Ch. 8: Language

Question 1

Aphasia

Answer 1

A form of brain damage that causes problems in language function. There are different kinds of aphasias that impair different aspects of language.

Question 2

Babbling

Answer 2

Part of the sequence of prelinguistic vocalizations occurring in the first year of
life. Children go through increasingly complex patterns of babbling, starting from around 4
months onward. Deaf children show a comparable babbling with sign language.

Question 3

Child-directed speech/motherese

Answer 3

Speech by adults or older children that is directed
toward younger children and that is altered in a wide variety of ways (for example, slower,
louder, and higher- pitched speech that stresses the boundaries between words) that make it different from speech directed toward adult peers; also known as motherese and infantdirected speech.

Question 4

Connectionism

Answer 4

An approach to learning and representation that posits massively parallel processing of small elements, none of which by themselves may be explicitly represented.
This approach draws heavily on statistical patterns of feature correlations in the environment.

Question 5

Constraints on word meanings

Answer 5

Constraints on the possible meanings that can be assigned
to a given word. These are thought to be necessary to explain how word meanings are
acquired because they narrow down the enormous number of possible meanings to a
workable number.

Question 6

Defining feature

Answer 6

In the study of word meaning, a feature that is necessary to specifying meaning.

Question 7

Holophrase

Answer 7

A single word that stands for a larger phrase or full sentence that is mentally present but that the child is unable to produce.

Question 8

Language acquisition device (LAD)

Answer 8

A hypothesized mental system in humans that is specialized for the acquisition of language and not other kinds of knowledge.

Question 9

Lexicon/ vocabulary

Answer 9

The set of words that a person knows; often referred to as a person’s vocabulary.

Question 10

Linguistic determinism

Answer 10

The view, first attributed to Whorf and Sapir, that the language that one learns determines the nature of one’s thoughts.

Question 11

Morpheme

Answer 11

The smallest unit of language that represents a discrete meaning. Morphemes
are not only words but also parts of words that carry meaning, such as plural endings in
English.

Question 12

Linguistic relativity

Question 13

Mutual exclusivity

Answer 13

A constraint on word meanings based on the assumption that entities do not tend to have more than one label.

Question 14

Overextension

Answer 14

A phenomenon in semantic development in which the child uses a word to
apply to a larger set of entities than is normal in adult usage.

ex. calling a cat for a dog

Question 15

Overregularization

Answer 15

The excessive use of a rule so that it applies to more cases than it actually should.

Question 16

Phoneme

Answer 16

The smallest unit of a language that makes a difference in word or morpheme meaning.

Question 17

Phonology

Answer 17

The sound patterns of a language and the rules that govern them.

Question 18

Pragmatics

Answer 18

The ways in which language is used to effect successful communication in social contexts, conveying intended meanings such as inferred goals and motivations.

Question 19

Prelinguistic vocalization

Answer 19

Any of a number of sounds made by the infant prior to the clear use of language. Vocalizations include babbling but can also include other earlier sounds, such as cooing and squealing.

Question 20

Principles and parameters approach

Answer 20

An approach advocated by Noam Chomsky that says
that there are a common set of principles that govern the internal structure of all languages and that, early in life, the child’s mind contains a large number of possible linguistic forms or alternative parameters that will later become fixed based on the specific language the child learns.

Question 21

Prosody

Answer 21

The acoustic properties of speech, such as intonation, rhythm, and pitch.

Question 22

Referential communications task

Answer 22

A task in which a speaker tries to communicate to a
listener, who cannot see the speaker, a series of operations that involve reference to a set of
materials that both the speaker and the listener have in front of them.

nice to measure communicative abilities.

Question 23

Semantic development

Answer 23

The process of learning word meanings and their interrelationships by linking words to concepts and then applying those concepts to objects.

Question 24

Semantics

Answer 24

The ways in which words and the relations between them yield meaning.

Question 25

Specific language impairment

Answer 25

A language impairment in which there are highly specific problems with particular syntactic structures, such as noun- verb agreement and the
use of articles and prepositions.

Question 26

Statistical learning

Answer 26

Learning based on the probability of events co- occurring or occurring
in certain orders.

Question 27

syntax

Answer 27

deals with the ordering of languages.

Question 28

Underextension

Answer 28

A phenomenon in semantic development in which the child uses a word to apply to a smaller set of entities than is normal in adult usage.

fail to call a dog a dog

Question 29

Whole-object bias

Answer 29

A bias to assume that labels refer to whole objects rather than their parts, their colors, or other properties.