Ch 2 Language Acquisition: A Theoretical Journey Flashcards
Nature vs. Nurture
Nature: The view that human language develops from biological components in the brain that we are born with, with out the necessity of being taught language.
Nurture: The view that human language is taught through imitation, listening, and learning in general.
Mirror Neurons
When a neuron fires when the person is doing some activity, and the same neuron fires when the person is watching someone else do the same activity
Plasticity
The dynamic ability of the human brain to change constantly as individuals learn. Also called the self-organizing neural network.
Naming deficit
A period between 18 & 20 months where a child has a vocabulary spurt, but suddenly finds that they are having confusion naming known objects, people, & events. This is thought to happen for two reasons. Either the dense growth of vocabulary produces competition in word selection, or the or because words are going through reorganization, causing confusion about words with strong semantic relationships.
Age of acquisition effect
Words that are learned early show faster retrieval during naming and reading tasks than words learned later.
Interactional Environment
The most current view of language development, which combines the nature and the nurture view.
Cross-linguistic studies
A study of one or more aspects of language concerning language development in children, such as comparing how one child learns English to how another child learns Chinese.
Telegraphic Speech
How english children use primary content words to produce words that are initially uninflected, but gradually the child learns to use inflection across the first 5-6 years of life.
The Three Proposed Routes of Acquisition of Grammatical Morphology that Occur in Relation to the Native Language
1) Productive use of inflection from the beginning
2) Rigidly ordered telegrams without grammatical morphology
3) Uninflected word combinations that occur in a range of different orders
Saliency
The perceptual relevance
Children focus on the salient aspects of?
Their language.
Animate Nouns
Living things
Inanimate Nouns
Non-living things
The Major Theories of Language Acquisition
Behaviorist Perspective, Nativist Perspective, & Interactionist Perspective
Behaviorist Interpretation
This view focuses on observable behaviors to explain language development. Behaviorists do not emphasize mental activities, such as attention and memory, although they do acknowledge their existence and their important connection to language development. BEHAVIORISTS ARGUE THAT LANGUAGE IS SOMETHING THAT HUMANS DO, NOT SOMETHING THEY HAVE. This statement puts language in the same context of learning as other behaviors, such as brushing your teeth or tying your shoe.
Operant
Any behavior whose frequency can be affected by the responses that follow it.
Reinforcement
If a target behavior’s frequency of occurrence increases as a consequence of the response that follow it, reinforcement has occurred.
Punishment
If the target behavior frequency decreases as a consequence of the response that follows it, the target behavior has been punished. (Punishment in this context is not a negative thing)
Shaping
A way of teaching a behavior which involves approximating the target behavior in small steps.
Chaining
When behaviors are learned in sequences, with the previous behavior complementing the next behavior in a positive or negative way.
Tact
A verbal behavior used to name or label something, typically in response to things or events the speaker is discussing.
Mand
A verbal behavior used to request, command, or make a demand, and it identifies its own reinforcer.
Intraverbal
A production that often seems to have no direct connection to the utterance that precipitated it.
Autoclitic
The responses influence and are influenced by the the speaker’s behaviors. They also account for the linking of words into sentences.
Classical Conditioning
When an originally neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus that elicits and unconditioned response.
Nativist Interpretation
This view is the extreme end of the nature end of the nature-nurture contimuum. CHOMSKY STATED THAT “ANYONE CONCERNED WITH THE STUDY OF HUMAN NAURE AND CAPABILITIES MUST SOMEHOW COME TO GRIPS WITH THE FACT THAT ALL HUMANS ACQUIRE LANGUAGE”. The foundation of the nativist interpretation is the idea that language is universal among humans and unique to the human species. The nativist interpretation states that because language is acquired so quickly and so early in the child’s life, learning alone cannot adequately account for acquisition. Nativists stress that language is essentially the same experience for all human beings no matter what language they speak, where they live, or how they interact with their language models.
Interactionist Interpretation
This view takes the view that biology and nature play important roles in language acquisition.
Two views of the interactionist interpretation
1) Semantic Cognitive View
2) Case Grammar Theory
Transformational Generative Grammar
This grammar suggests that language is processed at two levels, and two kinds of rules describe what is occurring at each level. Phase structure rules and transformations.
Phase Structure Rules
Describe the underlying relationships of words and phrases, the level of structure referred to as deep.
Transformations
The rules that describe the rearrangement of deep structures as they are moved to the next level of structure, known as surface.
Passive transformation
The transformation used to change the first sentence into the second.
Agentive
The initiator of an action
Dative
A being affected by the action or state of being ascribed by the verb.
Experiencer
A being who experiences an action or a mental or emotional state.
Factitive
An object or being that is the product of an action or state ascribed by the verb.
Instrumental
An inanimate object that is the means by which an action occurs.
Locative
The place where the action or state ascribed by the verb occurs.
Objective
A noun phrase whose role in the action or state ascribed by the verb is determined by the specific meaning of the verb.
Modality
Concerned with sentence characteristics such as verb tense or the expression of negation or interrogation.
Proposition
Concerned with the relationship between nouns and verbs in sentences.
Semantic Cognitive View
If we are to understand the acquisition of language, we must account for the expression of meaning.
Case Grammar Theory
The view that explains the importance and influence of semantics on the form of language, such as noun-verb agreement.
Piaget’s Cognitive Theory
A view that compared language acquisition to cognitive development, finding many correlations, with emphasis on Piaget’s sensorimotor period (Birth to two years). This period of cognitive development is crucial for speech and language development.
Information Processing Theory/Competition Model
This theory shares with the behaviorist perspective a greater emphasis on how language is learned than on the abstract rule system that presumably underlies language, but it goes a step further by making a concerted effort to relate structure and function. According to this system, children are not born with an internally wired system for language. Rather, they are born with a potential for all kinds of connections between symbols and the things and ideas symbols can represent.
Parallel Distributed Processing
The idea that children process language information at a number of levels at the same time.
Social Interactionist View
This view combines nature and nurture, with a focus on the interaction of biological abilities with environmental influences, such as the parent or care-giver.
Speech Act Theory
A view that takesa focus on pragmatics. This view states that every speech act has three separate acts in it: 1) the locutionary act, 2) the illocutionary act, & 3) the perlocutionary act.
Locutionary act
The expression of the words.
Illocutionary act
the motive or purpose underlying an utterance.
Perlocutionary act
The effect the locutionary act has on the listener.
