Child Language Acquisition Flashcards
Prepositions
A word or group of words used before a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to show direction, time, place, location, spatial relationships, or to introduce an object. Some examples of prepositions are words like “in,” “at,” “on,” “of,” and “to.”
Coordinating conjunctions
A conjunction that connects words, phrases, and clauses that are coordinate, or equal to each other. There are seven coordinating conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. They can be remembered using the acronym FANBOYS.
Subordinating conjunctions
A word or phrase that links a dependent clause to an independent clause e.g. because, for, while…
Complex sentences
Consists of an independent and dependent
clause. She hurt it when she felled over.
Determiners
They are always before the noun, not after it e.g. this car is new. They tell us which ‘thing’ is being referred to.
Auxiliary verbs
These help us understand the tense of another verb. There are only three – be (am, is, are), do (does), have (has).
e.g. Imu is dancing.
Over extension
Overextension is “the tendency of very young children to extend the use of a word beyond the scope of its specific meaning”
Younger children are more likely to overextend words because they are still learning how to categorize and differentiate between different objects and concepts.
A child who uses the word “dog” to refer to any four-legged animal
A child who uses the word “car” to refer to any vehicle, including trucks and buses
A child who uses the word “up” to describe any upward movement, such as climbing a ladder or going up in an elevator.
Under extension
In underextension, a child doesn’t use a word for enough particular cases. It’s the opposite of overextension where a child uses a word for too many different cases. Example of underextension: Kitty might mean the family cat, but not other cats.
Underextensions may occur because a general word (like kitty) is almost taken as a name, not as a word.
Adjacency pairs
An adjacency pair is composed of two utterances by two speakers, one after the other. The speaking of the first utterance (the first-pair part, or the first turn) provokes a responding utterance (the second-pair part, or the second turn).
Virtuous error
When a child applies regular grammatical endings to words with irregular forms (runned/ goed/ wented) – suggests that they have internalised a grammatical rule.
She felled over.
Inflections
Inflection refers to a process of word formation in which items are added to the base form of a word to express grammatical meanings.
Inflections in English grammar include the genitive (shows possession) ‘s; the plural -s; the third-person singular -s; the past tense -d, -ed, or -t; the negative particle ‘nt; -ing forms of verbs; the comparative -er; and the superlative -est. In this way, inflections are used to show grammatical categories such as tense, person, and number.
Intonation
The rise and fall of the voice in speaking.
Conditional tense
Conditional tenses are used to speculate about what could happen, what might have happened, and what we wish would happen. In English, most sentences using the conditional contain the word if.
Past simple tense
The form of a verb used to describe an action that happened before the present time and is no longer happening. It is usually made by adding -ed.”
Past continuous tense
Refers to/denotes those actions/events that were happening for a particular time in the past. For example, “Sam was writing a letter to his friend.”
