Lecture 5: Communication and Language

Communication and ● Perception

Language: Overview ○ Newborn language discrimination
○ Statistical learning
○ Looking at a talking face
● Production
○ Pre-linguistic communication
○ Later language production
● Bilingualism

Newborn Language ● Can babies straight out of the womb tell the difference
Discrimination between speech from one language to speech from a
different language?
● Many research shows that even newborn babies prefer to
listen to the language that they heard when they were in
utero and they will work harder to listen to the language
that they heard in the utero or the language that the
mother spoke when they were in utero than an unfamiliar
language
● Even a few day old babies have a preference for the
speech sounds that they were exposed to in the womb
● Their prenatal exposure to language are shaping their
attention
● Discriminating between languages (Nazzi et al., 1998)
○ Testing to see if babies can discriminate
languages across rhythmic categories, even if all
of those languages are unfamiliar to the baby
○ Study was testing to see if French listening babies
discriminate between English and Japanese
○ Study was done on French-listening babies where
they only heard French when they were in the
womb
○ If these babies can discriminate between 2
different languages that they have never been
exposed to then it suggests that the babies may be
using the the acoustic properties of those
languages as a cue to discriminate but they did
not have enough time learn about the regularities
of these foreign languages and the phonemes
■ Might be related to rhythm if they are
successfully doing this so early on in their
lives
○ French listening babies were presented with
sentences from one of the two foreign languages
(English or Japanese) until they have habituated
○ Used sucking paradigm (sucking on a pacifier) to
measure habituation
 ■ If babies are interested in something they
will engage in bursts of fast sucking
■ Study measured how much of these bursts
of fast sucking happen when they are
hearing these sentences
■ The study measured the time at which
25% of sucking rate decreases in the high
amplitude sucking patterns indicating that
the babies are not interested in that
language anymore and they have
habituated
○ In the experimental group, the babies listen to
either English or Japanese until they have
habituated
○ During the test, the study presents the babies with
the other foreign language that they did not
habituate to and measure if the babies have
dishabituated to the 2nd foreign language and if
they show more high amplitude sucking in
response to the 2nd foreign language
○ In the graph,the first half shows the measures
during habituation and the second half shows the
results from the testing and the graph shows high
sucking rate would mean interest to the stimuli
and drop off in the sucking rate would mean
habituation
○ The graph only shows the plotting of the last 5
minutes for each baby regardless of exactly where
in the habituation paradigm they were in
○ The second half of the graph shows that even if
they have never heard English or Japanese before,
they successfully discriminated between English
and Japanese
○ This supports the idea that it may be the rhythm
that the babies are being able to discriminate
● Another study was conducted where the study used
languages from the same rhythmic system (ex. English
and German are both stress-timed languages)
○ If experiment is done with 2 different languages
that are foreign to the baby but they are from the
same rhythmic category then they were not able
to discriminate between the 2 languages
○ This further suggests that rhythm needs to be
relevant for the babies to be able to differentiate
English from Japanese
○ However, it is not until later in infancy that babies
actually distinct distinguish between units within
those streams of speech and be able to
differentiate between where one word begins and
 ends and more
○ Even later in infancy, babies start to link the
sounds to meaning

Statistical Learning of ● How do babies learn where one word ends and another
Words one begins
● Example
○ “Jerry got a new computer”
○ “Was his old computer broken?”
○ “No. He’d saved his allowance to buy a new
computer”
○ The sound “Computer” is occurring together at 3
different times but this word is surrounded by
different things in each scenario
○ Therefore, if the babies hear the word “computer”
embedded into many different sentences,
“computer” always happened together, but the
words before and after are different
● One way we can think about where words begin and end
has to do with one being able to pick up on the
regularities of these sounds.
● “Computer” happening frequently and if they happen
together frequently but they get plunked into sentences at
different places, maybe they are a unit
● Being able to pick up on regularities of what sounds often
go together is called statistical learning
○ This can guide one’s expectations about whether
you will hear a particular chunk of sounds
together
○ Extracting regularities (sounds that often come
together) from the environment and using that
information to make predictions about what you
are hearing

