Chapter 9 - Language and Communication Flashcards
Language is ________
symbolic
What is language?
Language is a system that relates sound and gestures to meaning
What is phonology?
The sounds of a language (not everything else)
What is morphology?
The rules of meaning within a language; how we assign meaning, and how we construct ideas within a language
What are semantics?
The study of words themselves and their meanings; how words relate to one another
What are pragmatics?
How people use language to communicate effectively and practically
What are phonemes?
Phonemes are the unique sounds that are the building blocks of any language, such as an accent
True or False: Young babies can only hear the phonemes spoken by their parents
False: young babies can hear phonemes that are not in the language their parents are speaking
What is infant-directed speech?
Infant-directed speech is speech that may help children learn a language with its slow and exaggerated changes it pitch and volume
What occurs at 2 months for a child’s language development?
Cooing: the exploring of different phonemes of languages (vowels). Babies start with vowels because they are much more easier to produce than consonants
What occurs at 6 months for a child’s language development?
Babbling: speech like sounds that have no meaning. Babies start to develop much more muscle control in their throats and mouths, and begin to understand how breathing dynamics work
What occurs at 8-11 months for a child’s language development?
Babbling includes intonation, which is how we pitch a word (rising and falling). It requires listening - children are able to tell that certain words are inflected in certain ways.
What occurs at around 16 months in a child’s language development?
The first vocabulary spurt occurs and babies start to learn meanings for a bunch of words. Their vocabulary increases from 1-2 words to 50 words and they are usually names for things and people
What occurs at around 24 months in a child’s language development?
Their vocabulary has expanded to be about 320 words, and they can generalize new words to many situations. Verbs develop slowly because children do not associate a word with an action until around 18 months
What is fast mapping?
Fast mapping is learning word meanings so rapidly that the child can’t be considering all possible meanings
What is underextension?
Underextension is the use of a word for only one specific object or a single context. It suggests that children initially think of words as belonging to only one thing rather than categories.
What is overextension?
Overextension is the use of a single word for a category of objects or multiple contexts. It is more common during the naming explosion and may reflect a lack of vocabulary more than the inability to discriminate.
What is phonological memory?
Phonological memory is the capacity that a child has to remember words; is a biological component
What is referential style?
The referential study consists of words that name objects, persons, and actions (nouns and verbs). In this style, language is used as an intellectual tool to make sense of the world; accommodate and assimilate
What is expressive style?
Expressive style includes social phrases that are often used as single words and express states of mind. Children use this as a social tool.
What are holophrases?
Holophrases are combining a single word with gestures to make a complete thought
What are complex sentences?
Complex sentences follow inflections and negation and allow children to use conjunctions to connect two or more ideas.
Explain the Behaviourist Answer
Language input is important, but learning must be more than just imitation because children produce novel sentences, and children’s speech has its own grammar. Parents rarely reinforce grammatical correctness, and grammatical rules seem too complex to be simply inferred.
Explain the Nativist Answer
This answer has support inborn mechanisms for language: there are specific regions in the brain for different language functions, only humans develop grammar readily, and children develop linguistic communication with little or no formal input.
There is a critical period for learning a language (feral children) There are grammatical rules that seem too complex to be simply inferred.
What is Broca’s Area
Broca’s area is the region of the left frontal cortex active in the combination of words into meaningful sentences. This area is necessary for combining words into meaningful sentences.
Explain the Cognitive Answer
Some researchers believe that powerful cognitive skills can account for language learning: grammar may be learned by detecting regularities in the environment and patterns in grammatical structures
Explain the Social-Interaction answer
Much language learning takes place in the context of interactions between children and adults, with both parties eager for better communication.
True or False: Gesture use varies between cultures
True, examples: Canadians shake hands when meeting, and the Japanese bow when meeting
