social surroundings so there is pressure not to use it, unlike additive where both languages are socially valued

Front 7

what are speech perception tasks? what is the critical period hypothesis?

Back 7

tasks that ***** an infants ability to recognize phonemes and sound patterns used in studying early lexical development; the hypothesis that during some defined period in early life, humans possess a heightened sensitivity for language input

Front 8

what are the two types of bilingual language acquisition?

Back 8

simultaneous - bilingual init from birth, aka Bilingual first language acquisition BFLA/ 2L1
consecutive/ sequential - later on 2nd lang acquisition

Front 9

describe BLFA (3)

Back 9

- by the time the 2nd language is learned, the lexical, phonological etc knowledge of the native language is already partially in place already
- the two languages develop relatively separately from each other and there is little transfer
- BLFA language develops differently from second language acquisition for many reasons, but one is that the cognitive skills are greater in second lang acquisition

Front 10

describe the habituation/familiarization paradigm

Back 10

-use the high amplitude sucking test, heart rate paradigm, or preferential looking to see when their attention is peaked.
- Familiarization is based on time- play this for 5 mins and habituation is infant controlled- once the infant gets bored he or she is habituated

Front 11

categorical perception

Back 11

listeners know difference between two speech sounds representing different phoneme, but can't discriminate between sounds that represent one and the same phoneme. seen in infants

Front 12

what is VOT? formants?

Back 12

the time between the release of air and the moment the vocal cords begin to vibrate when a stop (plosive) is pronounced. you can have a VOT short lag, long lag, or a lead where the vibration occurs before the air; dark bands of relatively intense acoustic energy in speech

Front 13

Describe the head turn procedure

Back 13

there are two speakers one on left and one right, and three lights one in centre, one left and one right. there is a familiarization period during which the light flashes in the centre and then it classes at one speaker and the infant looks and a sound plays... in the subsequent trials the sound is either maintained the same or changed. if it is changed and the infant looks longer we assume that the infant noticed the difference.

Front 14

Deine CDI

Back 14

communicative development inventory- list of words in various categories that the parents check off. in bilingual children, it is used to see dominance differences between the two languages

Front 15

total conceptual vocabulary

Back 15

total the words known separately by language and then in bilinguals subtract the number of translational equivalent paired words

Front 16

whats an ERP

Back 16

event related potential! measures cognitive activity using ERG. p200 means its positive and takes 200 ms following the stimulus onset to develop.

Front 17

/b/ vs /p/

Back 17

values of VOT below +25 are seen as /b/ and over +25 as /p/

Front 18

describe the learning of native phonemic contrasts (/unlearning or non-native) (4)

Back 18

- unlearning of nonnative and learning or native happen at same time- during first year of life
- during the first 6 months, infants can perceive phoneme contrasts from all languages (but not necessarily ALL contrasts in each language like Spanish)
- after 6 months, native ones stick and non native drop off
- this happens sooner for vowels than consonants

Front 19

phonotactics

Back 19

sequences of sounds that do/do not occur in a specific language

Front 20

describe fragile vs robust contrasts

Back 20

this is one explanation given for the fact that infants don't lose the ability to distinguish between a llll contrasts of non native languages. Fragile contrasts are non salient and robust contrasts involve acoustically salient distinctions common across languages. According to this view, we don't lose the ability to discriminate between robust contrasts, only fragile ones.

Front 21

How are allophones related to retention of discriminatory ability for contrasts of a non native language?

Back 21

one theory is that the reason infants and adults can still discriminate between some non native contrasts is that is the contrasts are allophones of the same phoneme they are retained, otherwise they are not.

Front 22

out of several hypothesis about the ability to discriminate nonnative contrasts, which was proven?

Back 22

the hypothesis that contrasts can be discriminated if they are produced by difference articulatory organs, although this discrimination ability may decline with age

Front 23

describe the Mandarin-English study on contrast relearning or preserving (Kuhl et al.)

Back 23

they look 9/10 month old english infants who had lost the ability to discriminate Mandarin contrasts and exposed them to mandarin for a period of time. after the intervention, they had relearned to distinguish between contrasts, but this only held true if the intervention was done in a natural setting with real people speaking and playing with the children as opposed to tape recordings.

Front 24

describe the high amplitude sucking paradigm

Back 24

- sounds played over and over
- after sucking rates gal below criterion baseline, the test portion begins and novel sounds are added

Front 25

describe the head turn preference. What are the two outcomes?

Back 25

- lights on either side, one flashes, baby turns to light and sound starts
- once it is bored and looks away, sound stops
- can test if they find words/non words more interesting and if they find accents interesting
- a familiatiry preference means they look / listen longer to words than non-words/ words they haven’t heard- a novelty preference means they look longer to non-words/unfamiliar words

Front 26

differentiate between habituation and familiarization

Back 26

- habituation is infant controlled - once infant is bored and stops looking/sucking the phase stops.
- familiarization is based on time - for ex play this sound for five minutes- this is where you after see the familiarity vs novelty preference

Front 27

what are some challenges infants face leaning a language?

