Ch. 3: Language Development in Children Flashcards
Language
A code in which we make specific symbols stand for something else. Includes morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and phonology.
Morphology
Study of word structure. Describes how words are formed out of more basic elements of speech called morphemes.
Morpheme
Smallest meaningful unit of a language.
Bound/Grammatical Morpheme
Cannot convey meaning by themselves. Must be joined with free morphemes in order to have meaning.
Base/Root/Free Morpheme
Word that has meaning and cannot be broken down into smaller parts, but can have other morphemes added to it.
Allomorphs
Variations of morphemes. Do not alter the original meaning of the morpheme.
Syntax
Study of sentence structure. The arrangement of words to form meaningful sentences. Word order and overall structure of a sentence. A collection of rules that specify the ways and order in which words may be combined to form sentences in a particular language.
Passive Sentences
Sentences in which the subject receives the action of the verb. (“The cat was petted by Mark.”)
Active Sentences
Sentences in which the subject performs the action of the verb. (“Mark petted the cat.”
Interrogative Sentences
Sentences with questions. (“Did you see the gorgeous sunset?”)
Declarative Sentences
Sentences that make statements. (“The sunset was gorgeous.”)
Imperative Sentences
Sentences that state commands. (“Shut the door.”)
Exclamatory Sentences
Sentences which express strong feeling. (“I never said that!”)
Compound Sentence
Sentence that contains two or more independent clauses joined by a comma and a conjunction or by a semicolon.
Clause
Contains a subject and a predicate.
Independent/Main Clause
Contains a subject and a predicate. Can stand alone.
Complex Sentence
Sentence that contains one independent clause and one or more dependent/subordinate clauses.
Dependent/Subordinate Clause
Clause that has a subject and predicate but cannot stand alone.
Semantics
Study of the meaning of language. Meaning conveyed by words, phrases, and sentences. Includes vocabulary/lexicon.
Semantic Categories
Used to sort words. Example categories include recurrence (concept of ‘more’), rejection (‘no’), and causality (cause and effect).
Overextension
Often used by young children. (E.g., all round items are balls)
Underextension
Often used by young children. (E.g., only Oreos are cookies)
World Knowledge
Involves a person’s autobiographical and experiential memory and understanding of particular events.
Word Knowledge
Knowledge that is primarily verbal and contains word and symbol definitions. Depends heavily upon a child’s world knowledge.
Quick Incidental Learning/Fast Mapping
Refers to children’s ability to learn a new word on the basis of just a few exposures to it. Typical children use this to rapidly expand their vocabularies.
Pragmatics
Study of the rules that govern the use of language in social situations. Dimension of language that considers the context and the function of the utterance. Influenced by culture.
Cohesion
Ability to order and organize utterances in a message so that they build logically on one another.
Discourse
Refers to how utterances are related to one another. Has to do with the connected flow of language. Can involve a monologue, a dialogue, or even conversational exchange in a small group. What occurs when people talk with each other.
Narratives
A form of discourse in which the speaker tells a story. The speaker talks about a logical sequence of events.
Child-Directed Speech/Motherese
Utterances are produced with a higher pitch and great pitch fluctuations. Has simpler, shorter utterances with longer pauses.
Holophrastic Speech
One word is used to communicate a variety of meanings.
Semantic Relations
Utterances that reflect meaning based on relationships between different words (e.g., cause-effect relationships)
Phonological Awareness
Refers to a child’s specific ability to detect and manipulate sounds and syllables in words. Encompasses the ability to be aware of sounds and syllables apart from whole words.
Print Knowledge
Refers to children’s emergent knowledge about functions and forms of written language.
Auditory-Oral skills
Listening and speaking skills. Strongly related to learning to read and write.
Emergent Literacy/Preliteracy
Skills that are foundational to later reading and writing in school. E.g., coloring, being read to, etc.
Verbal Behavior
A form of social behavior maintained by the actions of a verbal community. Acquired under appropriate conditions of stimulation, response, and reinforcement.
Behaviorist Theory of Language Development
Theory of language development proposed by BF Skinner. Does not explain the acquisition of language. Explains the acquisition of verbal behavior. Suggests that learning, not innate mechanisms, plays a major role in the acquisition of verbal behaviors. Caregiver perform a variety of actions that promote language learning in children.
Mands
Involve requests. Derived from related traditional terms such as demands and commands.
Tacts
A group of verbal responses that describe and comment on the things and events around us. Reinforced socially. E.g., “This car is big and red.”
Echoics
Imitative verbal responses whose stimuli are the speech of another person. Clinician models target response and the client imitates.
Autoclitics
Secondary verbal behaviors that comment upon, or clarify the causes of, such primary verbal behaviors such as tacts and mands.
Intraverbals
A class of verbal behaviors that are determined by the speaker’s own prior verbal behaviors. What one says may be stimulus for more to be said. Account of continuous, fluent speech.
