Key Terms Flashcards
Child Directed Speech
Language used by parents to engage their children.
Convergence
Happens when an individual adjusts his speech patterns to match those of people belonging to another group or social identity
Critical period
A period of time when someone’s development in a skill is believed to be mostly readily acquired
Diminutives
A word form or suffix that indicates smallness.
Ellipsis
Omission of words or writing
Experimentation.
The process by which a child ‘learns’ to talk.
First 50 words
The first 50 words a child uses, usually nouns and verbs.
Grammar
A set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases and words in a language.
Naming words.
Nouns used when beginning to talk, usually around one year.
Object permanence.
The awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible.
Over-extension
A learners extension of a word meaning or grammatical rules beyond its normal use.
Past tense suffixes.
Inflections added to root words to change them to past tense.
Porto-words
Clusters of sounds that represent the baby’s attempt to say a specific word when their motor coordination is still in the early stages of development.
Scaffolding.
The process of transferring a skill from adult to child and then removing that support once it has been mastered.
Virtuous errors
Syntactic errors made by young children in which a non-standard utterance reveals some understanding, though incomplete, of standard syntax.
