Chapter 2 book Flashcards
Phonological development
involves acquiring the rules of language that govern the sound structure of syllables and words.
minimal pairs
Words that differ by only one phoneme, such as low and row
phonotac-tic rules
these rules specify “legal” (i.e., acceptable) orders of sounds in syllables and words and the places where specific phonemes can and cannot occur.
three key build-ing blocks in phonological development,
(a) using cues to segment streams of speech, (b) developing a phonemic inventory, and (c) becoming phonologically aware.
prosodic cues
infants draw on their familiarity with word and syllable stress patterns, or the rhythm of language, to break into the speech stream.
phonotactic cues
to parse the speech stream.
phonological knowledge
the child’s acqui-sition of internal representations of the phonemes composing his or her native language
phonological production
his or her expression of these phonemes to produce syllables and words—ter
factors influence the timing of development for specific phonemes
including the phoneme’s frequency of occurrence in spoken language, the number of words a child uses that contain a given phoneme, and, to some extent, the articulatory complexity of producing the phoneme
Phonological awareness
is an individual’s ability to attend to the phonological units of speech through implicit or explicit analysis.
examine an individual’s phonological awareness using a variety of simple oral tasks
syllable counting rhyme detection initial sound identification initial sound elision phoneme counting
Functional load
refers essentially to the importance of a phoneme in the phonemic inventory of the language, which corresponds to the volume of words that are distinguish-able by that phoneme
Children develop phonological representations through
their exposure to phonemic contrasts in their language; thus, differences in the timing of phonological development occur, at least in part, because of variability in children’s phonological exposure.
morphological development
is their internalization of the rules of lan-guage that govern word structure.
Morphemes
the smallest meaningful units of language
grammat-ical morphemes/ inflectional morphemes
include the plural -s (cat–cats), the possessive ’s (mom–mom’s), the past tense -ed (walk–walked), and the pres-ent progressive -ing (do–doing), to name a few
derivational morphemes
change a word’s syntactic class and semantic meaning. For example, taking the word like, we can add both prefixes (dislike, unlike) and suffixes (liken, likeable, likeness) to vary its meaning and syntactic role in a sentence.
bound morphemes
Suffixes (and prefixes) , because they must be bound or attached to other morphemes.
free morphemes
can stand alone; they include both words with clear semantic referents (e.g., dream, dog, walk), and words that serve primarily grammatical purposes (e.g., his, the, that).
obligatory contexts
occurs when a mature grammar specifies the use of a grammatical marker; for instance, in the phrase The girl’s house, the possessive ’s is considered obligatory.
derivational morphemes
to root words to create derived words.
derivational relations
The corpus of words derived from a common root word (e.g., friend, friendless, friendliness, befriend)
Language impairment affects morphological development,
In general, children with SLI seem to have very specific difficulties with verb tense markings, such as the past tense inflection and the third-person singular inflection
Syntactic development
children’s internalization of the rules of language that gov-ern how words are organized into sentences.
three major syntactic achievements:
(a) an increase in utterance length, (b) use of different sentence modalities, and (c) the development of complex syntax.
Utterance Length
most children achieve with relative ease by their sixth birthday is the production of utterances that are, on average, nearly as long as those of adults.
mean length of utterance (MLU)
Calculating the mean number of morphemes per utterance
- one makes a transcript of consecutive utterances the child speaks (ideally at least 50 different utterances), calculates the number
- calculates the number of morphemes per each utterance, and divides this by the total number of utter-ances.
Declarative sentences
- make a statement, and simple declaratives often use these six organizational schemes
1. Subject + Verb: I bake.
2. Subject + Verb + Object: I bake bread.
3. Subject + Verb + Complement: I feel good.
4. Subject + Verb + Adverbial phrase: I feel good today.
5. Subject + Verb + Indirect object + Direct object: She gave Tommy the hammer.
6. Subject + Verb + Direct object + Indirect object: She gave the hammer to Tommy.
Negative sentences
express negation and rely on such words as no, not, can’t, don’t, and won’t
Interrogative sentences
involve the act of questioning.
MLU
is a handy tool for estimating children’s syntactic development, it does not provide much detail concerning more nuanced achievements in syntax, particularly the child’s use of phrase and clause structures.
phrase
is a cluster of words organized around a head
- Types of phrases include noun phrases (the tall, angry boy), prepositional phrases (in the bucket), adjectival phrases (very happy), and verb phrases (was saddened;
clause
is a syntactic structure containing a verb or a verb phrase; when we produce sentences, we often join a number of clauses by using specific rules.
complex syntax
which refers to the use of phrase and clause structures, as well as conjunctive devices for organizing internal struc-tures of sentences.
Child-directed speech (CDS)
refers to the talk directed to children by others, includ-ing parents and other caregiv
simple syntax
syntax—grammatically well-formed utter-ances containing simple noun phrases and verb structures
the learning-from-input hypothesis
, which emphasizes that the grammatical properties of children’s language use depend on exposure to the properties in CDS
Developmental language disorders
are present at birth.
