Chapter 9: Language Development

Question 1

What are the four components of language?

Answer 1

1. Phonology
2. Semantics
3. Grammar
4. Pragmatics

Question 2

What does phonology refer to?

Answer 2

The rules governing the structure and sequence of speech sounds.

Question 3

Which component of language involves vocabulary (the way underlying concepts are expressed in words and word combinations)

Answer 3

Semantics

Question 4

What are the two sub-components of grammar, and what do they refer to?

Answer 4

1. Syntax: The rules by which words are arranged into sentences.
2. Morphology: The use of grammatical markers indicating number, tense, case, person, gender, active, passive, and other meanings.

Question 5

What does pragmatics refer to?

Answer 5

The rules for engaging in appropriate and effective communication. Because society dictates how language should be spoken, pragmatics involves sociolinguistic knowledge (interaction rituals such as verbal greetings and leave-takings).

Question 6

True/False:

The four components of language are independent from each other.

Answer 6

False. The four components are interdependent and acquisition of each facilitates mastery of the others.

Question 7

According to the behaviourist approach, proposed by Skinner, language is acquired through _______ ____________.

Answer 7

operant conditioning (i.e. parents reinforce children’s sounds that most closely resemble words).

Question 8

Why is the behaviourist approach to language development not widely supported today?

Answer 8

Imitation and reinforcement do not adequately explain how children acquire language.

Question 9

Who proposed the nativist theory of language development?

Answer 9

Noam Chomsky

Question 10

What does language acquisition device (LAD) refer to?

Answer 10

An innate system that permits children, once they have acquired sufficient vocabulary, to combine words into grammatically consistent, novel utterances and to understand the meaning of sentences they hear.

Question 11

What does Broca’s area support?

Answer 11

Grammatical processing and language production

Question 12

What does Wernicke’s area support?

Answer 12

It plays a role in comprehending word meaning

Question 13

Where is Wernicke’s area located?

Answer 13

left temporal lobe

Question 14

Where is Broca’s area located?

Answer 14

left frontal lobe

Question 15

True/False:

Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are solely responsible for their specific language functions.

Answer 15

False. Patients with Broca’s aphasia (impaired pronunciation and grammar) and patients with Wernicke’s aphasia (meaningless streams of speech) have injury that spreads to nearby cortical areas, and have widespread abnormal activity in the left cerebral hemisphere.

Question 16

True/False:

The brain is not fully lateralised at birth.

Answer 16

True. Brain lateralisation is complete by around puberty.

Question 17

What are the four limitations of Chomsky’s nativist perspective of language development?

Answer 17

1. Researchers have great difficulty specifying Chomsky’s universal grammar.
2. Chomsky’s assumption that grammatical knowledge is innately determined does not fit with certain observations of language development.
3. Chomsky’s theory lacks comprehensiveness. It cannot explain how children weave statements together into connected discourse and sustained conversations. Chomsky did not dwell on the pragmatic side of language, so his theory grants little attention to the quality of language input or to social experience in supporting language progress.
4. The nativist perspective does not regard children’s cognitive capacities as important.

Question 18

What does the statistical learning theory propose?

Answer 18

Children have the ability to analyse sound streams to identify which sounds often occur together and which do not, which helps children to discriminate words in fluent speech.

Question 19

Social interactionist theories propose that children acquire language due to which three influences?

Answer 19

1. Native capacity
2. A strong desire to understand others and be understood
3. A rich language environment

Question 20

Newborns are especially sensitive to the _____ _____ of human voice

Answer 20

pitch range

Question 21

Define phonemes

Answer 21

the smallest sound units that signal a change in meaning, such as differences between the consonant sounds in pa and ba

Question 22

What is the tendency to perceive as identical a range of sounds that belong to the same phonemic class called?

Answer 22

categorical speech perception

Question 23

What is infant-directed speech (IDS)?

Answer 23

A form of communication made up of short sentences with high-pitched, exaggerated expression, clear pronunciation, distinct pauses between speech segments, clear gestures to support verbal meaning, and repetition of new words in a variety of contexts.

Question 24

Around 2 months, babies begin to make vowel-like noises. What is this called?

Answer 24

cooing

Question 25

What is required for babbling to develop further?

Answer 25

babies must hear human speech, speech, resulting in deaf children falling behind in the development of their range of babbling.

Question 26

Studies of deaf children indicate there is a sensitive period during which human speech needs to be heard. When does this sensitive period occur?

Answer 26

This period appears to be before age 2 for normal development; if human speech is not heard before age 4 language delays tend to be severe and persistent.

Question 27

Infant pointing leads to what two communicative gestures?

Answer 27

1. Protodeclarative – the baby points to, touches, or holds up an object while looking at others to make sure they notice.
2. Protoimperative – the baby gets another person to do something by reaching, pointing, and often making sounds at the same time.

Question 28

At what age is phonological development is largely complete?

Answer 28

5 years old

Question 29

When young children first learn words, they often do not use them just as adults do. They may apply words too narrowly. What is this error called?

Answer 29

underextension

Question 30

What is overextension?

Answer 30

Applying a word to a wider collection of objects and events than is appropriate

Question 31

Research shows that adult feedback helps semantic development; however, the child’s level of _________ __________ determines what level of semantic development they have acquired.

Answer 31

cognitive processing

Question 32

What is the emergentist coalition model?

Answer 32

A recent model of vocabulary development which proposes that word learning strategies emerge out of children’s efforts to decipher language.
Children draw on a coalition of cues – perceptual, social, and linguistic – that shift in importance with age. Infants rely solely on perceptual cues. Toddlers, while still sensitive to perceptual features, increasingly attend to social cues. As language develops further, linguistic cues (syntax and intonation) play larger roles.

Question 33

Which two characteristics of morphemes play important roles in the sequence of development?

Answer 33

1. Structured complexity: e.g. adding the ending ‘–ing’ is structurally less complex than using forms of the verb ‘to be’.
2. Semantic complexity: the number and difficulty of the meanings they express.

Question 34

Once children apply a regular morphological rule, they extend it to words that are exceptions. What is this type of error called?

Answer 34

overregularisation

Question 35

Which three types of negatives appear in 2 ½-3-year-olds learning a variety of languages?

Answer 35

1. Non-existence, in which the child notes the absence of something
2. Rejection, in which the child expresses opposition to something
3. Denial, in which the child denies the truthfulness of something

Question 36

Conversations with adults about past experiences contribute to dramatic gains in children’s ability to produce well-organised, detailed, expressive narratives.
In what order do the three types of narratives emerge?

Answer 36

Leapfrog narratives - around age 4
Chronological narratives - around age 4.5-5
Classical narratives - around age 6

Question 37

What is partly responsible for preschoolers’ restricted narratives?

Answer 37

Preschoolers’ limited working memories