Psycholinguistics/Development of Speech Production answers

Learning Exercise Answers
1. a)
 * video 1 - Integration (Jargon stage)
 * His vocalizations are similar to the English language in their prosodic structure, syllable structure and vowel-consonant combinations. You can also see that he is using gestures as if he were having a conversation..


 * video 2 - Canonical babbling(reduplicated babbling)
 * CC produces the sounds "badada" showing that he is able to produce consonants and vowels, and he can control the sounds to produce the ones he wants.


 * video 3 - Vocal play
 * Here we see a range of sounds, that seem vowel-like, however none seem to be repeated ( and thus are not canonical). Furthermore, at one point, he seems to raise his voice (yells) showing an attempt to control or display his vocal range.


 * video 4 - Reflexive vocalization
 * We hear very little vocalization besides a sneeze towards the end of the video.


 * video 5 - cooing
 * CC is making vowel-like ("a") sounds in responds to parental attention and is this attempting at interaction. We almost see a smile too!

b) This vocalization is called a quasi-word as it is used consistently in the presence of a "bottle". It occurs during integration (stage 5) as the child is bridging the gap between babbling and words, and beginning to understand the connection between vocalization patterns and their associated meaning.

2. a) b)
 * 1.Possesive morphemes:
 * CHI: that Kathy.
 * MOT:yes # that's Kathy.
 * MOT:	Eve's letter.
 * CHI:	Mommy letter.
 * MOT:	there's Mommy's letter.
 * CHI:	Eve letter.
 * 2.in, on:
 * MOT:	you have tapioca on your finger.
 * CHI:	tapioca finger . [+ IMIT]
 * 3.present progressive (-ing)
 * CHI:	Kathy cry.
 * MOT:	yes # Kathy was crying.

c) Although this child appears to have used "a" in her utterance "a fly", she does not use "a" consistently throughout the sample. For example, soon after that utterance, the child repeats a similar utterance "fly" without the "a" (MOT: you go in the room and kill a fly. CHI: fly. ). Other examples that should include "a" are the following: The child shows no evidence of using "the."
 * MOT: what is that ?
 * CHI: letter.
 * MOT: oh # what's that ?
 * CHI: hat.

3.

4.
 * (a) Vocabulary spurt. There are three theories on how this may have developed. This process may begin from the naming insight, where children begin to understand that referents can be labeled. Second, children would need to expand their vocabulary to label categories, as this this period seems to coincide with Piaget’s sensorimotor stage  (where children are expanding their understanding of concepts and objects).  Finally, leveraged learning may facilitate the vocabulary explosion where the child learns words slowly (one at a time) and then each word can act as a "leverage" to learn the next word and this facilitates word learning.
 * (b) The Noun Bias.
 * (c) Overextension.

5.
 * (a) lexical innovations - The child has not yet learned a word associated with the meaning they are trying to express, or they simply cannot retrieve it properly. It is sometimes easier to remember this word than the traditional word.
 * (b) over-extension - The child is attempting to fill the lexical gap because they do not have a current label for that particular item, they don’t know the target word sufficiently and thus have difficulty determining which label the target should receive, or they temporarily cannot retrieve the word.
 * (c) over-regularization - The child does not have a complete understanding of the word meaning and thus incorrectly selects it, or the child is improperly categorizing the word.
 * (d) cluster reduction (leave out second stop in a consonant cluster) - difficulty producing multiple consonants in a row
 * (e) under-extension - The child is attempting to fill the lexical gap because they do not have a current label for that particular item, they don’t know the target word sufficiently and thus have difficulty determining which label the target should receive, or they temporarily cannot retrieve the word.
 * (f) skip unstressed syllable  the child fails to attend to the unstressed syllable
 * (g) assimilation - another phoneme is influencing the production of the target phoneme
 * (h) omission of function words - The child may focus on words that have referents, the child recognizes only the content words, which have greater stress and emphasis, or the child's production system is not mature enough to produce all the various parts of speech.