Developmental

Question 1

3 sub-components in linguistic development

Answer 1

Phonological, syntactic, semantic

Question 2

Mapping to a specific language phonology occurs within first 6 months - what does this entail?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

phonological acquisition

Answer 3

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

Question 4

first challenge of phonological acquisition

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

what human cognitive feature helps us to distinguish distinct phonological units from the continuous acoustic stimulus

Answer 5

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

Question 6

2nd challenge of phonological acquisition

Answer 6

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)

Question 7

3rd challenge of phonological acquisition

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Consonant simplification

Answer 8

Where the infant substitutes a simpler consonant for a more difficult one

Question 9

3 most common types of consonant simplification

Answer 9

Fronting, stopping and gliding

Question 10

Fronting

Answer 10

Replacing consonants produced at the back of the mouth with ones produced at the front

Question 11

Stopping

Answer 11

Replacing fricatives such as s, z, f and v with plosives such as t, d, p and b

Question 12

Gliding

Answer 12

Replacing r and l with w

Question 13

3 more common deformities in infant phonological production

Answer 13

• sounds being omitted or substituted with others
• assimilation
• reduolication (syllables being repeated)

Question 14

Syntactical acquisition

Answer 14

Acquiring the ability to arrange words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language

Question 15

Essential syntactic unit

Answer 15

The clause

Question 16

What does the infant need to be able to do in order to be able to relate syntactic units to the sentence skeleton?

Answer 16

Categorise syntactic units by a function/content distinction
(Functional convey grammatical meaning, content convey semantic meaning)

Question 17

What are the fundamental principles of syntax of a language

Answer 17

Its order and its constituent structure

Question 18

Homonymy

Answer 18

Words that sound the same but have different meanings eg the bank in ‘bank transfer’ and in ‘river bank’

Question 19

Fast mapping

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Semantic feature theory

Answer 20

Postulates that word meaning is acquired accumulatively through a ‘gradual addition of a universal set of discrete criterial perceptually based features’

Question 21

overextension

Answer 21

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

Question 22

What does the phenomenon of overextension reveal about the general properties of the process of infant language acquisition?

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Puzzle-puddle phenomenon (Smith)

Answer 23

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

Question 24

At what age cooing

Answer 24

6 weeks

Question 25

At what age babbling

Answer 25

6 months

Question 26

At what age 1 word utterances

Answer 26

1 year

Question 27

At what age questions and negatives

Answer 27

2.25 years

Question 28

At what age rare or complex constructions

Answer 28

5 years

Question 29

At what age mature speech

Answer 29

10 years