Chapter 11

Question 1

Grammatical morphemes:

Answer 1

Prefixes, suffixes, prepositions, and auxiliary verbs that modify the meaning of words and sentences

Question 2

Overregularization

Answer 2

The overgeneralization of grammatical rules to irregular cases where the ruless do not apply ( like saying mouses instead of mice.)

Question 3

Transformational grammar:

Answer 3

Rules of syntax that allow us to trastorn declarative statements into questions, negatives, Imperatives, and other kinds of sentences.

Question 4

Phonology:

Answer 4

Sound system of a language and the rules for combining these sounds to produce meaningful units of speech.

Question 5

Morphology:

Answer 5

The rules governing the formation of meaningful words from sounds.

Question 6

Semantics

Answer 6

Expressed meaning of words and sentences

Question 7

Morphemes

Answer 7

Smallest meaningful language units

Question 8

Free vs bound morphemes

Answer 8

Free = morphemes that con stand alone as a word ( cat, go.)

Bound = morphemes that cannot stand alone, modify the meaning of free morphemes. ( - ed.)

Question 9

Syntax

Answer 9

Structure of a language; the rules specifying how words and grammatical markers are to be combined to produce meaningful sentences.

Question 10

Pragmatics

Answer 10

Principles that underlie the effective and appropriate use of language in social contexts

Question 11

Sociolinguistic knowledge

Answer 11

Culturally specific rules specifying how language should be structured and used in particular social contexts

Question 12

Learning Theorist perspective on language acquisition:

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

Nativist perspective on language acquisition:

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

Interactionist perspective on language acquisition

Answer 14

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.

Question 15

Prelinguistic period:

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

Holophrastic period

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Telegraphic period

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Preschool period

Answer 18

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

Question 19

Middle childhood:

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Bilingualism

Answer 20

Cognitive advantages to bilingualism

Bilingual education programs appear to promote language skills and self-perceived academic and social competences

Question 21

Multimodal motherese:

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

Processing constraints:

Answer 22

Cognitive biases or tendencies that lead infants and toddlers to favor certain interpretations of the meaning of new words over other interpretations.

Question 23

Object scope constraint:

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

Mutual exclusivity constraint:

Answer 24

The notion that young children assume that each object has only one label and that different words refer to separate and not overlapping categories.

Question 25

Lexical contrast constraint:

Answer 25

The notion that young children make inferences about word meanings by contrasting new words with words they already know.

Question 26

Taxonomic constraint:

Answer 26

The assumption that words label categories of similar objects that share common perceptual features

Question 27

Over extension

Answer 27

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)

Question 28

Under extension:

Answer 28

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)

Question 29

Syntactical bootstrapping

Answer 29

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)