Psycholinguistics

Language, Mind and World

Danny D. Steinberg, Hiroshi Nagata, David P. Aline

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317900559
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

How do we learn to produce and comprehend speech? How does language relate to thought?
This second edition of the successful text Psycholinguistics- Language, Mind and World considers the psychology of language as it relates to learning, mind and brain as well as various aspects of society and culture. Current issues and research topics are presented in an in-depth manner, although little or no specific knowledge of any topic is presupposed.
The book is divided into four main parts:

• First Language Learning
• Second Language Learning
• Language, Mind and Brain
• Mental Grammar and Language Processing

These four sections include chapters covering areas such as- deaf language education, first language acquisition and first language reading, second language acquisition, language teaching and the problems of bilingualism.
Updated throughout, this new edition also considers and proposes new theories in psycholinguistics and linguistics, and introduces a new theory of grammar, Natural Grammar, which is the only current grammar that is based on the primacy of the psycholinguistic process of speech comprehension, derives speech production from that process.
Written in an accessible and fluent style, Psycholinguistics- Language, Mind and World will be of interest to students, lecturers and researchers from linguistics, psychology, philosophy and second language teaching.

Part

1

First-Language Learning

1

How Children Lean Language

We have minds and in our minds we have the means for producing and comprehending speech. But how did we learn to produce and comprehend speech? At birth we cannot comprehend speech, nor can we produce speech. Yet, by the age of 4 years we all learn the basics of our language. We acquire vocabulary and grammatical rules for creating a variety of sentence structures including negatives, questions, and relative clauses. And although 4-year-olds still have passives and some other elaborate syntactic structures to learn, along with a never-ending stock of vocabulary items, by that age they will have overcome the most difficult obstacles in language learning. This is true of children the world over, whatever the language may be.

Indeed, the language proficiency of the 4- or 5-year-old is often the envy of the adult second-language learner, who has been struggling for years to master the language. It is one of the fundamental tasks of psycholinguists to explain how children learn language.

For reasons that will become apparent later, we will separate language learning into two distinct, but related, psychological processes: speech production and speech comprehension. We will deal with each in turn and then consider how they are related.

1.1. The Development of Speech Production

1.1.1. From Vocalization to Babbling to Speech

1.1.1.1. Vocalization to babbling

Prior to uttering speech sounds, infants make a variety of sounds, crying, cooing, gurgling. Infants everywhere seem to make the same variety of sounds, even children who are born deaf (Lenneberg, Rebelsky, & Nichols, 1965). The ability and propensity to utter such sounds thus appear to be unlearned. Later, around the seventh month, children ordinarily begin to babble, to produce what may be described as repeated syllables (‘syllabic reduplication’), e.g. ‘baba’, ‘gigi’, ‘panpan’. While most of the syllables are of the basic Consonant + Vowel type (‘baba’ and ‘momo’), some consist of closed syllables of the simple Consonant + Vowel + Consonant variety (‘panpan’). This structure of babbling has been found to be produced by children in all studied languages.

The sounds which infants make involve many but not all of the speech sounds which occur in the languages of the world. For example, English sounds like the ‘th’ in ‘though’ and the ‘th’ in ‘thin’ are rare, as are the click sounds common in various African languages such as Zulu. In time, however, such vocalizations take on the character of speech. From as early as 6 months of age, even before they utter words in the language, infants from different language communities begin to babble somewhat distinctively, using some of the intonation of the language to which they have been exposed (Tonkova-Yampol'skaya, 1969; Nakazima, 1962; Lieberman, 1967). Although this has not been firmly established, research does indicate that in languages where the intonation contours are quite distinctive, native speakers could tell the difference between the babble of infants who were learning their (the native speakers') language as opposed to the babble of infants learning other languages (de Boysson-Bardies, Sagart, & Durand, 1984).

The production of sounds using the intonation contours of the first language is obviously a learned phenomenon because when infants babble they follow the intonation contours of the language which they hear. This is something that deaf infants deprived of hearing speech do not do. While such infants are able to vocalize and cry, they do not progress to babbling. Interestingly, deaf infants who have been exposed to sign language from birth do the equivalent of babbling - with their hands (Petitto & Marentette, 1991).

1.1.1.2. Babbling to speech

It is from the advanced stage of babbling that children move into uttering their first words. Often this occurs at around one year of age but can occur much earlier or much later. When children begin to utter words, somewhat surprisingly only some of the sounds which they have uttered in babbling appear in speech. The other sounds must be reacquired. And there may be some order to the acquisition of speech sounds. For example, sounds like /x/ (as in Bach), /k/, /g/, and /l/ which commonly occurred in vocalization and babbling prior to speech may now tend to occur later, after the acquisition of such sounds as /p/, /t/, /m/, /a/, and /o/. There is, then, some discontinuity between babbling and meaningful speech where the kinds of sounds which occur in babbling are not always immediately realized in meaningful speech.

Only a few studies show some continuity between babbling and early speech (Vihman, Macken, Miller, Simmons, & Miller, 1985); most research shows a lack of continuity. For example, Oiler and Eilers (1982) found that while vowels which occurred more frequently in babbling were related to the frequency of those vowels in the infants' native language, these sounds were not strongly related to the infants' subsequent meaningful speech. As babbling progresses to meaningful speech, though, the relationship seems to get stronger. For example, Stoel-Gammon and Cooper (1984) and Kent and Bauer (1985) found that advanced babbling begins to approach the consonant-vowel combinations of later meaningful speech. The relationship, however, is not a strong one.