Statistical Learning ● In the statistical learning demonstration in class, the

Demonstration phrase “too tee boo” was often occurring with each other
in the language but the phrase “boo pa bee” did not come
together but they were said individually as “boo”, “pa”,
and “bee”
● Even with the brief exposure, you are picking up the
regularities of what sound came together and you learnt
● And this may also be a way babies take statistics on the
regularities of the things that they hear to make a
prediction about what sounds are actually a unit and
eventually being able to parse out different words
● If speech sounds did come together often, then babies
would expect those sounds to be familiar
● Saffran, Aslin, & Newport (1998)
○ Expose 8-month-old babies to 3 minutes of the
align language that was demonstrated in class and
 after that they would expose them to sounds that
were in there but they did not come together as a
unit ALWAYS (ku go la) (maybe came together as
a unit once but not more than that) or they will
present them with a sound that is always
happening together a unit (da ro pi)
○ Therefore, if the babies learned the language then
the (da ro pi) would be familiar to them but (ku
go la) would be unfamiliar to them
○ In test phase: how long did they spend listening to
the old words in that language vs. the new
combinations of those phonemes or combinations
of phonemes that did not happen frequently
○ The found that babies would spend more time
listening to the unfamiliar combinations
○ The babies are paying attention, recognizing
common patterns, and picking up on the things
that are regular and responding differently to
things that happened a lot versus the things that
are irregular
● In a study, the toddlers were exposed to these alien
languages and then the study tried to use those words to
teach them labels for different objects
○ They found that the toddlers were better at
learning a word to represent a particular object, if
that was a word from their alien language that
they were just exposed to
○ This suggest that statistical learning is not just a
product of hearing things and perceiving it, but it
actually helps support learning object labels later
○ If the alien language is the language that these
toddlers are learning, and if they are
English-listening babies and have been exposed to
English from the time that they were born, and if
they are using statistical learning to figure out
where words are starting and ending, then once it
is time to start learning where how things are
labelled, they will be better able at using those
words to label those objects

Language is ● Language is not just sounds but it is the multimodal

multimodal: experience, sometimes they are not even sounds
Audiovisual speech ● In general, when we are listening to languages, we don’t
perception just hear language
○ Not usually receiving the auditory input but also
receiving other modalities or cues
○ Babies hear language but also see language and
they are combining these multimodal experiences
by as early as 4-months of age
 ■ If you show a baby videos of two different
people talking and then you present them
with only one stream of audio, they will
look preferentially at the congruent
speaker
● Ex. if a 4-month-old baby watches
someone reciting text from Harry
Potter and another person is
reciting text from Dr. Seuss book,
and then they hear the text of the
Harry Potter (only audio), then
they will look at the person that
was reciting the text from Harry
Potter
● McGurk effect in infancy (Rosenblum, Schmuckler, &
Johnson, 1997)

