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
children are prepared to learn words:
- over extensions
- under extensions
overextensions
Stretching a familiar word beyond its correct
meaning
Underextensions:
Children’s boundary for a vocabulary word is
too restricted.
Pragmatics
-refers to knowledge about how language can be used
and adjusted to fit different circumstances
-Many elements for children to learn including the quantity of
information to give, truthfulness, when to be a close listener
-They begin learning these and nonverbal cues early in life but
continue to improve throughout childhood
Communicative competence
- All types of language knowledge (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) are combined in a package
-Young children often have difficulty in conveying exactly the right
message and are frequently unaware that their message was
inadequate.Early language development in general, and development of
conversational skills in particular, does not take place only in the
context of adult-child conversations but often in the context of
other children, particularly siblings.
statistical learning
- domain-general mechanism to discern what is a word and what is not
-Used for language and tones
-Most contemporary researchers believe that traditional
behavioral accounts of language acquisition are not adequate to account
for learning syntax.
-nativist vs social interactionist theories
nativist theories
propose that children are biologically prepared
to learn language and do so with special, innate learning mechanisms, not through some domain-general set of learning devices as proposed by the behaviorists
Social-interactionist theories
blend aspects of the behavioral and
nativists perspectives, granting that humans are specially prepared to
acquire language but holding that aspects of the environment, especially
parents, also might be specially prepared to foster language acquisition
Nativists perspectives on language development
Chomsky insisted that language is something innate, produced by the child’s biology
Wernicke’s area
located in the temporal lobe, results in problems comprehending speech, although the ability to produce speech is not usually affected
Broca’s area
located in the frontal lobes, usually
results in problems with speech production
Grammar center:
The frontal lobe has areas that are specifically
related to processing grammatical information
lateralized
the hemispheres of newborns are different
Language and brain development
- wernicke’s area
- broca’s area
- grammar center
- lateralized
- Evidence also indicates that different areas of the brain are involved when a second language is learned in childhood versus in adolescence or adulthood
Universal grammar and language development
-universal grammar
-Children have a set of principles and parameters that guide their
interpretation of speech beginning at birth
-pidgin
-creole
Universal grammar:
the basic grammatical rules that typify all
languages
pidgin
When a group of people with a variety of native languages are
taken from their homes and transported to a foreign land where
they are not given the opportunity to participate in the majority
culture or to learn the language of their new homeland, they
develop a communication system
creole
The children of pidgin speakers take the remnants of their
parents’ language and create a fully developed language in only
one generation
Is there a critical period for language development?
There is a critical period, or sensitive period, for learning
language—that children must be exposed to language early in life if they are ever to master it.
(1) People who were socially deprived or isolated during
infancy and early childhood, who typically demonstrate
only a tenuous mastery of language.
(2) People who learned their second language early in
childhood showed greater proficiency as adults than did
people who learned their second language later in
childhood.
(3) Grammatical proficiency is related to age of first exposure to sign language, not to the number of years one has been using the language.
(4) Plasticity to the brain is reduced with age for the areas involved with language development.
Social-interactionist perspective of language development
Language is viewed as a powerful social-cognitive tool, used to manipulate other people’s attention
Emergence of communicative intentions
a) Around 9 months children engage in shared attention because they view others at intentional agents.
b) Children who engage in shared-attention activities early tend to begin talking early.
Gestures and language development
a)Pointing and gestures more generally serve as a prelinguistic form
of communication and predict children’s later language
development.
b) Gestures could cause parents to say words and sentences that
children need to expand their speaking abilities.
c) Children who use gestures tend to perform better on a host of
cognitive tasks, and this may also be true for language learning.
d) Shared attention and seeing others as intentional beings serve as
the social-cognitive foundation for language development.
e) Parents present language to children not in a random way but,
instead, in a form that is packaged just for them
Child-directed speech
The simple, repetitive speech parents often use with
infants.
Prosodic features of child-directed speech
(1) Prosody, referring to the ups and downs of the tones and the rhythms of the sounds we make.
(2) When mothers talk to infants, they use higher tones of voice in general, more high and low tones, and more tones that move from low to high.