Why is there some degree of discontinuity from babbling to the production of speech sounds? In our view, the discontinuity issue involves, as the eminent linguist Jesperson (1933) noted many years ago, the distinction between intentional and non-intentional vocalization. Babbling is non-intentional in the sense that particular sounds are not under central cognitive control; the infant does not intentionally make the particular babbling sounds which occur. They seem to happen by the chance coordination of speech articulators. (Infants do the same with their own hands. After they first notice a hand they can stare at it for hours, trying out movements.)

The case of meaningful speech is quite different, however. Here, sounds must not be uttered at random but must match previously heard sounds which are conventionally associated with certain objects, needs, and so forth. In order to accomplish this feat, it is necessary that the child discover which sound is created by which speech articulators (mouth, tongue, vocal cords, etc.). It is this knowledge that the child must acquire in order to speak meaningfully. While babbling is different from speech with respect to intentionality, nevertheless speech is dependent to some degree on babbling. In babbling, the child will chance on many of the various articulatory mechanisms for producing speech and give practice to the use of those articulators. The connec-tions established by such exercise of the articulatory mechanisms undoubtedly aid the child later in acquiring speech when intentional connections to the articulators for the purpose of activating speech must be firmly established.

1.1.1.3 Explaining the acquisition order of consonants and vowels

In the meaningful speech phase, it appears that consonants are acquired in a front-to-back order, where ‘front’ and ‘back’ refer to the origin of the articulation of the sound. Thus, /m/, /p/, /b/, /t/, and /d/ tend to precede /k/, /g/, and /x/. Conversely, vowels seem to be acquired in a back-to-front order, with /a/ (ball) and /o/ (low) preceding /i/ (meet) and /^/ (mud). Jakobson (1968) devised a theory based on his distinctive feature theory of phonological oppositions which attempts to predict the order of the acquisition of speech sounds. In the main, however, empirical studies have not supported his predictions (Veiten, 1943; Leopold, 1947; Braine, 1971; Ferguson & Gamica, 1975). There is much more variation in the order of acquisition than the theory predicts. Actually, this may well be expected, since there could be a great deal of chance involved when a child searches for the proper articulators of speech with which to make a sound.

As far as the establishment of intentional connections is concerned, our opinion is that two variables dominate this process, visibility of articulators and ease of articulation (first proposed by Steinberg, 1982). When the child becomes motivated to produce meaningful speech (this occurs after the child has learned to understand some words which other people say), the child begins to seek ways to produce desired sounds. The child then becomes alert to clues that relate to the articulation of the speech sounds.

The child observes where speech sounds come from and notes the relations between sounds and the position of noticeable speech articulators, particularly the mouth and lips (Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1988; Legerstee, 1990). It is mainly movements which the child observes and imitates. Since noticeable mouth and lip movements are primarily involved in the articulation of certain consonants, it is not surprising, therefore, that children tend to produce these consonants, such as /m/, /p/, and /b/, before the others. Consonant sounds like the stops /k/ and /g/ and the fricatives /s/ and /z/, which involve the movement of non-visible articulators, are generally learned later.

As for vowels, since most involve the use of largely unseen articulators, children get little aid from direct observation. Rather, they must indulge in a lot of trial and error in order to secure the proper positions for articulators. It seems that those sounds which are closest to the resting position of articulators, e.g. back vowels such as /a/ (watch), are easier to create and are learned earlier while those sounds which require more motor control to create, e.g. a tensed front vowel such as /i/ (feet), are learned later.

However, over and above the operation of these variables of ease and visibility, there is (as first mentioned above) the important one of chance. It seems that children may discover by chance a particular articulator-sound connection, e.g. the daughter of Leopold (1953), Hildegard, was able to pronounce the word ‘pretty’ with precision yet she was unable to pronounce other words composed of similar sounds. Interestingly, although the word ‘pretty’ was pronounced accurately at first, over time, as her pronunciation of words developed, the pronunciation of that word deteriorated. It seems that if a word is to be retained, the chance discovery of an articulator-sound connection must be followed by its incorporation within the overall developing sound system.

1.1.2 Early Speech Stages: Naming, Holophrastic, Telegraphic, Morphemic

1.1.2.1 Naming: one-word utterances

When do children start to say their first words? It may surprise you to learn that research on this basic question is not at all conclusive. Actually this is not only because there is a very wide range of individual differences but also because the precise determination of just when a word has been learned is not easy to make and is not standardized.

The mere utterance of speech sounds, e.g. ‘mama’, may or may not indicate word knowledge. Children can be said to have learned their first word when (1) they are able to utter a recognizable speech form, and when this is done (2) in conjunction with some object or event in the environment. The speech form may be imperfect, e.g. ‘da’ for ‘daddy’, and the associated meaning may be incorrect, e.g. all people are called ‘da’, but, as long as the child uses the speech form reliably, it may be concluded that the child has acquired some sort of word knowledge.

First words have been reported as appearing in children from as young as 4 months to as old as 18 months, or even older. On the average, it would seem that children utter their first word around the age of 10 months. Some of this variability has to do with physical development, such as the musculature of the mouth, which is essential for the proper articulation of sounds. Certain brain development is also involved since the creation of speech sounds must come under the control of speech areas in the cerebral cortex (Bates, Thai, & Janowsky, 1992).

The naming of objects is one of the first uses to which children put words, e.g. ‘mama’ is said by the child when the mother walks into the room. However, naming may be preceded by words which accompany actions, such as ‘bye bye’ in leave-taking (Greenfield & Smith, 1976).

It appears that children first...