Chapter 6 Flashcards
First words mark…
A transition from preverbal to verbal communication
Phonetically consistent forms (PCFs)
Describe the idiosyncratic wordlike productions children use consistently and meaningfully but that do not approximate adult forms
What is the age range of toddlerhood?
1-3 years old
Children who are beginning to transition from the prelinguistic stage to the one-word stage use ______
Referential gestures (gestures that indicate a precise referent and have a stable meaning across different contexts)
Deictic gestures
Gestures whose meanings change depending on the context (pointing, showing)
As children begin to transition to the two-word stage, they exhibit _______
Gesture-word combinations (pointing at mommy while saying her name)
Toddlers who use more gesture-speech combinations at 18 months demonstrate _______
Greater sentence complexity at 42 months of age
When children begin to use two-word utterances, they stop ______
Combining two referential gestures
Mirror neurons
Activate when people perform actions and when they observe other people perform actions (they’re a type of visuomotor neuron)
Theory of Mind
The ability to understand one’s own mental or emotional state, to understand that others also have mental or emotional states, and to realize that others’ mental and emotional states, beliefs, intentions, and perspectives differ from one’s own
False-belief tasks
Assess whether children demonstrate understanding that another’s beliefs can differ from one’s own beliefs
Customary age of production
Describes the age by which 50% of children can produce a given sound in multiple positions in words in an adultlike way
Age of mastery
The age by which most children produce a sound in an adultlike manner
Phonological processes
The systematic, rule-governed patterns that characterize toddler’s speech
Syllable structure changes
- Reduplication: repeating a syllable (wa-wa)
- Cluster reduction (“stong” instead of “strong”)
- Weak syllable deletion: deleting an unstressed syllable (banana - nana)
- Final consonant deletion: deleting the last consonant in a syllable (cat - ca)
Assimilation
- Consonant harmony: using consonants with like features in a word (doggie - doddie)
- Velar assimilation: producing a nonvelar consonant as a velar consonant (dog - gog)
- Nasal assimilation: producing a nonnasal sound as a nasal sound (candy - nanny)
Place-of-articulation changes
- Fronting: replacing a sound further back with a sound further forward (corn - dorn)
- Backing: replacing a sounds farther forward with a sound further back (daddy - gaggy)
Manner-of-articulation changes
- Stopping: replacing a fricative or affricate with a stop sound (jeep - deep)
- Gliding: replacing a liquid sound with a glide (love - wove)
Phonological perception involves:
Understanding that vocal characteristics of a speaker are not properties of the words themselves (when mom says water one way, and dad another way, the child will understand that both mean “water” and are referring to the same thing)
What age marks a transitional period in phonological development?
18 months of age
Novel nonneighbors
New words that are not phonologically similar to known words
Novel neighbors
New words that are phonologically similar to known words
Partial phonetic information
Recognizing words after hearing only parts of the words
Between ______ toddlers reach the _____ word mark, which usually co-occurs with the appearance of _____________________
18-24 months of age, 50, children’s first grammatical morphemes
Grammatical morphemes
Inflections that we add to words to indicate aspects of grammar (-s, -ed, -ing)
- Appear between 18-24 months
- Progressive -ing is the first to be developed
What marks the true beginning of syntax?
The two-word stage (you can only order words in a sentence if you have more than one)
MLU formula
Total number of morphemes divided by the total number of utterances
Telegraphic speech
Omitting key grammatical markers
The Quinean Conundrum
The uncertainty surrounding the mapping of a word to its referent in the face of seemingly endless interpretations (hard for language acquisition)
First-tier lexical principles
- Reference: states that words symbolize objects, actions, events, and concepts
- Extendibility: states that words label categories of objects and not just the original exemplar
- Object scope: states that words map to whole objects (whole object assumption: words label whole objects and not object parts)
Second-tier lexical principles
- Conventionality: states that for children to communicate successfully, they must adopt the terms that people in their language community understand
- Categorical scope: limits the basis for extension to words in the same category
- Novel name-nameless category (N3C): helps children select a nameless object as the recipient of a novel label (mutual exclusivity: states that objects only have one label)
Fast mapping
The ability to pick up words after only a few incidental exposures
Thematic role
The part a word plays in an event, and such roles include agent, theme, source, goal, and location
- Agent: the entity that performs the action
- Theme: the entity undergoing an action or movement
- Source: the starting point for movement
- Goal: the ending point for movement
- Location: the place where an action occurs
Receptive lexicon
The words children understand
Expressive lexicon
The words children produce
Explosive period
An accelerated growth of word-learning (18-24 months of age, or when they can produce 50 words)
Overextension/overgeneralization types
- Categorical overextension: extending a word to other words in the same category (dog - all four-legged animals)
- Analogical overextension: extending a word to other perceptually similar words (ball - moon)
- Relational overextension: extending a word to other words that are semantically or thematically related (flower - watering can)
Overlap
Overextending a word in certain circumstances and underextending the same word in other circumstances (candy - jelly beans & grandma’s pills, but NOT chocolate)
Reasons for word use errors
- Category membership errors (thinking a horse and cow are the same animal so using the same name)
- Pragmatic errors: knowing two objects are different but not knowing the name for one of the objects, instead substituting with a semantically related word (knowing a horse and a dog are different, but not knowing the word horse, using the word dog to refer to the horse)
- Retrieval error: knowing a certain word but being unable to retrieve it and unintentionally selecting a different word (knowing the word horse but accidentally saying dog when describing it)
Children’s success in using _______ for a variety of purposes is one of the most important aspects of _________________
Communication, communicative development during toddlerhood
Boys vs. girls comprehension and production
18 mo girls understand 65 words and produce 27, boys understand 56 and produce 18
First-born vs. later-born children
For toddlers between 18-29 mo, firstborn children exhibit more advanced lexical and grammatical development than their later-born counterparts, whereas later-born children exhibit more advanced conversational skills
Researchers use what kind of tasks?
Production tasks, comprehension tasks, and judgment tasks
Production tasks
Allow toddlers to demonstrate their competence in various areas of language development
- Naturalistic observation
- Elicited imitation tasks: the experimenter produces a target phrase and then requests that the child repeat it exactly as he or she heard it
- Elicited production tasks: researchers elicit sentence structures in the context of a game, during which the child must ask questions or make statements in response to an experimenter’s prompt (wug test)
Comprehension tasks
Reveal toddlers’ language competencies by having them either match or point to pictures of target words and phrases or act out phrases they hear an experimenter say
- The picture selection task: an experimenter presents a language target and asks the child to choose the picture corresponding to the target
- The act-out task: an experimenter presents a child with a series of props and instructs the child to act out the sentences he or she hears
Judgment tasks
Researchers ask children to decide whether certain language constructions are appropriate as a way to assess their level of grammatical competence
- Truth value judgment tasks: children judge certain language constructions to be correct or incorrect (yes-no, reward-punishment)
- Grammaticality judgment tasks
Clinicians use
Screening, comprehensive evaluations, and progress monitoring
Screening
Seeing if a child is meeting their language milestones
Comprehensive evaluation
Determining if a child has a language disorder
Ecological validity
The extent to which the data resulting from these tools can be extended to multiple contexts
Progress monitoring
Measures and monitors a child’s progress in a certain area of language development
Theory of mind is developed by?
4 years of age
Children typically suppress or eliminate several phonological process errors by?
3 years of age
