Child Language Acquisition Flashcards
What does innate mean?
In-built, something you’re born with.
What is the nature vs nurture debate in English language, give a few points for each?
Nature- innate, to be biologically pre-disposed, they are born with the rules of language, grammatical errors, help children with their language being innate, for example plural nouns like ‘sheeps’ and ‘gooses’ and past tense verbs like ‘runned’ and ‘goed’.
Nurture- learn through environment, surroundings, who’s around us; we need conversation and interactions, in order to learn, children learn through imitation, our brain, for example imitating accents.
Is it true that understanding comes before production?
Yes
What does cognitive development mean?
How a child develops their understanding.
What does lexical development mean?
How children learn words.
What does grammatical development mean?
Learning the rules of language, for example how to form languages.
What does phonological development mean?
How children develop sounds of language and how they go together.
What does child directed speech mean?
The special way in which adults speak to children, for example when talking in a high-pitched voice.
What does babbling mean?
Reduplication of a mono-syllable, for example bababab, dadada. This lacks meaning.
What does phonemic expansion mean?
When children use lots of different phonemes. (sounds)
What does phonemic contraction mean?
Fairly quickly babies reduce their babbles to sounds found from their native language.
What does semantic errors mean?
Mistakes to do with meaning.
What does over-extension mean?
Over applying a meaning/ broadening a word, for example apple for all fruit.
What does under-extension mean?
Under applying a meaning/ making a word narrower, more specific than what it is, for example ‘shoe’ just for their little converse trainers.
What does irregular verbs mean?
Verbs that don’t take the regular- ed past tense for example, take, go, buy.
What are feral children?
Children who are brought up with little human interaction, due to neglect. E.g. Genie Wiley in the USA, Oxana in the Ukraine.
What does critical period hypothesis mean?
The idea that there is a critical period for language learning. If a child hasn’t required language by the age of 9, they will never become fully fluent.
What does critical period hypothesis support? Nature or Nurture?
Nature, because human brain isn’t fully developed until a certain age.
What are the stages of language development?
- Plural Inflections
- Function Words
- Content Words
What are plural inflections?
They affect word endings, including the letter ‘s’.
They mark numbers (one table, two
table), person (he/she walks) and tense e.g (-ed)
This means that plural inflections won’t use the ‘s’ and will use the wrong tense like (-ed)
What are function words?
They have grammatical function, but don’t carry meaning.
What are content words?
They carry meaning, like nouns, verbs and adjectives.
What does phonemic simplification mean?
Make sounds simpler.
What does deletion mean?
Children will often simplify pronunciation by deleting certain sounds.
What are the three types of deletion?
- Final Consonants
- Unstressed Syllables
- Consonants Structures
What are Final Consonants?
Consonants that may be dropped. E.g. the ‘t’ sound in ‘hat’ and ‘cat’ or the ‘du’ in ‘duck’.
What are Unstressed Syllables?
Syllables that are often deleted. E.g. ‘banana’ becomes ‘nana’ or ‘potato’ become ‘tato’.
Why does unstressed syllable ‘po’ removed from ‘potato’?
Because the child sees the ‘ta’ as the primary stress and ‘to’ as the secondary stress, therefore the ‘po’ is removed to make the word easier to say.
What are consonant clusters?
They are consonants that are together, therefore reduced. e.g. ‘snake’ becomes ‘nake’, ‘sleep’ becomes ‘seep’, ‘squirrel’ becomes ‘skirrel’.
Why is the word ‘squirrel’ seen as a consonant cluster?
the ‘skw’ is squirrel in the way it’s pronounced, is seen by a child as a secondary stress making it challenging to say, therefore it becomes ‘skirrel’
What does addition mean?
Children sometimes break up consonants clusters not by deleting one of the consonants, but by adding a vowel to separate. e.g. ‘blue’ becomes ‘belu’ ( the e is the vowel)
What are the terms in phonology?
- biblical
- labio-dental sounds
- dental sounds
- alveolar sounds
- velor sounds
- voiceless phonemes
- voiced phoneme
what are biblical sounds?
They include the pronunciations of m,b,p
What are labio- dental sounds?
They include the pronunciations of f,v
What are dental sounds?
They include the pronunciations of th(in) and th(an).
What are alveolar sounds?
They include the pronunciations of t,s,l,d,z,n
What are velor sounds?
They include the pronunciations of k,g
What are voiceless phonemes?
They include the pronunciations of s,f,t,k
What are voiced phonemes?
The pronunciations of z,d,v,g
What are fricatives?
Sounds that you can keep going, for as long as you can hold your breath.
What pronunciations of letters are fricative?
s,f,z,v
What are stops/plosive?
They are pronunciations of t,k,d,g
What are nasal sounds?
Pronunciations of m,n
What is the holophrastic stage?
Words that may be used as a single unit, which are known as holophrases. E.g. ‘allgone’ or ‘juice’ which could mean ‘ I want some juice’ or ‘i’ve spilt some juice’ etc..
What does context/ paralinguistic features/ prosodic features enable?
They enable the parent to understand their child.
Is it true or false that utterances don’t focus on key words (content words)?
False.
Utterances DO focus on key words
What is the meaning of two-word utterances?
Means when a range of complex meanings can be expressed .
What are possessions?
Referring to someone’s belonging.
e.g. ‘Mummy car’ should be ‘Mummy’s car’
What does Action mean?
‘Paul eat’ should be ‘Paul eats’
What does Location mean?
‘Teddy Bed’ should be ‘Teddy’s bed’
How is possessions, actions and location expressed in two-word utterances?
Commonly possesive ‘s’ and plural ‘s’ and past tense ‘ed’ are absent.
For e.g. ‘Walk park’ is a plural present inflectional continuous tense.
‘Walk’ is missing the ‘ing’
What does Ranged Progress mean?
A wider range of structures and sentence types will be used. For example e.g. Inflectional affixes.
5 year olds grammatical rules have learned through.