○ In the illusion, what we see overrides what we

hear
○ Study with 5-month-old English listening babies
○ First the babies were habituated to an audio visual
presentation of “va”
○ At test for audiovisual experiment, in the first
section of the graph, they are hearing “va” and
seeing the visual representation of “va”
■ Perception is same as what they were
habituated to
■ Shows less looking time which is
reflective of habituation
○ At test for audiovisual experiment, in the second
section of the graph, they are hearing “ba” but
seeing the visual representation of “va”
■ Babies show habituation in this section
which suggests that perceptually the first
and the second experiences are
perceptually the same which means that
they are experiencing “va” and are being
swayed or being confirmed by the visual
perception (paying more attention to the
visual perception)
■ They are ignoring that they are they are
 hearing “ba” because they are integrating
what they are hearing with what they are
seeing
■ Being swayed by the McGurk effect
○ At test for audiovisual experiment, in the last
section of the graph, they are hearing “da” and
seeing the visual representation of “va”
■ “Da” and “va” are very different from
each other and it does not show McGurk
effect if “da” and “va” are combined, you
just hear “da” even if you are seeing “va”
→ therefore, we should not expect any
integration for this audio “da” visual “va”
condition
■ When we do not expect integration to
occur because the sounds are too distinct
and the McGurk effect would not happen,
the babies are dishabituating when they
are hearing the “da” sound
○ At test for audio-alone experiment, in the graph,
there is no difference across the phonemes
○ Therefore, babies do experience the McGurk
effect and they are integrating the phoneme that
they are seeing with the phoneme that they are
hearing and what they are seeing can sway their
perception if those phonemes are close enough
together that even an adult would be swayed
● Therefore, language is not just about sound and what they
are seeing is shaping their perception of the sounds that
they are hearing
● Watching the Talking Face
○ Where babies look when they are watching a
talking face
○ Using eye tracking experiments
○ Study done with 4-month-old to 12-month-old
babies and with adults
○ Present videos of people talking or reciting in
English and tracking eyes to see where the babies
and adults are looking at and the pictures in the
graph showed that they were fixated on the areas
that have the black dots
○ Across the x-axis are the ages of the babies being
tests and the adults
○ This graph is showing the proportion of time that
they are spending looking at the eyes vs. looking
at the mouth (bars over 0 = looking at eyes; bars
under 0= looking at mouth)
○ The graph shows that youngest babies are looking
at the eyes more and then there is a shift when
 older babies are looking at the mouth more, and
by the time we are adults, we are looking at the
eyes more again
○ This may have to do with that when a baby is at
this pivotal time of learning to speak themselves,
where their first words are usually around 12
months, right before that (around 8 months) they
may be trying to figure out the motor patterns
required to make different sounds
■ This may be the time where their attention
is really pulled to the mouth and it may be
important to them to learn how to make
those sounds themselves which is
specially pivotal during the language
learning months
● Watching the Talking Face in a Foreign Language
○ English listening babies watching Spanish
speaker
○ They continue to watch the mouth more
○ This relates to learning and also highlights the
multi-sensory nature of speech learning where
they are looking at the speech being produced
● It is not just babies but we, adults also shift our attention
back to the mouth when we need that extra support to
understand the speech
○ Ex. when someone is saying something in a loud
environment and you cannot hear them
○ Ex. when someone has a very thick accent that
you may not be able to understand well
○ Ex. when someone is speaking in a language that
you know some words to but not all (ex. Second
language)
Concept Check 1 How does statistical learning relate to language acquisition?
A. It allows infants to detect regularities in their linguistic
input
B. It helps infants learn where one word ends and another
begins
C. It may support learning object labels
D. All of the above

Transition to Speech ● Receptive vocabulary grows first before they actually say
the words
● Babies start to understand specific words before they can
even speak and they start to do that around 6-months and
with a 10-month, receptive vocabulary really starts to
grow
● Many growth factors need to happen before a baby says
their first word. The transition to speech that needs to
happen before they start to say their first words are:
○ Prelinguistic vocalizations
■ Babies making sounds like cooing or
crying
■ These sounds produced can
unintentionally lead to communication
● Ex. if a baby is crying, it is telling
the caregiver that they need
attention or care
■ By 2 or 3 months there is a wider variety
of the kinds of vocalizations that a baby
can make where they might be growling,
squealing, whispering, etc.
■ They use their vocal cords to make sounds
and they also use or move their tongue and
lips in different ways
● Ex. blowing raspberries, clicking
their tongue, etc.
■ These are letting them practice or
exercising their vocal cords, tongue or lip
movement
■ It might help them to get attention from
caregivers but it might also be that they
are just playing with it (circular reactions)
■ By 7 months babies start to do more
babbling where the babies are making
sounds like the phonemes that we expect
to be part of our languages
■ Babbling involves more complicated
movement of the lips and tongue and
vibrations of the vocal cord and more
specific ones
■ This is getting them ready to eventually be
 able to speak because if they have never
practised vocalization, then even if they
were cognitively ready to say a word by
12-months of age, their systems would not
be ready so they need the motor practice
as well
○ Conversational turn-taking
■ Before being able to say enough words to
have a conversation
■ This helps them to build up the social
dynamic of communication
■ Even as early as 2 months, infants and
adults vocal interactions occur in
distinctive turns where the baby will coo
and babble and then pause, then the parent
will say something and pause, and then the
baby will coo and babble again (like
having a conversation)
■ Babies are sensitive to waiting for these
pauses to jump in where they are waiting
for the pauses and the caregiver’s response
before jumping into the conversation
■ The ability of an infant and their adult to
coordinate this way at 4-months so the
better the caregiver-baby pairs are at
coordinated turn taking at 4-months of
age, correlates later with attachment
security and cognitive skills at 12-months
of age
● Early turn taking ability may be
reflective of the relationship and
also opportunities for cognitive
growth
■ This turn taking and vocalization is
happening very early on and also setting
up the stage for the dynamics of
communication
○ Gestures
■ Before babies are talking, they are already
gesturing
● Ex. pointing
■ Some people harness this and teach their
babies sign languages and they can do that
well before they can say those things
■ If a parent decided to teach their baby
some signs, it is because the baby is ready
to communicate in that way
● These lead them to both physical readiness (ex.moving
tongue, lip, etc.) and cognitive readiness (intentionally
 controlling your communication) to actually produce
speech later

