Discussion Questions: 6 March

• Fernald & Morikawa
  1. Is language learning an "experience" or an act of cognition? Or both? For experience, is it mainly social? And if social, what are the partial roles of cultural, economic, educational...factors in shaping it? To what extent, then, can studies like that of Fernald and Morikawa contribute to answer the basic questions facing development?
  2. Does the data in Fernald and Morikawa support or refute the idea of multiple styles of language acquistion? Would holistic infants fare better learning Japanese than English? Should there be proportionally more holistic infants in Japan than in the United States?
  3. What is the basis for believing that the aspects of maternal speech measured by Fernald matter for language acquisition?
  4. How many noun labels are enough for a child to learn nouns? On what basis might we expect "more gets more" --- that is a linear relation between labelling nouns and language acquisition?
• Hampson & Nelson
  1. What do the authors mean by the "match between the child's acquisition strategy and the mother's linguistic style"?
  2. What features of mother's language (not studied here) might benefit more expressive children?