CD Ch 10, Exam2 – Flashcards

Receptive speech: the individual comprehends when listening to others' speech Productive speech: the individual is capable of expressing (producing) in his or her own speech. 12-13 months infants can understand the meaning of many nouns and verbs long before they use them in their own speech. This means that the receptive language is ahead of productive language.

the sound system of a language and the rules for combining these sounds to produce meaningful units of speech -Each language uses only a subset of the sounds that humans are capable of generating -Infants learn to discriminate sounds of their language, such as the difference between b and d sounds, or which phonemes can be combined to form meaningful phonemes in their language

the expressed meaning of words and sentences -Smallest meaningful units of language are morphemes (2) -Free morphemes: stand along as a word (girl, boy) -Bound morphemes: cannot stand alone but change meaning when attached to a free morpheme. Ex. Girl(s) -Lexical development: learning the meaning of new words

rules governing the formation of meaningful words from sounds -These rules include the rule for forming past tenses of verbs by adding -ed and the rule for forming plurals by adding -s, as well as rules for using other prefixes and suffixes, and rules that specify proper combinations of phonemes to form meaningful words.

rules that specify how words are to be combined to from meaningful phrases and sentences.

knowledge of how language might be used to communicated effectively. They are principles that underlie the effective and appropriate use of language in social context. Vary by language. -Involves sociolinguistic knowledge: culturally specified rules that dictate how language should be used in particular social context. -Ability to interpret and use nonverbal signals that help to clarify the meaning of verbal messages and are important means of communicating in their own right.

Overextension: use of a specific word to refer to larger class than adults do; might be a result of a lack of better words. -Calling adult female "mom" Underextension: use of a general term to refer only to a specific example -Thinking a terrier is the only type of dog These errors are likely due to fast mapping: process of acquiring a word after hearing it applied to its referent on a small number of occasions. Linking word with concept after hearing the word a few times. Overregulation: overgeneralization of grammatical rules to irregular cases where the rules do not apply (saying mouses instead of mice)

use of a specific word to refer to larger class than adults do; might be a result of a lack of better words. -Calling adult female "mom"

use of a general term to refer only to a specific example -Thinking a terrier is the only type of dog

overgeneralization of grammatical rules to irregular cases where the rules do not apply (saying mouses instead of mice)

prelinguistic, holophrase, telegraphic

period before children utter their first meaningful words;10-13 months (399) • Responsive to language from birth and attend to speech; especially to mother • Babies begin to discriminate different stress patterns in 2 syllable and 3 syllable words. • 1 mo old are capable of discriminating consonants: ba da ta • very young infants are actually able to discriminate a wider variety of phonemes than adults can. • Intonational prompts are often successful at affecting a baby's mood or behavior • 2-6 mo: produce a vocalization in return that matches the intonation of what they have just heard. → preverbal infants no only discriminate different intonational patterns but also soon recognize that certain tones of voice have a particular meaning • By the last quarter of the first year, infant's increasing familiarity with the phonological aspects of their native language provides important clues about which patterns in an ongoing stream of speech represent individual words. • Prelinguistic Vocalizations • Crying: distress; fake crying by 3 months • Cooing: vowel-like sounds that young infants repeat over and over during periods of contentment. Ex. Oooooh, Ahhhhh • Babbles: vowel/consonant combinations that infants begin to produce at a bout 4-6 months of age. Ex. mamamama o Vocable: (10-12mo) consistent use of the same babble for an object. Infants are aware that certain speech sounds have consistent meanings are are about ready to talk.

Holophrase Period: the period when the child's speech consists of one-word utterances, some of which are thought to be holophrases. •Holophrase: single word utterance that represents an entire sentence's worth of meaning (1-2 years) •Phonological development occurs very rapidly •Naming explosion: dramatic increase in the pace at which infants acquire new words in the latter half of the second year; 18-24 months •Early pronunciation errors are somewhat similar across languages and are resistant to adults' attempts to correct them suggests that they stem, in part, from biological production constraints (immature vocal tract). •Individual differences because articulating phonemes are combining them into words is a vocal motor skill; it reflects the unique paths that individual children follow because they combine the sounds that they have been attending to closely and they produce new and more complex patterns •They practice phonemic combinations and their pronunciation errors become much less frequent. •Multimodal motherese: older companion's use of information that is exaggerated and synchronized across two or more senses to call an infant's attention to the referent of a spoken word. •Word Types -Nominals (Object Words) -Action Words (describe action or demand attention) -Modifiers (refer to properties or quantities of things) adj, adv -Personal/Social (express feelings or comment about social relationships) no, ouch -Function Words (grammatical function) what, where, is, to, for

