9. Language Development Flashcards
Bilingualism
Speaking two languages proficiently
Black English
A dialect of American English, characterized by some special rules of pronunciation and syntax, used mostly (but not exclusively) by members of the African American community
Bound morphemes
Morphemes that cannot stand alone but are attached to free morphemes, such as the word endings -ed and -ing in English
Broca’s area
An area of the frontal region of the brain, typically in the left hemisphere, associated with speech production
Child-directed speech
The specialized register of speech adults and older children use when talking to infants and young children
Cognitive self-guidance system
In Vygotsky’s theory, the use of private speech to guide problem-solving behavior
Collective monologues
Egocentric exchanges between two or more children with participants talking with one another but not necessarily to one another, such that what one child says has little to do with the comments of the other
Communicative competence
Mastery of five aspects of language: semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, and pragmatics
Creoles
Languages that develop when children transform the pidgin of their parents to a grammatically more complex ‘‘true’’ language
Egocentric (or private) speech
Children’s speech that is apparently produced for the self and not directed to others
Fast mapping
The ability to learn new words based on very little input
Free morphemes
Morphemes that can stand alone as a word, such as dog, chase, or happy
Grammar center
An area in the frontal lobe that is specifically related to processing grammatical information
Holophrases (holophrastic speech)
Children’s use of one-word sentences
Infant-directed speech
The specialized register of speech adults and older children use when talking specifically to infants
Inner speech
In Vygotsky’s theory, the covert language used to guide thought
Language acquisition device (LAD)
In Chomsky’s theory, the hypothetical construct possessed by all humans at birth enabling them to acquire language
Language acquisition support system (LASS)
The idea proposed by Bruner that adults and older children have learning devices that interact with children’s language acquisition devices (LAD)
Less-is-more hypothesis
Newport’s hypothesis that the cognitive limitations of infants and young children may serve to simplify the body of language they process, thus making it easier to learn the complicated syntactical system of any human language
Lexical constraints
Constraints that facilitate word learning in young children by limiting the possible interpretations that an utterance is likely to have. See also whole-object assumption, taxonomic assumption, and mutual exclusivity assumption
Lexicon
The words that a child knows, or vocabulary