Chapter 3 - Building Blocks of Language Flashcards
phonological development
- acquiring the rules of language that govern the sound structure of syllables and words
- acquiring sensitivity to prosodic cues, developing internal representations of the native language’s phonemes, and producing vowels and consonants intelligibly
phonemes
individual speech sounds in a language that signal a contrast in meaning between two syllables or words
phonological representation
neurological imprint of a phoneme that differentiates it from other phonemes
phonological rules
rules that specify “legal” orders of sounds in syllables and words and the places where specific phonemes can and cannot occur
phonological building blocks
begins immediately with birth, if not prior as the infant experiences speech beyond the womb
parsing the stream of speech
- infants use specific cues to parse speech stream into smaller units and to separate simultaneously occurring speech streams
- knowledge of word-stress patterns
- knowledge of pausing
prosodic cues
infants use their familiarity of word and syllable stress patterns, or the rhythm of language, to break into the speech stream
phonotactic cues
- sensitivity to the probability with which certain sounds occur both in general and in specific positions of syllables and words
- knowledge of probabilities and improbabilities is an important tool for the infant to segment novel words out of a continuous stream of speech
phonological knowledge
- internal representations of the phonemes comprising one’s native language
phonological production
- expression of phonemes to produce syllables and words
- vowels develop before constants
developing phonemic inventory
- timing influenced by: frequency in spoken language, number of words a child uses, articulatory complexity of producing the phoneme
- order of consonantal acquisition varies across languages
- sufficiently well-developed by 3-4 years of age to provide for fully intelligible speech
phonological awareness
- an individual’s ability to attend to the phonological units of speech through implicit or explicit analysis
- ex: identify rhyming words, identify the first sound in a word, count the number of phonemes in a word
- impact of systematic instruction of the phonological structure of language
phonemic awareness
- focus on the phonemic units of words
- awareness of the individual phonemes of which language is comprised
- phonics: teaches children the relationships between letters and sounds and children who are phonologically aware benefit from it more
influences on phonological development: native language
- influence of phonemic composition of the language to which infants are exposed
- “functional load” - importance of a phoneme in a language’s phonemic inventory
- children will not develop phonemes that are not in their language
influences on phonological development: linguistic experience
- variability in phonological exposure
- lower-income home vs higher-income home
- ex: lower-income = less exposure to language
- chronic ear infections
what is morphological development?
- internalization of the rules of language that govern the structure of words
- involves acquiring 2 types of morphemes: grammatical and derivational
morphemes
- smallest units of language
- can change syntactic class of words
grammatical morphemes
- add grammatical inflections such as:
plural s
possessive ‘s
past tense -ed
present progressive -ing - child’s acquisition of the major grammatical morphemes fairly invariant in both order and timing of acquisition
- first grammatical morpheme emerges around age 2 (-ing)
- enables a child’s movement from speaking with a telegraphic quality to a more adult-like
derivational morphemes
- change syntactic class and semantic meaning
prefixes
suffixes - morphemes added to root words to create derived words
- development of derivational morphology adds precision to one’s lexical base
obligatory contexts
instances in which a mature grammar specifies the use of a grammatical marker
- morpheme mastery is 75% or more of obligatory contexts
second language acquisition
- influences morphological development
- persons learning a second language that differs considerably to its grammatical morphology from their native language may never master the grammatical morphology of the second language
dialect
- influences morphological development
- the variants of a single language
- morphology varies among dialects of a single language
- ex: AAVE vs GAE
language development
- influences morphological development
- hallmark characteristic of specific language impairment (SLI): difficulty in grammatical morphology
- verb markings, such as past tense inflection and the third person singular inflection
what is syntactic development?
- internalization of the rules of language that govern how words are organized into sentences
- how to organize words into sentences that specify “who did what to whom”
- developed through gradual internalization of the grammatical system of one’s language
syntactic building blocks
- “discrete combinatorial system” - a finite number of discrete elements that allow the child to produce an infinite number of sentences
- 3 major achievements
increase in utterance length
increase in sentence variety
development of a complex syntax
utterance length
- gradually increases from 1-6 yrs old
- by 6 yrs old, most children are able to produce utterances that are, on average, nearly as long as those of adults
- calculating the MLU provides a symple proxy for estimating syntactic complexity up to age 5 yrs old.
- more grammatical markers, more MLU, less childlike and more adultlike
sentence modalities
- longer utterances produce sentences of various types or modalities
- increasing skill at producing different sentence types that vary in pragmatic intent and syntactic organization
- differences among sentence types reside in how words are grammatically organized at a surface level
declarative sentence
- make a statement
- common for 3 yr olds to have mastered majority of these patterns and to use coordinating and subordinating conjunctions to link several together
- children never explicitly taught how to produce declarative sentences, they intuit the rules from the language around them
negatives
- express negation and rely on words like, “no,” “not,” “can’t,” etc
- negation involves learning where to insert negatives into sentences
interrogatives
- specific syntactic rules to organize sentences for interrogative purposes
phrasal coordination
- the ability for children to connect phrases
complex syntax
use of phrase and clause (phrase including a verb) structures as well as conjunctive devices for organizing internal structure of sentences
influences on syntactic development
- relatively invariant across children compared to other domains of language; largely uniform patterns in type and timing of developments
- individual differences become even more evident as children develop more complex aspects of syntax
exposure to complex syntax
- variability in the extent to which children are exposed to exemplars of more complex syntax
Hoff’s “learning from input hypothesis”
grammatical properties of children’s language use are dependent upon exposure to those properties in child-directed speech
language impairment
- specific: affect only the language faculty
- secondary: resulting from other causes (mental retardation, down syndrome)
acquired language disorder
injury or illness damaging the language centers of the brain
- ex: stroke leading to Broca’s aphasia in left hemisphere
what is semantic development?