Language disorders that affect only language are viewed as “specific”—hence, the term specific language impairment (SLI).
- children with SLI produce shorter sentences than their nonimpaired peers and have particular difficulty with verbs.
Acquired language disorders
occur as a result of injury or illness that dam-ages the language centers of the brain.
semantic development
which refers to an individual’s learning and storage of the meanings of words.
Semantic development involves three major tasks for the language learner:
(a) ac-quiring a mental lexicon of about 60,000 words between infancy and adulthood, (b) learning new words rapidly, and (c) organizing the mental lexicon in an efficient semantic network.
lexicon (or simply the lexicon)
is the volume of words he or she understands (receptive lexicon) and uses (expressive lexicon).
- receptive lexicon is larger
- A typical child acquires about 860 words per year between ages 1 and 7 years, aver-aging about 2 new words per day during this period
vocabulary spurt,
that begins near the end of the second year and continues for several years. The term spurt implies that children transition from a slow stage of development to a rapid stage of development
inflection point
implies that there is a sudden burst in lexical growth at a given point.
semantic taxonomy
differentiates words on the basis of their semantic roles; 5 categories 1. Specific nominals refer to a specific object (e.g., Daddy, Fluffy)
- General nominals refer to all members of a category (e.g., those, cats)
- Action words describe specific actions (e.g., up), social-action games (e.g., peekaboo), and action inhibitors (e.g., no)
- Modifiers describe properties and qualities (e.g., big, mine)
- Personal–social words describe affective states and relationships (e.g., yes, bye-bye)
Children’s early lexicons,
comprising the first 50 or so words, typically contain at least one word in each semantic category
3 factos influence the reapidty in child understanding a word
- Concept represented by the word: some words are clearly easier to learn than others because of the concepts the words express.
- Phonological form of the word: learns a new word, he or she must acquire not only knowledge of the conceptual referent of the word, but also its phonological form
- Contextual conditions at initial exposure: Children’s initial and subsequent exposures to a new word vary considerably according to the contextual condi-tions in which the word is embedded.
lead-in
which an adult labels an object or event that is outside of the child’s attentional focus;
follow-in
which an adult labels an object or event that is currently the child’s attentional focus
- follow-in is more influential to children’s vocabulary growth
ostensive word-learning contexts
information is provided about a novel word either linguistically extralinguistically; in nonostensive word-learning contexts
semantic network
in which its entries are organized according to connective ties among them.
spreading activation
in which activation of spe-cific entries spreads across the network according to the strength of connections among entries.
influences on semantic development
- Gender: girls usually have larger vocabu-laries and learn words more easily than boys
- language impairment: developmental disorder of language (SLI) typically have significantly smaller vocabularies than those of their peers without SLI.Typically develop-ing children required an average of 11.6 trials to produce a new word, compared with nearly 14 trials for children with SLI.
- language exposure:significant relationship between the number and types of words children hear in their environment and the size of their vocabulary
Pragmatic development
involves acquiring the rules of language that govern how language is used as a social tool.
Three important aspects of pragmatic development
(a) using language for dif-ferent communication functions, (b) developing conversational skills, and (c) gain-ing sensitivity to extralinguistic cues.
Communication Functions
When people use language in social contexts, behind every utterance
regulation,
in which a per-son uses language to direct or control other people’s behaviors.
intentionality hypothesis
proposes that children’s experiences using language to engage with other people fosters their development of form and content; such experiences motivate the child to “express and articulate increasingly elaborate . . . representations”
conversations
When children express communication functions, they do so in exchanges with other people,
schema
are the building blocks of cognition and, in essence, are internalized represen-tations of the organizational structures of various events
Conversations have a schema
initiation and establishment of a topic, navigation of a series of contingent turns that maintain or shift the topic, and resolution and closure
Joint attention
describes instances in which infants and caregivers focus attention on a mutual object; in such exchanges, the infant must coordinate his or her atten-tion between the social partner and the object of interest
Sensitivity to Extralinguistic Cues
they draw on a variety of extralinguistic devices to aid communication, such as posture, gesture, fa-cial expression, eye contact, proximity, pitch, loudness, and pausing.
register
refers to stylistic variations in language that occur in different situational contexts; for instance, consider how you vary your language form, content, and use when making a request of a best friend versus your col-lege professor
- the children used higher pitches for mothers, louder voices for fathers, and the highest pitches for other children
influences on pragmatic development
- Temperament: is the way in which an individual approaches a situation, particularly one that is unfamiliar;describes a person’s behavioral style or personality type
- Social and cultural cotntext of development: have distinct rules about how language should be used during social interactions. These rules govern, for instance, how conversations are organized and how speakers address one another
