Developmental Flashcards
3 sub-components in linguistic development
Phonological, syntactic, semantic
Mapping to a specific language phonology occurs within first 6 months - what does this entail?
Native language has a ‘magnet effect’ for infants - pulls the variants to itself and makes close sounds less discernible so that infants are less able to tell the difference between their native language prototype and its variants
phonological acquisition
refers to the child’s development of the ability to form speech sounds, organize these sounds to form words, and understand the pronunciation of the words of the native language
first challenge of phonological acquisition
the child must first be able to distinguish sounds - to separate distinct phonological units from the continuous acoustic stimulus around them. This is a huge challenge, given that the speech stream does not actually provide the individual phonological units.
what human cognitive feature helps us to distinguish distinct phonological units from the continuous acoustic stimulus
categorical perception - we don’t actually perceive the speech stream as continuous, but automatically categorize sounds - infants can still do this in spite of widespread variability in natural speech
2nd challenge of phonological acquisition
recognise which fine differences are semantically important (ie minimal pairs like bat and pat) and which aren’t (like in English stress and tone usually don’t have semantic importance)
3rd challenge of phonological acquisition
the infant must learn the phonological and phonotactic rules which underpin the formation of words - this is often described as the ‘secret skeleton’, the underlying structure which relates phonemes and words.
Consonant simplification
Where the infant substitutes a simpler consonant for a more difficult one
3 most common types of consonant simplification
Fronting, stopping and gliding
Fronting
Replacing consonants produced at the back of the mouth with ones produced at the front
Stopping
Replacing fricatives such as s, z, f and v with plosives such as t, d, p and b
Gliding
Replacing r and l with w
3 more common deformities in infant phonological production
- sounds being omitted or substituted with others
- assimilation
- reduolication (syllables being repeated)
Syntactical acquisition
Acquiring the ability to arrange words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language
Essential syntactic unit
The clause
What does the infant need to be able to do in order to be able to relate syntactic units to the sentence skeleton?
Categorise syntactic units by a function/content distinction
(Functional convey grammatical meaning, content convey semantic meaning)
What are the fundamental principles of syntax of a language
Its order and its constituent structure
Homonymy
Words that sound the same but have different meanings eg the bank in ‘bank transfer’ and in ‘river bank’
Fast mapping
Between the ages of 14 and 18 months infants learn associations between words and objects extremely fast, and are even able to recall meanings of words after just one-time exposure
Semantic feature theory
Postulates that word meaning is acquired accumulatively through a ‘gradual addition of a universal set of discrete criterial perceptually based features’
overextension
this is the phenomenon where children commonly use words whose extension ranges beyond that of an adult - for example a child might call a whole set of different animals by the term ‘doggie
What does the phenomenon of overextension reveal about the general properties of the process of infant language acquisition?
1) during semantic acquisition children are categorising rather than simply ‘labelling’ distinct objects
2) they are doing this both independently and creatively, in a way that is resistant to an extent to adult teaching and corrections
Puzzle-puddle phenomenon (Smith)
The observation of a child who mispronounced ‘puddle’ when it was the target word but then also mispronounced ‘puzzle’ to produce puddle
Shows that children’s deformations aren’t simply due to an inability to articulate the correct sounds
At what age cooing
6 weeks
At what age babbling
6 months
At what age 1 word utterances
1 year
At what age questions and negatives
2.25 years
At what age rare or complex constructions
5 years
At what age mature speech
10 years
