chapter 6: development of language and symbol use

Question 1

symbols

Answer 1

systems for representing our thoughts, feelings, and knowledge, and for communicating them to other people

Question 2

language comprehension

Answer 2

understanding what others say (or sign or write)

Question 3

language production

Answer 3

the process of speaking (or signing or writing)

Question 4

generative

Answer 4

a system in which a finite set of words can be combined to generate an infinite number of sentences

Question 5

phonemes

Answer 5

the smallest units of meaningful sound

Question 6

morphemes

Answer 6

the smallest units of meaning in a language

Question 7

syntax

Answer 7

rules specifying how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) can be combined

Question 8

pragmatics

Answer 8

knowledge about how language is used

Question 9

bilingualism

Answer 9

fluency in two languages

Question 10

infant-directed speech (IDS)

Answer 10

the distinctive mode of speech used when speaking to infants and toddlers

Question 11

prosody

Answer 11

the characteristic rhythm and intonational patterns with which a language is spoken

Question 12

categorical perception

Answer 12

the perception of phonemes as belonging to discrete categories

Question 13

voice onset time (VOT)

Answer 13

the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating

Question 14

word segmentation

Answer 14

discovering where words begin and end in fluent speech

Question 15

distributional properties of speech

Answer 15

in any language, certain sounds are more likely to occur together than are others

Question 16

babbling

Answer 16

repetitive consonant-vowel sequences (“bababa…”) or hand movements (for learners of sign languages)

Question 17

overextension

Answer 17

an overly broad interpretation of the meaning of a word

Question 18

underextension

Answer 18

an overly narrow interpretation of the meaning of a word

Question 19

pragmatic cues

Answer 19

aspects of the social context used for word learning

Question 20

cross-situational word learning

Answer 20

determining word meanings by tracking the correlations between labels and meanings across scenes and contexts

Question 21

syntactic bootstrapping

Answer 21

the strategy of using grammatical structure to infer the meaning of a new word

Question 22

telegraphic speech

Answer 22

short utterances that leave out non-essential words

Question 23

overregularization

Answer 23

speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular

Question 24

collective monologue

Answer 24

conversation between children that involves a series of non sequiturs

Question 25

narratives

Answer 25

story-like structured descriptions of past events

Question 26

Universal Grammar

Answer 26

a proposed set of highly abstract structures that are common to all languages

Question 27

connectionism

Answer 27

a computational modeling approach that emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units

Question 28

dual representation

Answer 28

treating a symbolic artifact both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself