Chapter 4

Question 1

Were you born that way or did the environment influence your development

Answer 1

Nature vs. Nurture

Question 2

Language system is in place at birth and children use the system to extract rules about their language; language is innate and biological based

Answer 2

Nativist

Question 3

Children are born with a set of grammatical rules and categories that exist in all language

Answer 3

Deep structure

Question 4

Children use input from the environment to set the ____ features of the grammar in their language

Answer 4

Surface

Question 5

Children are born with linguistic competence; mistakes in speech indicate performance errors not lack of competence

Answer 5

Language acquisition device

Question 6

Why do people support nativist theories?

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Neurons that if you watch someone do the same action as you, a certain part of your brain is lighting up

Answer 7

Mirror Neuron

Question 8

What are some criticisms of nativist theories?

Answer 8

Variation of language levels, doesn’t account for developmental delays

Question 9

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

Answer 9

Behaviorist

Question 10

Who proposed a behaviorist theory?

Answer 10

B. F. Skinner

Question 11

Who proposed the nativist theory?

Answer 11

Noam Chomsky

Question 12

What is a critical skill in the behaviorist theory language acquisition?

Answer 12

Imitation

Question 13

Learning behavior through reinforcement

Answer 13

Operant conditioning

Question 14

What are some criticisms of the behaviorist theory?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

What age do children decrease imitation?

Answer 15

2

Question 16

Combination of nature and nurture forces play in language development

Answer 16

Interactionist theory

Question 17

What are the 3 interactionist theories?

Answer 17

Social interactionist, cognitive, intention based theories

Question 18

Language emerges through social interaction; children communicate before they develop language, focus on language use, use of parties and expansions

Answer 18

Social interactionist

Question 19

Who proposed the social interactionist theory?

Answer 19

Vygotsky, Bruner

Question 20

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

Answer 20

Zone of proximal development

Question 21

Child-directed speech; higher pitch, simplistic vocabulary, more facial expressions

Answer 21

Parentese

Question 22

Exaggerating words directed to children, slightly utterance a child could use to say back to the parent

Answer 22

Expansions

Question 23

What is an example of an expansion?

Answer 23

Child says “ball” and parent expands it to “ball please”