Building Blocks of Language Flashcards
Language development involves achieving competency in what domains?
Content: semantics
Form: morphology, syntax, phonology
Use: pragmatics
Phonological development
Acquiring sensitivity to prosodic cues, developing internal representations of the native languages phonemes and producing vowels and consonants intelligibly
Phonological representation
Neurological imprint of a phoneme that differentiates it from other phonemes- ex: tats/cats Child has phonemic representation but cannot produce
What are the building blocks of phonological development?
Begins @ birth, or even before, in the womb.
- Parsing stream of speech
- Developing a phonemic inventory
- Phonological awareness
Parsing stream of speech
Use specific cues to parse speech stream into smaller units (words) and to separate simultaneously occurring speech streams. Can use prosodic and phonotactic cues.
Prosodic cues
Familiarity of words and syllable stress patterns/ rhythm of language to break into stream. Must have knowledge of word stress patterns and pausing.
Phonotactic cues
Sensitivity to probability with which certain sounds occur in general and specific positions of words. Knowledge of probabilities/improbabilities is a tool to segment novel words from continuous stream.
Developing a phonemic inventory
Involves phonological knowledge and phonological production
Phonological knowledge
Internal representations of phonemes comprising native language
Phonological production
Expression of phonemes to produce syllables and words.
How do phonemes develop?
Timing is influenced by frequency in spoken language, number of words child uses, articulatory complexity of producing phoneme. Order of consonantal acquisition varies across languages, is sufficiently well developed by 3-4 years to provide intelligible speech.
Phonological awareness
Individuals ability to attend to phonological segments of speech through implicit or explicit analysis- id rhyming words, 1st sound in word, and count phonemes in word
Phonemic awareness
Focus on phonemic units of words- child has if they can id sounds
Phonics
Teaches children relationship between letters/sounds.
The phonologically aware are better able to profit from phonic instruction- better readers is impact of systematic instruction on phonological structure of language.
What are the influences on phonological development?
Native language- Arabic 0 P example. Functional load is importance of a phoneme to languages phonemic inventory.
Linguistic experience- variability in phonological exposure. Lower income/ear infections.
Morphological development
Acquiring inflectional morphemes and derivational morphemes
Morphemes
Smallest unit of language, can add grammatical inflection, change syntactic class.
Derivational morphemes
Change class/meaning
When do children acquire major grammatical morphemes?
Age 2, ing. Invariant in order/timing
Children move from speaking in telegraphic quality to adult like due to
Grammatical morphology
Obligatory context
Instance which a mature grammar specifies use of grammatical marker.
Morpheme mastery
If child includes grammatical morpheme 75% of time it is mastered in obligatory contexts
Influences on morphological development
2nd language acquisition: May never master due to grammatical morphemes- age is factor
Dialect: morphology varies- AAVE ex
Language Impairment- hallmark characteristic of SLI is difficulty in grammatical morphology- past tense, 3rd person
Language
Single dimension of human bx that consists of three interrelated domains of content, form, and use.
