Ch 2 Development of Communication, Language, and Speech Flashcards
Paralinguistic
This mechanism can change the form and meaning of a sentence by acting across individual sounds or words of a sentence. These mechanisms signal attitude or emotion and include intonation, stress, rate of delivery, and pause or hesitation.
Communication
The process of exchanging information and ideas.
Nonlinguistic mechanisms
These include gestures, body posture, facial expression, eye contact, head and body movement, and physical distance or proxemics.
Metalinguistic mechanisms
These signal the status of communication based on our intuitions about the acceptability of utterances. In other words, metalinguistic skills enable us to talk about language, analyze it, think about it, separate it from its context, and judge it.
Decoding
When the listener receives the message both auditorily and visually and is processed in the brain.
Referent
The thing that a word or phrase denotes or stands for.
Language
A social tool, defined as a socially shared code or conventional system for representing concepts through the use of arbitrary symbols and rule-governed combinations of those symbols.
Symbols
Pictures, words, sounds, motions, etc. used to bring about the use of language.
Dialects
Subcategories of parent languages that use similar, but not identical rules.
Form rules
These include syntax, morphology, and phonology.
Syntax
A rule system governing the ordering of words in sentences
Morpheme
The smallest unit of grammar, a morpheme is indivisible without violating the meaning or producing meaningless units.
Free morphemes
These can be used independently. They form words or parts of words, such as dog, big, and happy.
Bound morphemes
Grammatical markers that must be attached to free morphemes. Some examples are ‘s, -er, un-, and -ly.
Morphology
These rules govern structure at the word level. For example, dog can be modified by the addition of s to form dogs.
Phonemes
The smallest meaningful units of speech sound. These are combined in specific ways to form words.
Semantic features
The part of the word meaning that characterize the word. For example, the semantic features of “bachelor” include “unwed” and “male”.
Selection restrictions
These are based on specific features and prohibit certain word combinations as meaningless or redundant. Examples are “bachelor’s wife” which is meaningless, or “unwed bachelor” which is redundant.
Synonyms
Words that are similar in meaning.
Antonyms
Words that are opposite in meaning.
Prosodic patterns
Flow patterns of a language.
Phonotactic organization
Consists of syllable structure and sound combinations.
Neighborhood density
The number of possible words that differ by one phoneme. For example, there are very few words in the neighborhood with “the”, meaning the word’s density is low.
Phonotactic probability
The likelihood of a sound pattern occurring.
Presupposition
The process of estimating the knowledge of the listener and the amount of information needed for comprehension.
Deictic terms
Words or phrases that can be interpreted only from the physical location of the speaker.
Bootstrapping
Using what you know about language to help you comprehend and produce language, as when preschoolers use their earlier knowledge of semantics to interpret and form sentences.
Lexicon
A child’s personal dictionary of words that he/she knows.
Fast mapping
When words are added rapidly in which the child assumes a meaning from context and then produces the word in a similar context.
Contrast strategy
When a child assumes that each word is different from or contrasts with every other in his/her lexicon.
Conventionality strategy
When the child assumes that a certain form will be used repeatedly to convey meaning for words in a child’s lexicon.
Embedding
The placement of a phrase or clause within another clause.
Gerunds
A type of phrase. (I like swimming.)
Clause
Contains both a noun and a verb, called the subject and predicate, respectively.