Nativist Theory of Language Development
Theory of language development and syntax proposed by Noam Chomsky. Syntactic structures are the essence of language and language is a product of the unique human mind. There are universal rules of grammar that apply to all languages. Children are born with a language acquisition device (LAD). Child is born with an innate ability to learn language. Believes that therapy should be focused on syntax and that reinforcement is unnecessary.
Competence
The knowledge of the rules of universal grammar.
Performance
The actual production of language.
Surface Structure
Actual arrangement of words in syntactic order. Phrase or sentence that one hears.
Deep Structure
Abstract structure which primarily contains the rules of sentence formation.
Transformation
Operation that relates the deep and surface structures and yields different forms of sentences.
Transformational Generative Theory of Grammar
According to this theory, with knowledge of the rules of grammar and the use of transformations, speakers can generate an endless variety of sentences.
Government Binding Theory
Theory that attempts to describe the way the mind represents the autonomous system of language. Chomsky wanted to present a theory that accounted for the variety in human languages and explained the development of grammars on the basis of limited output.
Cognition
Knowledge and mental processes such as memory, attention, and visual and auditory perception.
Cognitive Theory/Cognitive Constructionism
A theory that states that language acquisition is made possible by cognition and general intellectual processes. Language is only one expression of a more general set of cognitive activities, and proper development of the cognitive system is a necessary precursor of linguistic expression. A child must first acquire concepts before producing words. Cognitive precursors are innate but language is not. Language is not innate nor learned, so language emerges as a result of cognitive growth.
Strong Cognitive Hypothesis
Hypothesis stating that there are cognitive abilities that are essential prerequisites to language skills. Without these prerequisite cognitive skills, language skills will not be optimally developed. Language development is dependent on cognitive development.
Strong Cognitive Hypothesis
Hypothesis stating that there are cognitive abilities that are essential prerequisites to language skills. Without these prerequisite cognitive skills, language skills will not be optimally developed. Language development is dependent on cognitive development.
Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development
1) Sensorimotor (0 – 2 years)
2) Preoperational (2 – 7 years)
3) Concrete Operational (7 – 11 years)
4) Formal Operational (11+ years)
Weak Cognition Hypothesis
Hypothesis stating that while cognition accounts for some of a child’s language abilities, it cannot account for all of them. Some aspects of language do not develop directly as a result of underlying cognitive skills.
Piaget’s Sensorimotor Stage
Piaget’s stage of cognitive development for 0 – 2 years. Divided into 6 substages.
Piaget’s Preoperational Stage
Piaget’s stage of cognitive development for 2 – 7 years. Divided into 2 substages: Preconceptual and intuitive.
Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage
Piaget’s stage of cognitive development for 7 – 11 years. Child is less egocentric and has increasing ability to see others’ point of view, acquires seriation and conversation skills, employs logical causality, and uses effective classification skills.
Piaget’s Formal Operational Stage
Piaget’s stage of cognitive development for ages above 11 years. Child displays lack of egocentricity and is able to see others’ point of view, displays ability to think and speak in the abstract, can use inductive and deductive thought processes, can use verbal reasoning and make “if…then” statements, and the child is able to use hypothetical reasoning.
Information-Processing Theory/Cognitive Connectionism
Theory of language development that views the human information-processing system as a mechanism which encodes stimuli from the environment, operates on interpretations of those stimuli, stores the results in memory, and permits retrieval of previously stored information. Skills of primary concern are organization, memory, transfer, attention, and discrimination. Language learning relies on information-processing mechanisms.
Phonological Processing
Deals with the processes involved in the ability to mentally manipulate phonological aspects of language such as word rhyming, word segmentation, syllabication, and others.
Temporal Auditory Processing
Deals with the ability to perceive the brief acoustic events that comprise speech sounds and track changes in these events as they happen quickly in the speech of other people.
Auditory Processing
Encompasses skills such as auditory discrimination, auditory attention, auditory memory, auditory rate and auditory sequencing.
Auditory Discrimination
These skills enable children to identify differences between sound stimuli. E.g., “Listen: cat – bat. Are these words the same or different?”
Auditory Attention
Ability to ignore irrelevant acoustic stimuli and focus on important information. Children with poor skills in this area have difficulty filtering relevant and irrelevant stimuli. Children are not able to attend solely to important speech stimuli.
Auditory Memory
Ability to mentally store speech stimuli, or remember what one has heard.
Auditory Rate
Ability to process acoustic stimuli that are presented at different rates or speeds.
Auditory Sequencing
Ability to identify the temporal order in which auditory stimuli occur.
Social Interactionism Theory
Theory of language development stating that the structure of human language has probably arisen from language’s social-communicative function in human relations. Emphasizes language function, not structure. Gives credence to the situations in which social interactions occur, believing that interactions vary depending on the situation. Language develops because people are motivated to interact socially with others around them. The child and his/her caregivers and the environment play active roles in language acquisition. Vygotsky was a proponent.