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Social and cognitive development

Social and cognitive development. Language evolution. special adaptations unique to human language? (Pinker & Bloom 1990) more general social and cognitive abilities allowing cultural learning? (Tomasello 2008, Csibra & Gergely 2009). Evidence for cultural learning.

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Social and cognitive development

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  1. Social and cognitive development

  2. Language evolution • special adaptations unique to human language? (Pinker & Bloom 1990) • more general social and cognitive abilities allowing cultural learning? (Tomasello 2008, Csibra & Gergely 2009)

  3. Evidence for cultural learning • fixation on faces (Haith et al 1977, Farroni et al 2005) • increases over the first few weeks of life • triggered by child-directed speech • eye contact in response to caregiver’s vocalisations (Crown et al 2002) • neonates discriminate faces with eyes oriented towards them vs. with eyes looking away from them • the still-face effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0 (Tronick et al, Nagy 2008)

  4. imitating facial expressions (Meltzoff & Moore 1977) • neonates can imitate facial expressions • and sounds accompanying facial expressions (/m/ versus /a/) (Chen et al 2004) • turn-taking behaviour before speech • vocalisations in response to non-human puppet vocalisations, taking turns

  5. Moving on • from dyadic interaction to triadic interaction • dyadic: child + caregiver • triadic: child + caregiver + the environment • referential communication: communications with others about the world

  6. Prerequisites to referential communication • gaze following: direction of caregivers gaze as a cue • 10 month-olds are more likely to follow head movements if the eyes are open (Brooks & Meltzoff 2005) • they pay more attention to an object • if another person is looking at them (Striano & Rochat 2000) (noticing communicative intentions) • if another person is also looking at the object (Striano et al 2006) (joint attention)

  7. Joint attention • infants’ ability to establish joint attention (by following adult gaze) predicts vocabulary size at 14-18 months (Carpenter et al 1998, Brooks & Meltzoff 2005) • for children with developmental disorders (Down Syndrome, ASD), joint engagement is a strong predictor of language development (Adamson et al 2009)

  8. interpreting pointing • understanding intentions • using shared knowledge • by 14 months infants can interpret pointing (Liebal et al 2009) (but this is later than the first words!!!)

  9. using pointing to reference objects • at 8-11 months (Carpendale & Carpendale 2010) • they point to draw attention to something, to seek help, to give directions, to request objects (Tomasello et al 2007)

  10. Advanced imitation • 12 month-olds copy even nonsense actions if that’s the intention of the adult (Nielsen 2006) • imitation of a nonsense action is more likely if the outcome is known in advance (Southgate et al 2009) • social learning, following convention language is also arbitrary, a matter of convention

  11. CONCEPTS, REPRESENTATION

  12. A representation of the world in memory • Deferred imitation task • adult performs an action, child is allowed to imitate the action after a period of delay • if they can do so, they must some kind of representation of the action • 9 month-olds can do the task (with 24 hour delay) (Meltzoff 1988) • Generalised imitation • adult performs an action using an object (e.g. gives a drink to an animal) • infant is asked to imitate the action using another object (another animal vs. a toy car) • at the 14 months infants appropriately generalise (Mandler & McDonough 1998)

  13. Playing with toys of different categories (animals versus vehicles) • 7 month-olds distinguish the categories (look at a toy from a new category for longer) (Mandler 2004) • Symbolic play • at 18 months they can pretend that one object is another

  14. The origin of conceptual categories • statistical learning from perceptual information? (Mareschal & Quinn 2001) • re-description of perceptual information? (Karmiloff-Smith 1992) • the role of language?

  15. WORD LEARNING

  16. Fenson et al 1994

  17. Fenson et al 1994

  18. 6-8 months: learn pairings of novel words with novel objects if the object is moved around as it is being named (Gogate et al 2010) • at 14 months they can learn labels without special attention seeking movement (Werker et al 1998) • toddlers associate novel words with novel objects or actions (Akhtar & Tomasello 1996, Tomasello et al 1996, Tomasello 2003)

  19. Errors • under-extension • word used for a specific objects rather than for the category (Bloom 1973) • over-extension • word used for broader category (Clark 1982)

  20. Vocabulary spurt • about one new word a day between 18 and 24 months • about 4 new words a day between 2 and 6 years • how do they do it?

  21. Mutual Exclusivity and the Principle of Contrast (Markman 1989, Clark 1993) • Children assume that a new word is the name of a new object or action • built-in constraint (Markman) • or general-purpose learning strategy (Regier 2003) • dogs appear to use this strategy (Kaminski et al 2004) • but children can learn multiple labels!!! • Ramscar (2011): distributed learning (ever finer grade differentiation)

  22. Whole object bias (Markman 1989, Hollich et al 2007) • we see the world in terms of whole objects (Spelke 194) • a connected and bounded region of solid matter • infants expect novel words to refer to a whole object category (Waxman & Markow 1995) • it’s not unique to humans (Winters et al 2008)

  23. The shape bias: dax (Landau et al 1988)

  24. The noun bias • noun meanings are easier to extend than verb meanings (Imai et al 2005) • language (and culture?) dependent • English speaking children tend to pick objects rather than actions as referents of novel words • Mandarin Chinese learners do not show this biassilent videos of Chinese and American mothers playing with their toddlers (Snedeker et al 2003) • Chinese and American adult viewers had to guess what the mothers were saying • viewers correctly identified more nouns than verbs in the American videos, but equal numbers of nouns and verbs in the Chinese videos

  25. Bayesian model of word learning (Xu & Tenenbaum 2007, Perfors et al 2011) • task: learn 24 object names (from 1 vs. 3 examples) • no word learning biases were built in • 45 objects were organised into a hierarchy of clusters based on their similarity ratings (based on anything: shape, size, colour, animacy, etc) • names were taught (egdalmatian for OBJECT8 and OBJECT13) • results: the model generalised the names the way 3-4 year-olds did.

  26. From syntax to word meaning • children use syntax to distinguish count nouns (a dax) from mass nouns (some dax) (Landau et al 1992) • argument structure can help identify verb meaning (The duck is gorping the bunny. vs. The duck and the bunny are gorping.) (Naigles 1990)

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