2ND LANG ACQUISITION Flashcards
Skinner
One of the pioneers of Behaviorism.
Behaviorism
Language development by means of environmental influence.
Noam Chomsky
The world’s most famous linguist to date.
Morphemes
The smallest grammatical markers, or units, in language that alter words.
Universal Grammar
A set of innate principles and adjustment parameters that are common to all human languages.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
Hard wired (in the brain) ability to learn language/grammar.
Innateness Hypothesis
Argues that our ability to acquire
human) language is innate (genetically encoded
Theories of Acquisition
Imitation, Reinforcement, Active Construction of a Grammar, and Connectionist Theories.
Imitation Theory
Children imitate what they hear.
Reinforcement Theory
Children learn through positive and negative
reinforcement
Active Construction of Grammar Theory
Children create their own grammar rules.
Connectionist Theory
Claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens neural connections.
Critical Period Hypothesis
A critical period in development during
which a language can be acquired like a native speaker.
Prelinguistic stage of development
Babies make noises, but not yet babbling.
Structure Dependency
Language is organized in such a way that it crucially depends on the structural relationships between elements in s sentence.
Head Parameter
Specifies the position of the head in relation to its compliments within phrases for different languages.
Deep Structure
The core semantic relations of a sentence
Surface Structure
The physical properties of a language.
Motherese
Focused on maternal input
Motherese
Focused on maternal input
Language
cognition that distinguishes humans from other species.
Cognitive Revolution
the scientific study of the mind as an information processor.
Mentalist Emphasis
States that rule learning is over enthusiastic.
Linguistic Competency
Concerned with the child’s grammar, linguistic input, and construction of grammatical structures.
Performance
Deals with the nature of the child’s rule system.
Head first language
English is a head first language because the head of the phrase always appears before its compliment.
Head Last Language
Compliments precede the head inside phrases. Japanese is a head last language
Syntactic Structures
An influential work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957.
Transformations
This procedure gives rise to different sentence structures.
Semantic Relations
The associations that exist between the meaning of words.