-Nominals (Object Words) -Action Words (describe action or demand attention) -Modifiers (refer to properties or quantities of things) adj, adv -Personal/Social (express feelings or comment about social relationships) no, ouch -Function Words (grammatical function) what, where, is, to, for

Telegraphic Period: 18-24 months, children combine words into simple sentences • Telegraphic speech: early sentences that consist of content words and omit the less meaningful parts of speech, such as articles, prepositions, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs. Essential content words •Omit words because of their own processing and production constraints •Telegraphic speech is not as universal oSome languages place more stress on small grammatical markers and have less rigid rules about word order than other languages •Telegraphic speech based on syntax underestimate young child's linguistic capabilities oYoung children often use the same 2 word utterance to convey different meanings •Children supplement their words with gestures and intonational cues to ensure that their messages are understood •Most 2 to 2 ½ year olds have learned many pragmatic lessons about language and communication and are usually able to get their meaning across to conversational partners Preschool Period •Produce sentences that are complex through the development of grammatical morphemes •Grammatical morphemes: refinements that make language grammatically correct and give meaning; year 3 oPluralize nouns by adding s, signify location with the prepositional morphemes in and on, indicated verb tense with the present progressive or past tense, and describe possessive relations with the inflection's. oMastery occurs at different ages but in the same order oMorphemes acquired early are less semantically and syntactically complex than those acquired later oOnce young children have acquired a new grammatical morpheme, they apply this rule to new as well as familiar contexts. Mastering Transformational rules oTransformational grammar: use of syntax to change the meaning o1. Transform declarative sentence into a question by inverting the subject/verb "Am I going to the library?" •wh' words are placed at beginning of sentence "what doing" o2. Negative sentences: "I was not going to the library" •initially express negations by simply placing negative word in from of word or statement "No, I go" •child beings to insert negative word inside of the sentence, in front of the word it modifies "That not dog" •children learn to combine negative markers with the proper auxiliary verbs to negate sentences o3. Imperatives "Go to the library!" •omit the subject and put the verb first o4. Relative clauses "I who hates studying, was going to the library" •modify nouns o5. Compound "I am going to the library to eat and study" by the end of preschool period (5-6), children are using most grammar rules of adults Semantic Development o Increasingly aware of a variety of meaningful relations (big/little, tall/short) o Children younger than 4-5 misinterpret passive constructions but easily understand active version of the same idea. • Pragmatics and Communication Skills o Understand illocutionary intent, that the real underlying meaning of an utterance may not always correspond to the literal meaning of the words speakers used. o Referential communication skills: produces clear, unambigious messages and can detect ambiguities in others' speech and ask for clarification. o Children often fail to detect linguistic ambiguities because they are focusing on what they think the speaker means rather than on the literal meaning of the message. o They are not very good at detecting ambiguities in the literal meaning of oral messages o They are better communicators than many laboratory studies of comprehension monitoring might suggest because they are often successful at inferring what an ambiguous message much mean simply from nonlinguistic contextual information.

children learn to speak appropriately because they are reinforced for grammatically correct speech. • He believed that adults begin to shape a child's speech by selectively reinforcing those aspects of babbling that most resemble words, thereby increasing the probability that these sounds will be repeated. • Once they have 'shaped' sounds into words, adults withhold further reinforcement (attention or approval) until the child begins combining words. • BANDURA: social learning: children acquire knowledge by carefully listening to and imitating the language of older companions. • Caregivers teach language by modeling and by reinforcing grammatical speech. • Adults use child-directed speech and reshape their primitive sentences with expansions and recasts (motherese) • Children will acquire language as lost as they have partners with whom to converse, even without environmental supports • Evaluation of Learning Perspective • Young children are quicker to acquire and use proper names when reinforced • Children whose parents frequently encourage them to converse are more advanced in their early language development • Children babble in own language's intonation • DOES NOT account for development of syntax o Mothers approval or disapproval depends far more on the truth value (semantics) of what a child says, not on the statements grammatical correctness (syntax) o No evidence that children acquire grammatical rules by imitating adult speech • When young children try to imitate an adult utterance, they condense it to conform to their existing level of grammatical competence.

