Langauge Acquisition Flashcards
Innate
determined by factors present from birth
Innateness hypothesis
humans are generally predisposed to learn an use language
Imitation theory
claims that children acquire language b listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear
Active Construction of a Grammar Theory
children acquire language by inventing rules of grammar
Connectionist Theories
claims that children learn language through neural connections in the brain.
Social Interaction theory
theory that claims children acquire language from social interactions
linguistic universal
property believed to be held in common by all natural languages
universal grammar
theory that posits a st of grammatical characteristics shared by all natural languages
High amplitude sucking
experimental technique used to study sound discrimination in infants from birth to six months
Conditioned head turn procedure
experimental technique used with infants between five and eighteen months with two phases: conditioning and testing
VOT
the length of time between the release of a consonant and the onset time of voicing
articulatory gestures
a movement of a speech organ in the production of speech
babble
child produces meaningless sequences of consonants and vowels
canonical babbling
repeating babbling in infants
variegated babbling
production of meaningless consonant- vowel sequences by infants
holophrastic stage
in first language acquisition where a child can produce only one word at a time
holophrase
a one word sentence
complexive concept
a group of items that child refers to with a single word for which it is not possible to single out any one unifying property
over extension
a relationship between child and adult perception of word meaning
attention getters
word or phrase that used to initiate an address to children
attention holders
a tactic used to maintain children’s attention for an extended amount of time
infant- directed speech
similar to child directed speech
conversational turns
made by one speaker from the time that she takes he floor from another speaker to the time that she passes the floor on to another speaker
bilingual
state of commanding two languages
second language acquisition
acquisition of a language after becoming an adult
language mixing
similar to code switching
foreign accent
an accent that is marked by the phonology of another language or other languages that are familiar to the speaker
code switching
using words or structural elements from more than one language within the same conversation
fossilization
process through which forms from a speaker’s non-native language usage become fixed
simultaneous bilingualism
both languages acquired from infancy
sequential bilingualism
in which the second language is acquired as a young child
multi lingual
the state of commanding three or more languages
negatives
children go through this stage of speaking in order to produce negative sentences such as no
Interrogatives
young children can produce questions only by using a rising intonation, rather than using a particular syntactic structure
Plurals
recall that the plural morpheme -s is acquired quite early by children
relational term
type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference
under extension
application of a word to a smaller set of objects than is appropriate for mature adult speech
deictic expression
words referring to personal, temporal, or spatial aspects of an utterance
Here and Now
what adults mostly speak to children about
identifying sounds
in order to produce spoken language, infants first need to be able to perceive it
