Language And Communicative Development - Lecture 1

Front 1

Law et al. (2011)

Back 1

Some children have delays in language due to lack of good language input

Front 2

Children’s language skills on entering school are a good predictor of...

Back 2

– Reading skills (Duff et al., 2015)
– Social mobility (Blanden, 2006)

– Academic achievement (Durham et al., 2007)

Front 3

18 month-olds who hear a lot of speech...

Back 3

- 6 months ahead of peers
- Faster language processing at 25 months
- Larger vocab at 6 years
- Marchman & Fernald (2008)

Front 4

Informal Vocabulary

Back 4

– 'Baby’ vocab (tummy, (ba)nana)

– Informal speech (hiya, ok?)

– Contracted forms (he’s, it’s)

– General meanings (go, come, put, do)

– Imprecise (a few, some)

– Context-specific (I want one)
– Informal expressions (nap time)

Front 5

Formal Vocabulary

Back 5

– Technical vocabulary (Trex, stomach)

– Formal speech (Good morning, how are you?)

– Full forms (He is vs. he’s)

– Specificity of meaning (go vs. walk vs. stroll)
– Precision (more than, 7, approximately)

– Multiple meanings (miss the bus vs. miss Daddy)
– Non-literal meanings (line up, cotton wool clouds)

Front 6

Horst et al. (2011)

Back 6

- 3yr olds, 6 novel words put in stories (e.g. 'tannin)
- Same story vs. different story conditions
- Children tested for comprehension (pointing task)
- Retained word meanings better when same story

Front 7

Rowe (2012)

Back 7

- Three 90min recordings at 18, 30 and 42 months
- Parental speech coded for vocab diversity, rare words, decontextualised talk (explanations, pretend)
- Parents with higher lexical diversity produce children with diversity (42 months)

Front 8

Hart & Risley (1995)

Back 8

- Hearing range of high and low frequency words in meaningful contexts boosts word learning

Front 9

Kidd & Holler (2009)

Back 9

- 3, 4 and 5 year olds told three stories containing homonym pairs (with pictures)
- Children retell story to second experimenter
- Children questioned to resolve ambiguities
- Disambiguation attempts coded for speech only, gesture only, speech and gesture
- 5 year olds use 'speech only' most
- 4 year olds use iconic gestures
- 3 year olds use deictic gestures (pointing)

Front 10

Informal Sentence Structures

Back 10

- Simple sentences, one piece of information (It's pretty)
- Focus on who or what is doing action (I'm hungry; he's driving the car)
- Direct requests (Stop teasing her)

Front 11

Formal Sentence Structures

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- Complex, multiple pieces of information
- Linking information
- Taking different perspectives (The dog chased the man)
- Politeness devices (I'd prefer it if you stopped)

Front 12

Huttenlocher et al. (2010)

Back 12

- 47 families recorded for 90 mins every 4 months, from 14 months old
- Caregiver and child language coded for:
- Constituent and clausal diversity
- Caregiver constituent diversity predicts childs constituent diversity
- Caregiver clausal, constituent and lexical diversity predicts child clausal diversity
- Suggests children need to learn lower level words and constructions before more complex sentences

Front 13

Constituent Diversity

Back 13

Use of:
- Adjectives (big chair)
- Adverbs (run quickly)
- Prepositional phrases (in the park)
- Noun phrases (last night)
- Possessives (his shoes)
- Quanitifiers (some cheese)

Front 14

Clausal Diversity

Back 14

Use of:
- Coordination (I went home and slept)
- Subordinates (I think it's over there)
- Adverbials (before you eat, wash your hands)
- Relatives (that's the cat I like)

Front 15

Huttenlocher et al. (2002)

Back 15

- Measured proportional use of multiclausal sentences (he went to shops and brought some milk) in caregiver/teacher speech, as predictor of 3-4yr old childrens multiclausal production and comprehension
- Results: proportion of complex sentences produced by caregivers predicts proporitional use and comprehension by children

Front 16

Iconic Multiclausal Ordering

Back 16

- Ordering of clauses in a sentence matches the real world
- E.g. "Wash your hands before you eat dinner"

Front 17

Non-Iconic Multiclausal Ordering

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- Ordering of clauses in a sentence conflicts with the real world
- E.g. "Before you eat your dinner, wash your hands"
- Can use real world knowledge to understand (put your shoes on after your socks)

Front 18

Blything et al. (2015)

Back 18

- Strategies for understanding non-iconic multicausal ordering
- 3-4 year olds use order of mention strategy
- 4-6 year olds influenced by connective type ('before' better than 'after')

Front 19

Cameron-Faulkner & Noble (2013)

Back 19

- 15% of child directed speech contains complex utterances
- Higher levels of subject-predicate (full sentances) and complex sentences in book reading than child directed speech

Front 20

Role of Different Play Contexts Regarding Complex Sentences

Back 20

- Youngest children (2-3) produce most complex sentences during play
- Oldest children (4) produce more complex sentences in story retelling

Front 21

McNeil, Alibali & Evans (2000)

Back 21

- 4-5yr olds shown blocks with certain images (smiley face, arrow, rectangle etc.)
- When instructed to find a certain block, experimenter uses either speech alone or reinforcing/conflicting iconic gestures
- 4yr olds do better with reinforcing gesture than speech alone
- 5 yr olds no difference speech alone vs. reinforcing gesture, conflicting gesture much worst

Front 22

Theakston, Coates & Holler (2014)

Back 22

- 3-4yr olds tested on comprehension of object cleft constructions (It was the dog that the duck scratched)
- With or without gesture
- Only 4yr olds show effect, gesture does help with comprehension

Front 23

Informal Wider Discourse Context

Back 23

- Situated in here-and-now (Can you pass me that one?)
- Assumes shared information with implied links between events and referents (How did it go yesterday?)

Front 24

Formal Wider Discourse Context

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- Refers to past, present and future
- Longer sequences of related sentences
- Explicit links between events and referents
- Sequencing of events
- Essential for reasoning, negotiation, constructing narrative, scientific explanation etc.

Front 25

McCabe & Peterson (1991)

Back 25

- Caregivers who extend topics with open-ended questions with 2yr old children, have better independent narrative skills a year later

Front 26

McWilliam & Howe (2004)

Back 26

- 4yr olds in 5-day intervention, tasked with teaching alien puppets to speak
- Day 1, language modelled by experimenter
- Control condition = claim-question-response
- Intervention condition = claim-question(why)-justification(because)
- Children in intervention used more 'why' questions and 'because' justifications