Chapter 8

Question 1

innate

Answer 1

determined by factors present from birth

Question 2

innateness hypothesis

Answer 2

a hypothesis that humans are generally predisposed to learn and use language

Question 3

imitation theory

Answer 3

child language acquisition theory that claims that children acquire language by listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear

Question 4

reinforcement theory

Answer 4

theory of child language acquisition which says that children learn to speak like adults because they are praised, rewarded, or otherwise reinforced when they use the right forms and are corrected when they use the wrong ones

Question 5

active construction of a grammar theory

Answer 5

theory of child language which says that children acquire a language by inventing rules of grammar based on the speech around them

Question 6

connectionist theories

Answer 6

theory of language acquisition which claims that children learn language through neural connections in the brain

Question 7

social interaction theory

Answer 7

claims that children acquire language through social interaction - in particular with older children and adults- and prompt their caregivers to supply them with the appropriate language experience they need.

Question 8

linguistic universals

Answer 8

property believed to be held in common by all natural languages

Question 9

universal grammar

Answer 9

the theory that posits a set of grammatical characteristics shared by all natural languages.

Question 10

critical period

Answer 10

age span, usually described as lasting from birth to the onset of puberty, during which children must have exposure to language and must build the critical brain structures necessary in order to gain native speaker competence in a language.

Question 11

neglected children

Answer 11

a child who is neglected by caretakers, often resulting in significantly lower exposure to language as a child

Question 12

feral children

Answer 12

child who grew up in the wild without care by humans adults, often with animals

Question 13

homesign

Answer 13

a rudimentary visual-gestural communication system that is developed and used by deaf children and their families when a signed language is not made available for their communication

Question 14

language mixing (code switching)

Answer 14

using words or structural elements from more than one language within the same conversation

Question 15

child-directed speech

Answer 15

speech used by parents or caregivers when communicating with young children or infants.

Question 16

identifying sounds

Answer 16

the first step is perceiving sounds

Question 17

high amplitude sucking

Answer 17

experimental technique used to study sound discrimination in infants from birth to about six months

Question 18

conditioned head-turn procedure

Answer 18

experimental technique suually used with infants between five and eighteen months with two phases: conditioning and testing

Question 19

voice onset time

Answer 19

the length of time between the release of a consonant and the onset of voicing, that is, when the vocal folds start vibrating

Question 20

producing sounds

Answer 20

vocalizations are present at the very beginning of life

Question 21

articulatory gestures

Answer 21

a movement of a speech organ in the production of speech, for example, the movement of the velum for the production of a nasal consonant

Question 22

babble

Answer 22

a phase in child language acquisition during which the child produces meaningless sequences of consonants and vowels

Question 23

repeated (canonical babbling)

Answer 23

the continuous repetition of sequences of vowels and consonants like mamama by infants

Question 24

variegated babbling

Answer 24

production of meaningless consonant-vowel sequences by infants

Question 25

holophrastic stage

Answer 25

stage which children can produce only one word at a time

Question 26

telegraphic

Answer 26

because of omission of function words, the speech of young children is often telegraphic

Question 27

plurals

Answer 27

morpheme -s

Question 28

negatives

Answer 28

putting no in front of a sentence

Question 29

interrogatives

Answer 29

producing questions

Question 30

complexive concept

Answer 30

associating a wrong or incomplete set of unifying characteristics with a word

Question 31

overextension

Answer 31

a relationship between child and adult application of rules relative to certain contexts: a process in which children extend the application of linguistic rules to contexts beyond those in the adult language

Question 32

underextension

Answer 32

application of a word to a smaller set of objects than is appropriate for mature adult speech or the usual definition of the word

Question 33

relational term

Answer 33

type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference

Question 34

deictic expressions

Answer 34

word or expression that takes its meaning relative to the time, place, and speaker of the utterance

Question 35

attention getters

Answer 35

word or phrase used to initiate an address to children

Question 36

attention holders

Answer 36

a tactic used to maintain children’s attention for extended amounts of time

Question 37

conversational turns

Answer 37

the contribution to a conversation made by one speaker from the time that she takes the floor from another speaker tot he time that she passes the floor on to another speaker

Question 38

simultaneous bilingualism

Answer 38

bilingualism in which both languages are acquired from infancy

Question 39

sequential bilingualism

Answer 39

bilingualism in which a linguistic unit is moved from one location to another

Question 40

second-language acquisition

Answer 40

acquisition of a second language as a teenager or adult