(3) Babies are more attentive to this type of speech and it allows them to discriminate between words with minimal differences in sounds.
(4) Infant-directed speech supports social interactions
between infants and their caregivers, promoting language development
Role of child-directed speech
(1) The more a mother used expansions, repetitions, and
questions, all of which are frequent in child-directed
speech, the better her child’s language development
overall.
(2) As children’s language competencies increase, so too does the complexity of language addressed to them.
(3) Not only does watching and listening to television provide no opportunity for social (and language) interaction, but the language heard on television consists almost totally of A–D speech and not the modified (and simplified) child directed speech that children typically receive from adults.
Development of a concept of self
-self concept
-By becoming self-aware, we also become “other-aware,” and this becomes
useful when dealing with other members of our species
-Charles Cooley (1902) used the term looking-glass self to capture the idea that
our self-concept is a reflection of how other people see and respond to us.
self concept
: the way a person defines himself or herself
Beginnings of self-awareness
- One of the earliest indications of a self-concept is infants’ ability
to differentiate themselves from other people and objects. - Infants as young as 3 months were able to discriminate between
images of themselves and same-aged infants. - I-self or implicit self occurs from birth until 15–18 months, and
there is no self-awareness. - Me-self or explicit self requires conscious awareness of the self or
the “idea of me.” - Visual self-recognition
- The development of a sense of self, as reflected by selfrecognition,
has important consequences for emotional, social, and
cognitive development. - Sometime late in the second year or early in the third year, many
children begin using the personal pronouns I, me, my, and mine, thereby
indicating a distinction between themselves and others.
Visual self-recognition
children prove they have a sense of self by
recognizing themselves in the mirror.
Self-efficacy:
the extent to which a person views himself or
herself as an effective individual
Development of self-efficacy
- When self-efficacy is poor, people tend to behave ineffectually, regardless of their actual abilities.
- As children approach school age, their peer group becomes a valuable source of information, and school itself is a potent agent in forming children’s self-efficacy
- Preschool children tend to be overly optimistic about their abilities.
- Cognitive immaturity, as reflected by their unrealistic assessments of their abilities, can actually facilitate development rather than hinder it
- wishful thinking
Wishful thinking:
Young children can make relatively accurate
predictions of how other children are likely to perform on school-like
tasks but are overly optimistic in predicting their own future
performance. The overconfidence gives them the confidence to attempt
things they might not otherwise try.
Cognitive bases of gender identity
- Gender identification
- One important factor in the development of gender identification is their ability to understand gender as a concept and to understand that gender remains stable over time and is consistent over situations.
- Gender constancy
- Gender cognition in transgender children
- Children’s theories of gender
Gender schemas
“are interrelated networks of mental associations representing information about the sexes.”
a) They are active constructions, prone to errors, and distortions.
Gender cognition in transgender children
-Transgender children
- Children referred for problems in their gender identity showed more immature levels of gender constancy
- Implicit association test
-When children’s reactions are consistent with their
sex, scores are positive patterns for the control children and the siblings of the transgender children were positive for all tasks, both the implicit
and the tests.
a) The same consistent pattern was found for the transgender children but only when viewed from their gender identity.
b) In contrast, the transgender children displayed the opposite pattern to the cisgender children when responses were coded in terms of their birth sex
Children’s theories of gender
- Cognitive, cultural, and biological differences all influence gender identity.
- Children’s knowledge of gender roles and their understanding of the concept of gender are important for development.
- Their early theories are simplistic, based on the grossest of characteristics.
- Children discard old theories, try new ones, and eventually acquire the meaning of gender that is implicitly agreed on by members of their society.
Transgender children
One whose natal, or birth, sex is
inconsistent with one’s gender identity
Implicit association test
Test uses the speed with which people make decisions about words or concepts when they are associated with
different social groups.
How special is social cognition
-Children are born prepared by evolution for a social world but they do not have the requisite skills necessary to function effectively in that world.
-Their social intelligence emerges, in part, following a universal timeline but also varying as a
function of the particular society they are born into.
