Relación entre conductas, modelos internos y trastornos de apego

4.3.1 Developmental Arguments for the Inclusion of Social Cues into Real-time Language Processing Accounts

More support for the idea of the integration of social aspects into a language processing account comes from children studies suggesting that social conventions affect vocal tract properties. Before children reach puberty, females have higher formant frequencies than males even though there is not yet a difference in f0 (Perry, Ohde, & Ashmead, 2001). These higher formant frequencies may be the consequence for learned, i.e., conventionalized, gender-typical dialects that generate different speech patterns between males and females even before puberty affects f0 (Creel &

Bregman, 2011).

Another argument for integrating social aspects into accounts of real-time language processing comes from developmental studies of learning. Already neonates react differently to the voice of a stranger than to their own mother’s voice (DeCasper

& Fifer, 1980). Furthermore, in a preferential looking study, Kinzler, Dupoux, and Spelke (2007) demonstrated that infants preferred looking at faces associated with their native language compared to faces associated with accented (but comprehensive) speech or a foreign language. Their results hence indicate that familiar acoustic speech patterns are used for the social evaluation of the speaker in language processing. Furthermore, the developmental aspect strengthens the argument that

language processing and the processing of social information should be integrated together into an account of language processing. That is, social information seems to have an impact on the evaluation of the linguistic input, which in turn influences the way we build our social networks. Hence, social cues and language processing are inseparably linked and should not be considered separately without taking their mutual influence into account. Although these studies mainly focus on the integration of talker identification through speech sounds into language processing, this could be extended to other listener characteristics not just of the speaker but also of the comprehender, such as age and other non-visual social cues such as emotional prosody.

Yurovsky, Wu, Yu, Kirkham, and Smith (2011) for example suggested that infants as young as eight months of age learned faster from a visual social (facial) cue than from a non-social cue (square) in an attentional cueing task on audio-visual learning. Moreover, Yu and Ballard (2007) argue for an integration of indirect (social) cues, such as gaze direction, gesture and facial expression into statistical learning models⁹. They showed that in an analysis of CHILDES video clips of mother-infant interactions, a model including social cues outperformed the results of the purely language-driven statistical learning method when word-meaning associations were computed.

More support for a processing account that includes both linguistic and social information comes from emergentist and usage-based perspectives (see also Section 2.3). Recall that these perspectives assume that linguistic representations are formed using an individual’s experience of each representation together with the linguistic mechanisms that constrain its usage. Moreover, language can be learned from language use which is itself dependent on social skills like joint attention and the ability to understand others as intentional agents (Behrens, 2009; Tomasello &

Rakoczy, 2003). Additionally, emergentist and usage-based perspectives assume powerful generalization mechanisms, meaning that children quickly generalize new structures using previous experiences (O'Grady, 2005). Hence, emergentism is seen as essential for language acquisition. It is the interaction with language and the communicative intention behind language that eventually emerges into competent linguistic knowledge (Behrens, 2009). This view is similar to exemplar-based

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9!! Statistical learning in language acquisition refers to the assumption that children can quickly discover and learn from patterns in the underlying structure of the language system (Saffran, 2003).!

perspectives in that formed exemplars then contribute to the linguistic competence and can change slightly with each new experience gained regarding the specific exemplar (Abbot-Smith & Tomasello, 2006). Writing about the acquisition and use of social knowledge, Wyer (1980) states that social knowledge is inseparable from world knowledge and experience. Incoming input, no matter from which modality, needs some kind of context or previously acquired knowledge to be interpreted. Learning in isolation is extremely difficult as we use contextual information and previously acquired knowledge to interpret the world meaningfully (Wyer, 1980). The importance of context, experience and knowledge thus suggests that language cannot be separated from other cognitive abilities, which we, just like language, use to understand language and the world around us (Bybee, 2006).

In line with this is the view of Abbot-Smith and Tomasello (2006) who propose a hybrid categorization model to account for syntactic acquisition. Their model combines dynamic exemplar learning with a permanent and static schema abstraction, which can be frequently accessed to build new exemplar categories. Learning linguistic representations is thus highly dependent on the (non-) linguistic, social, situational and contextual environment in which the linguistic representation is encountered, as it is the communicative function that is underlying language acquisition and use (Tomasello, 2000). This view is supported by empirical evidence from a number of studies showing that children of different ages are able to produce SVO sentences using a novel verb which they only heard previously with a different syntactic structure (e.g., Akhtar & Tomasello, 1997; Olguin & Tomasello, 1993;

Tomasello & Brooks, 1998, see also Section 2.3).

Additionally, Lavie (2005) proposed the ‘Analogical Speaker’ which applies the exemplarist view to syntax, stating that children do not learn a specific language, but rather learn how to use speech. In his model, he stresses the dynamics of linguistics and the progressive generalization a child constantly has to perform in order to achieve adult speaker competence. However, this cannot be done in a single instant but new syntactic structures emerge slowly with intermediate steps before the structure can be produced correctly (Lavie, 2005).

As is evident from Section 2, children only gradually learn to comprehend challenging syntactic structures. However, recall that Zhang and Knoeferle (2012) showed that children can integrate visual contextual information in the form of depicted actions into their sentence processing to boost comprehension of these

challenging structures. Weighall and Altmann (2011) additionally asked 6-8-year old children to look at a display and listen to sentences with an embedded structure of varying complexity. The scenes either showed the depicted characters engaged in an action or not, i.e., they were passive. Just as in Zhang and Knoeferle (2012) their offline comprehension task showed that children performed better in the task when the characters were performing an action and hence can make use of extralinguistic cues to form event representations.

Language processing accounts should therefore integrate social cues and listener characteristics as we are using both direct and indirect cues to incrementally update our interpretation of utterances. Moreover, we seem to do so from a very early age onwards. Next, we will introduce the Coordinated Interplay Account, which posits a suitable basis as it already includes the visual context as a means for updating utterance interpretation. We will outline how the CIA could be adapted to accommodate visual social aspects and listener characteristics used in the present studies, i.e., emotional facial expressions and listener age, in Section 10.8.1.

4.4 A Suitable Language Processing Account for the Enrichment