Chapter 4 Flashcards
Were you born that way or did the environment influence your development
Nature vs. Nurture
Language system is in place at birth and children use the system to extract rules about their language; language is innate and biological based
Nativist
Children are born with a set of grammatical rules and categories that exist in all language
Deep structure
Children use input from the environment to set the ____ features of the grammar in their language
Surface
Children are born with linguistic competence; mistakes in speech indicate performance errors not lack of competence
Language acquisition device
Why do people support nativist theories?
We have a universal language acquisition, language is unique to humans, adult language is full of errors, language is the same experience for all humans despite the language they speak, biological structures in the brain that house language, mirror neurons
Neurons that if you watch someone do the same action as you, a certain part of your brain is lighting up
Mirror Neuron
What are some criticisms of nativist theories?
Variation of language levels, doesn’t account for developmental delays
Language is like any other human behavior and it does not reflect any special innate abilities; learn language through operant conditioning; some verbal behaviors are reinforced while other are suppressed
Behaviorist
Who proposed a behaviorist theory?
B. F. Skinner
Who proposed the nativist theory?
Noam Chomsky
What is a critical skill in the behaviorist theory language acquisition?
Imitation
Learning behavior through reinforcement
Operant conditioning
What are some criticisms of the behaviorist theory?
No explanation for syntactic forms that are not modeled by adults, decrease in imitation at age 2, difficult to explain syntactic development, we don’t communicate all the time for an award
What age do children decrease imitation?
2
Combination of nature and nurture forces play in language development
Interactionist theory
What are the 3 interactionist theories?
Social interactionist, cognitive, intention based theories
Language emerges through social interaction; children communicate before they develop language, focus on language use, use of parties and expansions
Social interactionist
Who proposed the social interactionist theory?
Vygotsky, Bruner
Difference between a child’s actual developmental level and his or her potential developmental level; difference between where the child is and adding more steps to move onto a higher level of development
Zone of proximal development
Child-directed speech; higher pitch, simplistic vocabulary, more facial expressions
Parentese
Exaggerating words directed to children, slightly utterance a child could use to say back to the parent
Expansions
What is an example of an expansion?
Child says “ball” and parent expands it to “ball please”
