Discussion Questions: 4 March

• Bard & Anderson
  1. Why do Bard and Anderson say speech to children tends to be less intelligible than speech to adults? Paradoxically, they argue that this might actually benefit children. How?
  2. Were the children in Bard & Anderson's experiment 3 clairvoyant? Somehow the information about the original context (referent present or absent) got preserved in the acoustic signal, and children were able to extract this information in the current context they were in (toys present or absent)? [Interestingly, this is not a simple effect of clarity (because then toys absent would have been easier across all conditions)]
     Can we imagine what kind of acoustic information "does the trick" for the children?
  3. Have Bard and Anderson correctly hypothesized the role of accented/de-accented contrast in speech? Is there necessarily a problem with the the hypothesis that parents pronounce object names differently when the referent is available?
  4. If children will seek out novel objects when confronted with a novel word, what kind of behavior would be expected when they encounter a familiar word with lowered intelligibility?
• Bates et al.
  1. What do Bates et al. mean by the "confound between developmental and stylistic aspects of referential style"? Given the confound, how do they show that there are in fact significant individual differences?
  2. Why are individual differences interesting? What does it tell us about language development?
  3. Bates et al. have demonstrated "robust individual differences in the early stages of language development" (p119), but overall they found clear and robust patterns and trends in the kinds of words acquired and in the order and timing of this acquisition. Don't these patterns in fact suggest that language is innate and triggered in a specific order (with a bit of of variability reflecting the small role of environment)?
  4. In Bates, et. al, what are the possible explanations for the holistic vs. analytical differences in children? Is it necessarily a internal difference or could external factors explain the differences?
  5. What might the observation that children show a great deal of variation in early word choice suggest to an innateness paradigm in child language acquisition?
  6. In other work by Bates (specifically on aphasics), she argues that certain parts of the brain have a propensity for language over others, but that language is not as localized as we have thought. How do the observations made in the present article lend support to this argument?
  7. How would Bates' proposed lexicon shift across time from reference, to predication, then to grammar interrelate with increasing length of utterances with age?
  8. Bates et. al. report that children can vary greatly in the early stages of language development; Fernald & Morikawa report different speech styles with American & Japanese mothers when talking to their infants; children learn many words with minimal feedback. What does this tell us about the role of the adult in teaching children? What things matter and what things do not? How does this relate to studies in which mothers have been shown to act differently with an infant when they are told the gender is male or female? (i.e., is this something that does matter?)