Discussion Questions: 27 Feb

1. In Golinkoff and Alioto, Chinese sentences were used prosodically to test the effectiveness of infant directed speech against adult directed speech, to adults of English. English is a language that, on some analyses, has four intonational levels. What are the implications of this study to adult speakers of a language which has four, or two, intonational levels? Should there be a difference from that of English?
2. Shatz (p113): mothers of younger, less sophisticated children showed no tendency to be more consistent in this regard (gesture-relation mapping) than did mothers of older children.
   --> this implies that mothers develop their skill to communicate with their children, right?
   --> Did children in the experiment have any elder brothers or sisters? More experienced mothers might perform better.
3. In the first experiment of Golinkoff & Alioto, most words are presented with a phrase "this is a ___". In the second experiment, besides varying the position of the target word, the contexts in which it appears vary more. Wouldn't the relatively stable context in the first experiment provide a big clue about which is the target word?
4. Shatz seems to claim that they have tested for all the possible contributions of environmental factors to language learning thru interaction. To what extent is this a valid claim? Is their account of the environmental influences a comprehensive one even in this narrow sense?
5. Why do Bard and Anderson say speech to children tends to be less intelligible than speech to adults?
6. In Golinkoff & Alioto's experiments, why would the advantage of child-directed speech disappear when the target word does not appear at the end?
7. What are the possible ways in which adults' gestures could aid in language acquisition?