File 8 Flashcards
Innate
Determined by factors present from birth
Innateness Hypothesis
A hypothesis that humans are generally predisposed to learn and use language.
Imitation Theory
Child language acquisition Child language acquisition theory that claims that children acquire language by listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear.
Reinforcement Theory
Theory of child language acquisition which says that children learn to speak like adults because they are praised, rewarded, or otherwise reinforced when they use the right forms and are corrected when they use the wrong ones.
Active construction of a grammar theory
Theory of child language which says that children acquire language by inventing rules of grammar based on the speech around them.
Connectionist Theory
Theory of language acquisition which claims that children learn language through neural connections in the brain. A child develops such connections by through exposure to language and by using language.
Social Interaction Theory
Theory of language acquisition that claims that children acquire language through social interaction- in particular with older children and adults- and prompt their caregivers to supply them with the appropriate language experience they need.
Linguistic Universal
Property believed to be held in common by al natural languages.
Universal Grammar
The theory that posits a set of grammatical characteristics shared by all natural languages.
Critical Period
Age span, usually described as lasting from birth to the onset of puberty, during which children must have exposure to language and must build the critical brain structures necessary in order to gain native speaker competence in a language.
Neglected Child
A child who is neglected by caretakers, often resulting in significantly lower exposure to a language as a child.
Feral Child
Child who grew up in the wild without care by human adults, often with animals.
Homesign
A rudimentary visual-gestural communication system that is developed and used by deaf children and their families when a signed language is not made available for their communication.
Imitation Theory
Child language acquisition theory that claims that children acquire language by listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear.
Rules
A formal statement of an observed generalization about patterns in language.
Child directed speech
Speech used by parents or caregivers when communicating with young children or infants.
High Amplitude Sucking
Experimental technique used to study sound discrimination in infants from birth to about six months.
Conditioned Head Turn Procedure
Experimental technique usually used with infants between five and eighteen months with two phases: conditioning and testing.
Babbling
A phase in child language acquisition during which the child produces meaningless sequences of consonants and vowels.
Canonical Babbling
The continuous repetition of sequences of vowels and consonants like [mamama] by infants.
Variegated Babbling
Production of meaningless consonant- vowel sequences by infants.
Holophrastic Stage
Stage in first-language acquisition during which children can produce only one word at a time.
Holphrase
A one-word sentence.
Telegraphic stage
A phase during which child language acquisition in which children use utterances composed primarily of content words.
Telegraphic Utterances
Utterances containing primarily content words.
Overgeneralizations
In the study of child language acquisition, a relationship between child and adult application of rules relative to certain contexts: a process in which children extend the application of linguistic rules to context beyond those in the adult language.
Interrogative
A kind of sentence that expresses a question.
Complex Concept
A term used in the study of language acquisition. A group of items that a child refers to with a single words for which it is not possible to single out any one unifying property.
Overextension
In the study of child language acquisition, a relationship between child and adult perception of word meaning: the child’s application of a given word has a wider range than the application of the same word in adult language.
Underextension
Application of a word to a smaller set of objects than is appropriate for mature adult speech or the usual definition of the word.
Relational Term
Type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference.
Deictic Expressions
Word or expression that takes its meaning relative to the time, place and speaker of the utterance.
Fossilization
Process through which forms from a speaker’s non-native language usage become fixed and do not change, even after years of instruction.
Foreign Accent
An accent that is marked by the phonology of another language or other languages that are more familiar to the speaker.
Second- language acquisition
Acquisition of a second language as a teenager or adult.
Code- Switching
Using words of structural elements from more than one language within the same conversation.
Sequential Bilingualism
Bilingualism in which the second language is acquired as a young child.
Simultaneous Bilingualism
Bilingualism in which both languages are acquired from infancy.
Multilingual
The state of commanding three or more languages; having linguistic competence in three or more languages.
Conversational Turn
The contribution to a conversation made by one speaker from the time that she takes the floor from another speaker to the time that she passes the floor onto another speaker.