Infants’ intentionally ● Looking at the dynamics between the baby and the
communicative caregiver: Are babies pointing at stuff and are caregivers
vocalizations elicit responding to that and when they point, are they
responses from vocalizing and how does it lead to later language learning
caregivers ● Are prelinguistic vocalizations and gestures
(Donnellan et al., 2020) “intentionally communicative”?
○ Video recorded parents and infants in their homes
when the infants were 11-months-old and they are
interested in prelinguistic communication
○ They coded all the infant gestures and
vocalizations (every time the baby did a particular
gesture like pointing, open hand, etc.)and then
they noted what the parent was doing and how the
parent responded to these gestures within the first
few seconds of when the baby made the gesture
■ Ex. If the baby points at something, do
they then look at the parent to see if the
parent responded to the gesture
○ They tried to find if babies generally just point or
are they intentionally trying to communicate
through pointing
○ Are they pointing for their own benefit or is the
pointing a communicative gesture
○ If it is a communicative gesture, they should look
at the communication partner to see if that person
picked up on their communicative gesture
○ They are looking at gaze coordination - if the
baby is looking at the toy and just points and
looks at the toy and not the parent, then it does
not matter whether the parent is present or not
○ If the baby is pointing at a toy and immediately
looks at the parent, that suggests that they are
doing so intentionally and they want to bring the
person in to engage with them
○ The paper shows that the babies are seemingly
trying to communicate and after pointing or after
doing a gesture, they want to communicate with
the parent
● Can later vocabulary be predicted from early
communicative interactions?
○ The babies that are participating in these early
communicative interactions, will they have a
larger vocabulary later
○ At 15-months, 18-months, and 24-months, the
parents were instructed to report the child’s
vocabulary by using a questionnaire
 ○ They found that certain gestures predicted higher
vocabularies and other gesture types predicted
lower vocabularies
■ Regular pointing (gaze-coordinated) that
are followed by a look to the parent
predicted higher vocabularies later
■ One of the gestures that were negatively
relate to vocabulary later was open hand
point
● This may be because this gesture
may not have been communicative
and the babies were just trying to
grab it and therefore, maybe the
baby was not making an effort to
communicate
● Do parents respond more when infants look at them
while vocalizing/gesturing?
○ If the baby points at an object and then looks at a
parent, the parent is more likely to engage in that
communication vs. when the babies are just
pointing and not looking at the parent after
○ This suggests that babies are intentionally
communicating and parents are receptive to that
● In the graph, they show that at 11-months they recorded
the videos and tested for vocabulary at 15, 18, 24-months
and so on and they are plotting the change in words
produced at 19 months per 1 standard deviation increase
from the mean in behaviour
○ If a baby has higher than average caregiver
contingent talk by 1 SD, then at 19-months they
will have 30 more words in their vocabulary than
the average babies
○ If they are doing more than average
gaze-coordinated and responded to vocalizations,
then they are going to have almost 30 more words
in their vocabulary later
● These gaze-coordinated vocalizations and gestures seem
to be encouraging parents’ responsiveness and it also
seems to be happening more than chance and they seem
to be intentionally communicative and they also seem to
predict later vocabulary, especially for certain kind of
gestures (especially for those ones that are followed by a
gaze)

Concept Check 2 What would be an example of a “gaze coordinated

vocalization”?
A. Logan babbles while looking at his toy, then
immediately looks at me
B. Logan points to his toy, then immediately looks at me
 C. Logan babbles while looking at his toy. Ten seconds later
he looks at me
D. Logan babbles and I look at him

