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.