Back 27

- how to separate continuous speech into meaningful units
- speech sounds can be produced in a variety of ways and still mean the same thing. Variability- speaker characteristics, speech rate, adjacent sounds
- no clear mapping between auditory speech signal and ‘words'
- no clear pattern of word segmentation

Front 28

What are the psycholinguistic models the most prominent?

Back 28

-- innately endowed universal grammar that guides language acquisition process- modularity theory- Chomskys
- emerging language learning approaches like connectionism, usage-based theories, cognitive linguistics which falsify Chomskys poverty of stimulus argument and look at pattern finding and statistical regularities

Front 29

Michael Tomasello alleges that there are two requisite language learning skills....

Back 29

: 1) Intention reading (theory of mind (the ability to infer what others are thinking, and that others think different)) which is unique to humans an enables functional communication 2) Pattern finding ability- an old skill evolutionarily - bilinguals extract patterns from multiple language

Front 30

Discuss categorical perception (4)

Back 30

- categorical perception- after a certain threshold of VOT, a /b/ changes to a /p/
- Do monolinguqal infants show adult- like categorical perception? YES
- languages also differ in the location of the boundary
- some contrasts are inherently more salient than others (spanish contrasts are less inherently perceptually salient than english or thai)
- perhaps the differences in distributions in VOT continuums between language are cues for simultaneous bilingual infants that they are learning two separate languages

Front 31

languages are organized by____, which come from a common ancestor called a ____

Back 31

language families
Proto-language

Front 32

how can you tell if two languages are dialects or separate languages?

Back 32

dialect= variation on language. languages can vary by sound system, syntactic, writing habits, lexical items etc.
we can draw the line by:
- does the language come from a nation country that has its own army or navy?
- something better is whether the languages are mutually intelligible

Front 33

list 4 factors contributing to bilingualism

Back 33

1) movement of people

2) nationalism and political federalism
3) education and culture
4) industrialization and Urbanization
5) technology, Information, and Communication- internet

Front 34

what are the three situations that can happen when people move? three types of movement?

Back 34

a) each group must learn the others language- uncommon
b) immigrant froup learns host language- common
c) host group learns immigrants language- Hawians learned English



a) military invasion and colonization results in language change if the conquest is followed by stability or if proficiency in invading language brings economic, cultural, political, educational opportunities.
b) migration for social , economic or political reason i.e. Irish sought relief from famine
c) trade and commerce- Greek was a very important language in commerce in 3rd century

Front 35

What are the 3 Evaluative views of bilinguals?

Back 35

1) additive vs subtractive- immigrants vs citizens- is bilingualism a good thing, helping you or is it hindering our performance
2) deficit vs difference; semilingualism vs holistic view- if you learn french will your english suffer/be different
3) advantage vs disadvantage

Front 36

what research variables must we consider with lang acquisition? (5)

Back 36

1)Age of Acquisition-early vs late-sequential/ simultaneous
2) context- home, school, immersion, direct, audio lingual...
3) Levels of Proficiency
4) Language Typology a) typologically- similar languages like Spanish and French b) Typolocically-different languages like English and chisese
5) Modality: oral (natural) vs written (instructed)

Front 37

Talk about phonology- what are phonemes and phonetic contrasts (careful not phonemic contrasts)

Back 37

a) phonemes: minimal unit of sound that has meaning like /b/ vs /d/ are phonemes since big and dig are different
b) a phonetic contrast is an acoustic difference that does not change meaning like how t can be like a /t/ or /d/ but still have same meaning
- /l/ and /r/ are phonetic in english and Japanese but only phonemic in English

Front 38

Lexicon: discuss content vs functional words

Back 38

a) content words- nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs- have referential meaning- we create new content words all the time and so they are called sometimes open-class words
b) functional words- prepositions, conjunctions, articles- limited number of them and new ones are seldom created (sometimes called closed-class words)- have no referential meaning, but tie words together to have meaning

Front 39

what are morphemes? different types?

Back 39

MORPHEMES: smallest unit of sounds that convey meaning- may be a single sound like ‘a’ or a string ‘perhaps’ FREE MORPHEMES are sounds that can exist alone and still convey meaning (dog) BOUND MORPHEMES are sounds that convey meaning but must be attached - ’s’ plural or ‘ing’. You can have INFLECTIONAL BOUND morphemes- word class stays the same, but meaning is modified- play vs plays or DERIVATIONAL BOUND MORPHEMES where meaning and class changes- like nation vs national
some languages are morphologically complex while others are grammatically complex

Front 40

what does morpho-syntax mean?

Back 40

sentence grammar

a) word order= syntax
b) inflectional morphology (dog chases cat vs dog chased cat)
word order is important in English but not so much in Russian

Front 41

what does discourse or pragmatics mean?