Bilingual Babies ● In the video shown in class, the mom is speaking British
English with a Belfast accent and the dad is speaking
Welsh
● The way these 2 languages teach the cow sound is
different so depending on who is asking the question in
whichever language, he is answering with differently
with “moo” for Welsh and “mee” for Irish (Belfast)
accent

Culture as a binder for ● Their proposal is that if babies are learning 2 different
bilingual acquisition languages simultaneously, how do they keep them
(Kandhadai et al., separate
2014) ○ Culture helps bilingual babies keep their two
languages distinct
○ If culture is a cue to help bilingual babies to keep
their languages separate, then the languages are
being associated with so many other different
things that help them highlight the distinctiveness
● This means that the bay is not just learning 2 different
languages, but they are learning about 2 different cultural
systems if they learning 2 different languages at the same
time
● Language is an important part of culture but it is not the
only part of culture that these babies are attending to
● Three different mechanisms through which languages
might be more distinctive through these cultural binders
○ Acquired distinctiveness
■ The idea is that the discrimination of 2
similar things can be easier if those 2
things are associated with distinctive other
things
■ Refers to the fact that two similar forms
can be kept distinct through consistent
associations or cues that are unique to
those forms
■ If there are 2 different languages and each
of those languages are associated with
other rich things, they themselves become
more distinctive
■ How can a baby tell apart Language A
from Language B?
● Language A coincides with some
specific cultural cues and
Language B coincides with other
distinctive cultural cues
■ This is the idea that you are pairing the
 language with rich cues about the people
who are speaking those languages to you
and the environment that you are in when
you hear it
● By having those rich associations,
the 2 languages themselves are
more distinctive
○ Structural isomorphy
■ In the picture, showing the red lines with
equal signs
■ Refers to the fact that some expressions of
culture, such as music or dance, share
non-arbitrary or “non-random” properties
with language
■ Not all the pairing are arbitrary
■ Some of the links between language some
cultural thing that people who speak that
language engage with are not arbitrary
● Ex. music - different rhythms so if
there is a relationship between the
language system of a culture and
the music system of a culture, then
the system would be related
rhythm
● Some study shows that the rhythm
of music composed by french
speakers is more reflective of the
rhythms that we see in French
language compared to english
music composed by english
speakers
● So the language that the composer
speaks influences the way that they
write music
○ If an English speaker
speaks English in a
stress-timed way, they are
more likely to build that
stressing patterns into the
musical compositions
● If music or dance style from a
particular culture are being
associated with a particular
language, it not an arbitrary
association and they are actually
connected at a perceptual level in
some way
○ Privileged relation
■ Showing the pictures with the blues lines
 with stars
■ Connection between speech sounds and
faces
■ Refers to the connection between speech
sounds and faces
■ Related to the tendency to match a voice
to a specific face (multimodal nature of
language)
■ Very young infants expect to hear human
speech coming from a human face
● If they hear human speech and
they see a human face and a
monkey face, they will look at the
human face because they expect
the sound to come from the human
face
■ Hearing speech is tied to looking at faces,
this might encourage infants to notice
face, features, and signals about ethnicity
that signal different language communities
■ Structural isomorphic and privilege
relations feed into the acquired
distinctiveness
● If babies are able to keep the languages apart, this is not
just based on the speech sounds but it is based on the
whole rich experience of a baby in an environment
engaging with other people and thinking about that
holistically in the community
● If they hear hear one language at home and another
language at school, there are different context cues that
they will use to discriminate the 2 different languages

Reading
Introduction
● Infants in bilingual homes attune (aware) to properties of
both their native languages
● Bilingual infants equally prefer listening to both native
languages at birth, start getting aware of the vowel and
consonant distinctions used in each language, and acquire
phonotactic rules of each language

Culture as a “binder” for bilingual acquisition

● TEXT

Mechanisms for an influence of culture on bilingual acquisition

● TEXT

Do bilinguals ● Code mixing?

