File 8 Language Acquisition Flashcards
Innate
Determined by factors present from birth. (Part of the language ability)
Innateness hypothesis
A hypothesis that humans are generally predisposed to learn and use language.
Imitation Theory
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 Grammar Theory
Theory of child language which says that children acquire a language by inventing rules of grammar based on the speech around them.
Connectionist Theories
Theory of language acquisition which claims that children learn language through neural connections in the brain. A child develops such connections 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 universals
Property believed to be held in common by all natural languages.
Universal grammar
The theory that posits a set of grammatical characteristics shared by all natural languages. Also, the name of this set of shared characteristics.
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 Children
A child who is neglected by caretakers, often resulting in significantly lower exposure to language as a child.
Feral Children
Child who grew up in the wild without care by human adults, often with animals.
Homesign (system)
A rudimentary visual-gestural communication system (not a language) that is developed and used by deaf children and their families when a signed language is not made available for their communication.
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. In many Western societies, child-directed speech is slow and high-pitched and has many repetitions, simplified syntax, exaggerated intonation, and simple and concrete vocabulary.
High Amplitude sucking
Experimental technique used to study sound discrimination in infants from birth to about six months. Infants are given a special pacifier that is connected to a sound-generating system. EAch suck on the pacifier generates a noise, and infants’ sucking behavior is used to draw conclusions about discrimination abilities.
Conditioned Head-Turn Procedure
Experimental technique usually used with infants between 5 and 18 months with two phases: conditioning and testing. During the conditioning phase, the infant learns to associate a change in sound with the activation of visual reinforcers, first presented at the same time and then in succession, such that the infant begins to anticipate the appearance of the visual reinforcers and look at them before they are activated. During the testing phase, when the infant looks to the visual reinforcers immediately after a change in sound, it suggests that the infant has perceived the change in sound, thereby demonstrating the ability to discriminate between the two sounds involved.
Articulatory gestures
A movement of a speech organ in the production of speech, for example, the movement of the velum for the production of nasal consonant.
Babble
A phrase in child language acquisition during which the child produces meaningless sequences of consonants and vowels. Generally begins around the age of six months.
Canonical Babbling
The continuous repetition of sequences of vowels and consonants like [mamama] by infants; also called repeated babbling.
Variegated babbling
Production of meaningless consonant-vowel sequences by infants.
Telegraphic
The omission of function words (which continues even after the child begins to produce more than two words at a time0 the speech of young children is called telegraphic
Holophrastic Stage
Also called One-Word Stage. Stage in first-language acquisition during which children can produce only one word at a time.
Overgeneralization
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.
Complexive Concept
A term used in he study of child language acquisition. A group of items (abstract or concrete) that a child refers to with a single word 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 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(relative intersection)
Type of relationship between adjective an noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference.
Diectic expressions
Words referring to personal, temporal, or spatial aspects of an utterance, and whose meaning depends on the context in which the word is used.
Attention getters
Word or phrase used to initiate an address to children
Attention holders
A tactic used to maintain children’s attention for extended amounts of time.
Conversational turns
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 on to another speaker.
Bilingual
Sate of commanding two languages; having linguistic competence in two languages. In machine translation, a system that can translate between only one language pair.
Multilingual
The state of commanding three or more languages; having linguistic competence in three or more languages. In machine translation, a system that can translate between more than two languages.
Second-language acquisition
Acquisition of a second language as a teenager or adult (after the critical period).
Code-switching
Using words or structural elements from more than one language within the same conversation (or even within a single sentence or phrase).
Foreign accent
An accent that is marked by the phonology of another language or other languages that are more familiar to the speaker.
Fossilization
process through which forms from a speaker’s non-native language usage become fixed (generally in a way that would be considered ungrammatical by a native speaker) and do not change, even after years of instruction.
Transfer
The influence of one’s native language on the learning of subsequent languages (which can facilitate or inhibit the learning of second language)
Simultaneous Bilingualism
Bilingualism in which both languages are acquired from infancy.
