Chapter 11 Flashcards
Grammatical morphemes:
Prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs that modify the meaning of words and sentences
Overregularization
The overgeneralization of grammatical rules to irregular cases where the ruless do not apply ( like saying mouses instead of mice.)
Transformational grammar:
Rules of syntax that allow us to trastorn declarative statements into questions, negatives, Imperatives, and other kinds of sentences.
Phonology:
Sound system of a language and the rules for combining these sounds to produce meaningful units of speech.
Morphology:
The rules governing the formation of meaningful words from sounds.
Semantics
Expressed meaning of words and sentences
Morphemes
Smallest meaningful language units
Free vs bound morphemes
Free = morphemes that con stand alone as a word ( cat, go.)
Bound = morphemes that cannot stand alone, modify the meaning of free morphemes. ( - ed.)
Syntax
Structure of a language; the rules specifying how words and grammatical markers are to be combined to produce meaningful sentences.
Pragmatics
Principles that underlie the effective and appropriate use of language in social contexts
Sociolinguistic knowledge
Culturally specific rules specifying how language should be structured and used in particular social contexts
Learning Theorist perspective on language acquisition:
Kids acquire language as they imitate others’ speech and are reinforced for grammatically correct utterances - but this is unsupported by research.
Adults use child - directed speech and reshape their primitive sentences with expansions and recasts.
Children will acquire language as long as they have partners with whom to converse, even without these environmental supports.
Nativist perspective on language acquisition:
Humans are innately endowed with biological linguistic processing capabilities (a language accusation device or language making capacity) that function most efficiently prior to puberty.
This means that kids require nothing more than being exposed to speech in order to learn to speak the language they hear.
Nativists identity linguistic universals and observe that language fureliors are served by Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of the brain.
Deaf kids + other kids exposed to ungrammatical pidgins, may create languages of their own.
Both first and second language learning seem to proceed more smoothly during the sensitive period prior to puberty.
Nativists admit it isn’t clear how kid’s sift through verbal input + make the crucial discoveries that further their linguistic competencies.
Interactionist perspective on language acquisition
Believe kids are biologically prepared to acquire language.
Instead of a specialized linguistic processor being innate, humans have a nervous system that gradually matures and predisposes them to develop similar ideas at about the same age.
Biological maturation affects cognitive development, which in turn influences language development.
Environment plays a crucial role in language learning, because companions continually introduce new linguistic rules and concepts.
Prelinguistic period:
Infants well prepared for language learning:
- development during this phase allows them to discriminate speechlike sounds + become sensitive to a wider variety of phonemes than are adults.
- sensitive to intonational cues from birth.
- by 7-10 months, infants are already segmenting others’ speech into phrases and wordlike units
- begin cooing by 2 months, babble by 6-9 months.
- later match babble intonation to tonal qualities of the language they near + may produce own vocables to signify meaning
- infants less than 1 year old have already learned people take turns while vocalizing & that gestures can be used to communicate + share meaning
- once infants begin to understand individual words, their receptive language is ahead of their productive language.
Holophrastic period
Holophrase = one word. In this phase infants speak in holophrases+ spend several months expanding vocabularies one word at a time. Talk mostly abat moving or manipulable objects of interest.
Vocabulary spurt / naming explosion between 18-24 months of age.
Most kids in western cultures develop a referential style of language, whereas many infants from social-harmony emphasizing cultures adopt expressive style.
Toddlers use social and contextual cues to fast-map words onto objects, actions + attributes.
Processing constraints such as object scope constraint, mutual exclusivity, lexical context, syntactical bootstrapping help toddlers figure out what new words mean.
Toddlers frequently make semantic like errors over/under extensions
Telegraphic period
18-24 months: toddlers begin to make 2-3 word sentences known as telegraphic speech because they omit grammatical markers and smaller, less important words
Not just random word combos!
In earliest senators, kids follow certain rules of word order when combining words and also express the same categories of meaning (semantic relations)
Toddlers become sensitive to pragmatic constraints, including the realization that speakers must be more directive and elaborate when a listener doesn’t share their knowledge
Also learn certain sociolinguistic prescriptions such as the need to be polite when making requests
Preschool period
During the preschool period (2.5-5) the child’s language becomes much more similar to an adults.
Children begin to add grammatical morphemes (-s, -ed, -ing) to their increasingly long sentences
May overregularize grammatical markers but there is uniformity in the order in which they appear
Learns rules of transformational grammar that will help them change declarative sentences into questions, negations, imperatives, relative clauses, and compound sentences.
Begin to understand pragmatic lessons like the need to tailor their messages to a listeners ability to comprehend
Referential communication skills are not well developed at this stage
Middle childhood:
Period of linguistic refinement. Learn subtle exceptions to grammatical rules & begin to understand even the most complex syntactical structures of their native language. Vocabulary grows rapidly as children acquire morphological knowledge and metalinguistic awareness.
School-age kids display better referential communication skills as they attend more carefully to literal meanings of ambiguous utterances & are more likely to clarify the ambiguous messages they send and receive
Cognitive development, the growth of sociolinguistic knowledge, & opportunities to communicate with linguistically immature siblings and peers all contribute to the development of communication skills
Bilingualism
Cognitive advantages to bilingualism
Bilingual education programs appear to promote language skills and self-perceived academic and social competences
Multimodal motherese:
An older companion’s use of information that is exaggerated and synchronized across two or more senses to call an infant’s attention to the referent of a spoken word.
Processing constraints:
Cognitive biases or tendencies that lead infants and toddlers to favor certain interpretations of the meaning of new words over other interpretations.
Object scope constraint:
The notion that young children assure that a new word applied to an object refers to the whole object rather than to parts of the object or to object attributes.
Mutual exclusivity constraint:
The notion that young children assume that each object has only one label and that different words refer to separate and not overlapping categories.
Lexical contrast constraint:
The notion that young children make inferences about word meanings by contrasting new words with words they already know.
Taxonomic constraint:
The assumption that words label categories of similar objects that share common perceptual features
Over extension
Young child’s tendency to use relatively specific words to refer to a broader set of objects, actions, or events than adults do (using car to refer to all motor vehicles)
Under extension:
Young child’s tendency to use general words to refer to a smaller set of objects, actions, or events than adults do (using candy to refer only to mints)
Syntactical bootstrapping
The notion that young children make inferences about the meaning of words by analyzing the way words are used in sentences and inferring whether they refer to objects (nouns), actions (verbs), or attributes (adjectives)