CHOMSKY human beings are biologically programmed to acquire language; language is quite natural and almost automatic, as long as children have linguistic input to process •Simplest of language is far too complex to be taught by parents (Skinner) or discovered via trial and error. •Language Acquisition Device: knowledge that might enable young children to infer the rules governing others' speech and to use these rules to produce grammar. Inborn model of language structure (surface and deep) oContains universal grammar: basic rules of grammar that characterize all languages. •Language Making Capacity (LMC): set of cognitive and perceptual abilities that are highly specialized for language learning. oInferences about the meaning and structure of linguistic information represent a theory of language that children construct for themselves and use to guide their own attempts to communicate. •Support for Nativist •Children reach certain linguistic milestones at about the same age, despite cultural differences in the structure of their languages •Language is species specific; no species has ever devised anything in the wild that closely resembles an abstract, rule-bound linguistic system •Brain Specialization and Language: left hemisphere is sensitive to language from birth Broca's and Wernicke's •Deaf children of hearing parents and other children exposed to ungrammatical pidgins may create languages of their own Problems with Nativist •UNCLEAR how children sift through verbal input and make the crucial discovers that further their linguistic competencies. •Fails to identify the underlying variables (nutrition, hormones, etc) that explain why growth follows the course that it task. It is more of a description of language than an explanation.

notion that human beings are most proficient at language learning before they reach puberty when the lateralized human brain is becoming increasingly specialized for linguistic functions. •Observations that child aphasics often recover their lost language functions without special therapy whereas adult aphasics usually require extensive therapeutic interventions to recover even a portion of their lost language skills •The right hemisphere of a child's relatively unspecialized brain can assume and linguistic functions lost when the left hemisphere is damaged •The brain of a person who is past puberty is already fully specialized for language and other neurological functions

•Genie heard very little language, no one was permitted to talk to her, and she was beaten •Neither woman mastered the rules of syntax that virtually all children acquire without formal instruction

Biological and Environmental; biological factors and environmental influences interact to determine the course of language development. NATURE and NURTURE •Children are biologically prepared to acquire language •Humans have a nervous system that gradually matures and predisposes them to develop similar ideas at about the same age. •Biological maturation affects cognitive development and influences language development •Environment plays a crucial role in language learning because companions continually introduce new linguistic rules and concepts. •Language results from a complex interplay among biological maturation, cognitive development, and an ever-changing linguistic environment that is heavily influenced by the child's attempts to communicate with companions.

Before 1960, many claimed that learning two languages rather than one hindered a child's language proficiency and slowed intellectual development. •Bilinguals were often first or second generation immigrants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who were not very proficient in English •The tests they took were administered in English (rather than in their language of greatest proficiency) •Their performances were compared with samples largely comprised of middle class, English speaking monolinguals

•Children exposed early (before age 3) to two languages had little difficulty becoming proficient in both •By age 3, well aware that the 2 languages were independent systems and that each was associated with particular contexts in which it was to be spoken •By age 4, displayed normal language proficiency in the language of their community and solid to excellent linguistic skills in the second language, depending on how much they had been exposed to it Advantages of Bilingualism •Fully bilingual children score as high or higher than monolingual peers on test but also outperform monolinguals on measures of metalinguistic awareness •Outperform monolingual peers on nonlinguistic tasks that require selective attention to overcome distractions •Bilingual advantage at metalinguistic tasks may stem from leaning very early that linguistic representations are arbitrary. •Bilinguals' advantage at ignoring distractions may simply reflect the fact that they are well practiced at monitoring their surroundings and producing the language understood by their immediate companions, while inhibiting the distracting second language that is irrelevant to that context. •Effective bilingual education could help to ensure that educational and future economic success of our LEP children, promote greater appreciation of ethnic diversity, and address and increasing need for bilingually competent workforce in our increasingly multicultural world.

fast mapping, form class hypothesis, lexical contrast

linking word with concept after hearing the word a few times

use context to determine type of word (noun, verb, etc)

(mutual exclusivity constraint) new word cannot mean same thing as the old word; contrast new word with ones already known. Young children will assume that each object has but one label and that different words refer to separate and non-overlapping categories.