Chapter 12 Flashcards
Pragmatic skills in adults
- Skilled with Theory of Mind
- Reads nonlinguistic and supralinguistic cues
- Switches registers depending on the audience: professionals, strangers, political affiliation, etc
Working memory decline: effect on narratives
- Decline in working memory with age causes
- Difficulty integrating texts
- Less sensitive to details
- Fewer clauses
- More irrelevant content
Conversational Activities of Teenagers
- most teens in the US direct their partner’s attention, give feedback, and respond based ont heri partner’s statements
- teens don’t show negative emotions, turn away, request for clarification, or fail to answer questions
Conversational Activities of Adult Speakers
- ’uh’ and ‘um’ have different uses
- uh = short delay, um = long one
- more contingent questions = fewer topic changes
- able to detect conversation breakdown
- increase in the variety of intentions expressed
Gender Differences in Speech
- men generally talk more than women
- men swear more, women swear less
- women use more polite words, more descriptive words
- men talk more in public, less at home
- women talk less in public, more at home
- men are more combative, less engaged
- women see conversation as a way to connect
How do adult word definitions vary from child definitions?
- More abstract than child definitions
- Adolescence: inclusion of category membership, sharpening of core features of a word, addition of subtle aspects of meaning
Figurative Language use in Adults
- Preteens + adolescents prefer transparent + familiar figures of speech to opaque + out of context ones
- In older adults it depends on level of education rather than figure of speech
Word retrieval vs. Inventory in Older Adults
- There’s a decline in retrieval of words around 70 years old, but not lexicon
- Possibly due to working memory issues
Syntax and morphology
Length and syntactic complexity Depending on age Depending on genre Expository vs. narrative Complexity of written texts positively correlated with education
Conjuncts
-cohesive and connective devices between sentences
-Concordant:
“Similarly, moreover, consequently”
-Discordant
“In contrast, rather, but, nevertheless
Disjunct
- comment on or convey the speaker’s attitude toward the content of the connected sentence
“Honestly, I don’t know why you brought that car”
“In my opinion, it was a bargain”
“Well, to be honest, i think it’s a lemon”
Phonology
Articulatory knowledge increases throughout lifetime
-Increased fluency
-Higher phonological skills
Social-indexical knowledge - ability to recognize and understand a social group’s unique characteristics
Reading in Teens and Adults
- pleasure reading decreases through adolescence, esp among boys
- adults read somewhat more than teens, mostly @ work: this difference may decrease as more people raised on computers reach adulthood
Writing in Teens and Adults
- it isnt until early adulthood that the cognitive and executive function skills necessary for mature writing are present
- until junior high, young writers need adult help with planning + revising their writing
Bilingualism in Adulthood
- the earlier exposure to english = more nativelike English speech in adulthood
- native english proficiency is rarely attained if learning begins after puberty
- nonnative child and adult listeners rely less on grammatical analysis for interpretation than native speakers