- an individual’s learning and storage of the meaning of words
- new word ==> develop internal representation of the word like phonological form, grammatical role, and conceptual meaning
- knowledge of a specific word matures over time
semantic building blocks
3 major tasks
- acquire a mental lexicon of roughly 60,000 words between infancy and adulthood
- acquire new words rapidly
- organize the mental lexicon in an efficient semantic network
the mental lexicon
- receptive lexicon: volume of words one understands
- expressive lexicon: volume of words one uses
- typically, the receptive lexicon is larger than the expressive
- vocabulary spurt begins near the end of the second year and continues for several years thereafter
- children transition from a slow stage of development to a rapid stage of development with an inflection point differentiating the slow and rapid stages
- size of child’s lexicon = volume + individual’s lexical items
- early lexicon: the first 50 or so words
semantic taxonomy
differentiates words based on semantic roles
specific nominals
specific object
general nominal
all members of a category (ex: truck, cat)
action words
specific actions (ex: up), social-action games (ex: peekaboo), action inhibitors (ex: no)
modifiers
properties and qualities (ex: big, mine)
personal-social words
affective states and relationships (ex: yes, bye-bye)
learning new words
- achieve a general familiarity with the word (ex: phonological form, conceptual meaning)
- “fragile” state: errors in understanding and use of the word are likely to occur
- deeper and flexible knowledge of the word
concept represented by the word
- “hard words:” words referring to abstractions
- the concept to which they refer is not accessible to the child, such as words that describe mental states and believes - the concept or meaning represented by the word influences the ease with which the word is learned
phonological form of the word
- arbitrary relationship between the phonological form of the word and the concept to which it refers: onomatopoeic words, common sound sequences, rare sound sequences
- common sound sequences learned more readily than words containing rare sound sequences
contextual conditions at initial exposure
- contextual information used to develop and refine internal representations of novel words
- linguistic context
- extent to which semantic features of the word are described
- information from the extralinguistic context
ostentive word learning context
a great deal of contextual information is provided about a word either linguistically or extralinguistically
nonostentive word learning contexts (inferential contexts)
little contextual information is provided to derive the meaning of a new word
building a semantic network
new words stored in semantic network where entries are organized based on connective ties and weak or strong connections are based on the extent to which words share syntactic, phonological, or semantic features
spreading activation
activation of specific entries spreads across the network based on the strength of connections among entries
influences on semantic development
- rate with which children build lexicon
- rate with which they learn new words
- efficiency in retrieving words from the lexicon
gender
early in language acquisition, girls tend to have larger vocabularies and learn words more easily compared to boys
- differences attenuate if not disappear by 6-7 years old
- biological, physiological, and social variables influence these patterns
language impairment
- children who exhibit a neurologically-based language impaired typically have significantly smaller vocabularies compared to non-impaired peers
- word-finding errors and slower retrieval of items from the semantic network
language exposure
significant relationship between the number and type of words children hear in their environment and the size of their vocabulary
- orphanages: depressed vocabularies
- low SES households: parents’ emotional resources–compromises the quality and frequency of parents’ conversational interactions with their children
what is pragmatic development
- acquiring the rules of language that govern how language is used in social interactions for instrumental purposes
- aspects that emerge during early childhood:
1. using language for different functions or intentions
2. developing conversational skills
3. developing sensitivity to extralinguistic cues
communicative functions
there is an intention behind every utterance, which may reflect mental states, beliefs, desires and feelings
intentionality hypothesis
children’s development of form and content is fostered, in part, by their experiences with others as they use language to engage with others
schema
building blocks of cognition; internalized representations of the organizational structures of various events
conversational schema
initiation and establishment of a topic, a series of contingent turns that maintain the topic, and resolution and closure
macrostructural schema of conversations
provides a broad organizational framework in which many additional microstructural schemata are embedded
microstructural schema
a child must acquire to include navigating topic shifts, negotiating conversational breakdowns, and knowing how much information to provide when background information is shared among listeners versus when it is not shared
joint attention
infants and caregivers focus attention on a mutual object; the infant must coordinate her attention between her social partner and the object of interest
- provides the child with early schematic representations of conversational organization
proto-conversations
highly scripted routines focused on concrete objects
- helps infants develop conversational schema
sensitivity to extralinguistic cues
posture, gesture, facial expression, eye contact, proximity, etc
register
stylistic variations in language that occur in different situational contexts
- ex: dramatic play, requests of peers vs adults
temperament
- the way in which an individual approaches a situation, particularly one that is unfamiliar
- one’s behavioral style or personality type
- uninhibited/bold vs inhibited/shy
- biologically-based heritable variations in neurochemistry
social and cultural contexts of development
- children’s pragmatic development reflects the pragmatic rules of their larger community
- achievements in each area of pragmatic building blocks reflect the socialization practices children experience at home, school, and in the community
- language impairment also affects pragmatic development