Back 41

more than one sentence
organization of sentences and utterances to be correct and appropriate- how was the party? yes.

Front 42

Describe the Riverara- Gaxiola study (EEG vs Behavioural)

Back 42

- When we look at ERP patterns in adults we can see differential patterns for contrasts
- Riverara- Gaxiola study showed that 11 months olds had different EEG patterns for non-native contrasts suggesting that they could distinguish

Front 43

Describe the Maye el al study on simultaneous bilinguals and VOT contrasts using monolinguals. What does this conclude?

Back 43

- Maye, Werker and Gerken familiarized 6&8 month monolinguals to sounds from da to ta continuum in two conditions
- bimodal distributio- heard more sounds from the endpoints of the continuum rather than the centre
- unimodal-sounds from centre are presented most often
- infants in the bimodal condition were able to discriminate the endpoints of the VOT continue
- infants in the unimodal condition did not discriminate- formed a single phonetic category
- phonetic category learning is sensitive to the distribution of the input and of this reason, bilingually exposed infants take longer to learn the phonetic systems in their languages than mono lingually exposed ( BUT we have to take into account the Boch and Sundara studies)

Front 44

Describe the Boch el al and Sundara studies on contrast extinction in simultaneous bilinguals. What did they find had an effect? So what?

Back 44

- tested catalan-spanish bilinguals and monolinguals at 4 and 6 months and tested them on a catalan contrast- at 4 months all could discriminate. At 8 months both the spanish monolinguals AND the bilinguals had lost ability to discriminate the contrast, however when tested at 12 months, the bilinguals could again
SO: overlap between the languages means the bilinguals arent learning to perceive differences
BUT
-Sundara: does frequency of contrast play a role? found that if the frequency of the contrast was high in both languages like d in english and french, the bilinguals didn't see a dip in discrimination
- SO, frequency plays a role for them- if its high frequency in both languages they will learn to discriminate

Front 45

phonetic perception in bilinguals (2)

Back 45

-bilingual can discriminate their languages early in life
- sometimes bilinguals do not show the same phonetic sensitivities as monolinguals at 8 months to discriminate contrasts, but regain this by 1 year

Front 46

What is a minimal pair? Describe minimal pair word learning in monolinguals vs bilinguals (how do they test this, when can infants do this? bilinguals benefit from...) (4)

Back 46

- minimal pair=differ by only one phoneme- like ball and doll
- they test this with the switch paradigm where they show pictures of random things with a made-up word playing as they see it. They do the habituation and then they switch the word that is show with the picture and see if kid notices- means they learned word
- monolinguals can learn these words after 14 months ONLY if they are not minimal pair words (then not until 20 months)
- bilinguals can also learn the words, but they learn best when a bilingual speaker is teaching them the words. Monolinguals also benefit form having a monolingual teach them

Front 47

Discuss the Kem and Bos study the speaker talked about. What can we conclude?

Back 47

- had a bilingual speaker use the words bos and kem in both english and french sentences
- they used familiarization and taught them one ‘native’ word in an english sentence and one ‘foreign’ word in a french sentence
- then showed the words in isolation- they actually found (using preferential looking) that they learned the foreign and native words equally well! however what is causing the effects?
- when they redid the study with two foreign words, they could not do it!
- thus 14 month olds can learn foreign words but may need a boost from a native language word which may provide referential or directive information

Front 48

Does bilingualism delay language acquisition? are language disorders more common with bilinguals? do bilingual children show cognitive advantages?

Back 48

no; no; yes

Front 49

When do children start producing words?

Back 49

- first words produced around 12 months, slow growth of 12 words per week
- at 18 months there steep growth
- language development is GRADUAL and not all kids have spurts at same time or in same way

Front 50

Children learning words undergo a shift from associative to referential mode. What dies this mean?

Back 50

-referential uses categories - one new word can refer to all objects in one category (i want a "treat")
- this is more economical in terms of cognitive load and the free capacity created by this allows kids to at ten to the phonology of words

Front 51

When do infants understand that words are segmented in speech input? (studies) (4)

Back 51

- familiarization to two words like cup and dog and then present stories- half of them would have one of the familiarized words, and half would have novel words
- 6 months looked at each story the same, but 7 moths looked longer at the stories with unfamiliar words (the problem with this is that the words were originally presented in isolation which isn't realistic-
- at 7.5 months presented passages (so not in isolation) repeating 1 word and they showed preferential looking to words presented in the familiarization passages- they can recognize sound patterns of words in fluent speech
- at 8 months, infants were able to distinguish words from part-words when given a string of these

Front 52

Describe the dutch-english phonotactics study

Back 52

gave dutch and english infants at 9 months sentences with words that were a) english but weird like kudos but still violated dutch phonotactics and b) dutch words which violated english
- english babies look longer at english and dutch look longer at dutch- both groups are sensitive to their own languages at 9 months