Final Goff Flashcards
What is language?
A. Language is a special form of communication, qualitatively different from the ways in which other animals send messages back and forth to one another.
B. Language is multilayered.
C. At its most basic level, language refers to the systematic and conventional use of
sounds, signs, or written symbols for the intention of communication or self expression.
D. Human language is symbolic, grammatical, and although all biologically typical
people acquire language, the particular language children learn to speak varies
with culture.
Describing children’s language development Intro
- There are at least five aspects of language:
(1) phonology
(2) morphology
(3) syntax
(4) semantics
(5) pragmatics, and they all develop over time.
Phonological development
- Age-related changes occur in tongue, mouth, and position of the larynx in the throat, and these physical differences mean that the sounds
infants and children are able to produce change over time. - Speech production before 6 months of age is driven primarily by endogenous (internal) forces rather than by the language environment.
- Babbling plays an important role in language development.
- The variety of sounds children can make increases from about 18 months to 8 or 9 years of age.
- By 6–9 years of age, children can pronounce all the sounds of their language correctly about 75% of the time.
Phonology
the sounds of a language
Phonemic awareness:
the knowledge that words consist of separable sounds.
Morphology:
the structure of something—in the case of language,
the structure of words.
morpheme,
- The smallest unit of meaning in a language
- > Free morphemes
- > bound morphemes
Free morpheme
can stand alone as words, such as fire, run, or
sad
Bound morphemes
cannot stand alone but, rather, convey
meaning by changing the free morpheme they are attached to.
mean length of utterance,
The average number of morphemes a child uses in a sentence, or
the mean length of utterance, is one indication of young children’s
linguistic development.
Over regularization:
beginning around 20 months of age, children
over use morphological rules for word endings on irregular verbs.
a) The acquisition of the rule is generalized to all situations.
Syntax
is the knowledge of sentence structure, or grammatical
rules—rules for how words are combined into sentences and how
sentences are transformed into other sentences
Holophrases
One word sentences that carry more meaning
Telegraphic speech:
Two- to three-word sentences that carry
meaning and focus on high content words.
a) Usually beings around 18 months of age
Semantics
refers to meaning—specifically, the meaning of
language terms
Lexicon:
vocabulary development
vocabulary development
a) Most children say their first words around the age of 1 year, and they are often only understood by family members.
b) By 6 years of age, most children have a vocabulary of over 10,000
words, which will double by third grade and steadily increase to
about 60,000 words by 18-years-old.
c) Word spurt
word spurt
at about 18 months of age, or when children have
about 50 words in their active vocabulary, the rate at which they learn new words increases substantially, to between 22 and 37 words per month
Receptive vocabulary:
words they can recognize.
->Receptive vocabulary exceeds productive vocabulary.
Productive vocabulary:
words they can say, or produce.
Constraints on word learning
- whole-object assumption
- taxonomic assumption
- mutually exclusive assumption
- Through a process of elimination, they are more efficient at recognizing new names for new objects.
- synaptic bootstrapping
whole object assumption
children, when hearing a word, assume that it refers to
the whole object and not to some part of that object
taxonomic assumption
children assume that words refer to things that are similar
mutually exclusive assumption
different words mean different things
synaptic bootstrapping
learning the part of grammar of an unknown word through the sentence structure surrounding it