“confuse” their ○ One of the reasons people think that kids get the
languages? confused with more languages is because of code
mixing
○ Thye use code mixing as evidence that kids are
confused
○ Code mixing is when children are switching back
and forth within a sentence between their two
languages
■ Ex. if someone is speaking where half a
sentence is English and the other half is
French
○ But research suggests that code mixing is a very
good strategy and it is not specific to children and
it is not reflective to something problematic
○ Code switching might be a strategy that relate to
more language proficiency
■ In a study with 5 year olds Mandarin
speaking children who were also learning
English showed that the children who did
more code switching understood each
language better than the children who did
less code switching
■ Code switching related to language
proficiency in these languages
○ When kids code switch in social context
■ In a study with 3 to 6 year old Spanish and
English bilingual children talked to the
experimenter and played with other
bilingual kids
■ They found that when they were playing
with other kids, they did a lot of code
switching but when they spoke to the
experimenter, they stuck with one
language
■ This is because, when these children are
playing with other bilingual children, it is
a more efficient way of communicating
because if a word on one language is not
coming but it comes in the other language,
switching when you know that the other
person also understands both the language
is more efficient and will keep the
conversation going more efficiently
○ Code switching has been used as an argument that
bilingualism is problematic, but research shows
otherwise
● Adapting to conversational partners
○ Code switching also related to the adapting to
conversational partners
 ○ Who you are talking to is going to affect whether
you are doing a lot of code switching or not and
also we see that as young as 2 year olds are very
good at conversational partners when they are
speaking a certain to language to someone who
will speak or understand that language
○ In a paper with 2 year olds show that they will
modulate the language that they use depending on
the conversational partner and do so flexibly
○ This helps us understand that children are not
confusing languages and they are also good at
picking up the contextual cues about which
language to use in different settings
● Infant language discrimination
○ Even newborns can discriminate languages
therefore, 3, 4,5 year olds will also be able to tell
the two language systems apart
○ These languages are acoustically different and
they are doing statistical learning and they are
understanding and learning these as separate
systems
○ Babies can tell apart language system from the
same rhythmic class by 4-months so a
4-month-old can tell English apart from German

Is there a bilingual ● Linguistic/social advantage:

advantage? ○ Knowing multiple languages is important for
travel, employment, connecting to family and
culture!
● Cognitive advantages?
○ Very controversial field of research!
○ If you learn 2 languages very early on, does that
make you better at abstract reasoning or executive
control
○ There has been many papers published about how
bilinguals have better executive functions than
monolinguals and the idea is that if you are
constantly switching between languages then you
have to focus your attention on the right piece of
information and your environment and maybe this
cognitive exercise makes you better generally at
tasks that require attentional control and task
switching
○ However, most of the papers that find results
come from one particular lab group and other lab
groups have had a hard time replicating those
things

Is earlier better? ● If you learn both languages simultaneously, is that better

than learning them later?
 ○ Yes
○ If you learn both languages simultaneously you
have better accent, better vocabulary in both
languages, higher grammar abilities, better real
time processing than sequential bilingual
■ Sequential bilingual is being someone
who learns one language first and then
learns the second language
● In this graph it is plotting accuracy in the language with a
large sample group
○ If you learn one language, the accuracy in that
language is 98%
○ If you are learning both languages at the same
time, then you not different than the monolinguals
on that language and there is a drop off as age of
first exposure increases
○ The non-immersion learners would be learning
the language in a non immersive way and it is
harder to do so and therefore it drops off again
with age
○ However, accuracy is still high
○ It is easier to learn early but it not impossible to
learn late
● Incremental decline in language learning abilities with
age
● Simultaneous bilinguals have better accents, more divers
vocabulary, higher grammar accuracy, better real-time
language processing than sequential bilinguals
● Language learning is possible in later life, just different!
○ The brain reduces in plasticity with age and so the
reason why small babies learn language so easily
has to do with brain plasticity
■ There is a nurture element to that, where if
you are learning both languages
simultaneously, you are probably learning
them from caregivers in a really
immersive one-on-one experience
■ So if a caregiver who always speaks a
particular language with you all day in a
rich way is going to be different than the
kind of learning that you will get if you go
to French Immersion school or only hear
that language once a week in a Mandarin
class
■ Our brains are prepared to learn language
early but also the way we can learn
languages when we are learning them
from birth is more immersive than it will
be if we learn later
Summary ● Language perception begins as soon as the auditory
system comes online and shifts as infants gain experience
● Language perception is also about motor planning
● Pre-linguistic communication provides a foundation for
language production
● Immersion in more than one language results in
bilingualism