LANGUAGE Flashcards
What are phonemes? Morphemes?
Phonemes - basic speech sounds
Morphemes - smallest components of speech that carry meaning (whole words, prefixes, word endings)
What is a basic definition of grammar?
Combining morphemes into phrases & sentences using rules
What is the difference between production and comprehension?
Production - ability to use language
Comprehension - ability to understand language
What are some important milestones of language development?
Babbling
Sensitive period for learning language - critical period
What is babbling? What is its function? When does it develop?
Experimentation w/ sounds
Production of phonemes w/ no grammar rules
Repetition
infants
Do animals babble?
Yes, evidence in songbirds, monkeys, & bats
What is the sensitive period for language, and why is it important?
7 months in utero to 6 years
Critical exposure & feral children
When this period passes, can never fully learn a language
What happens when children are not exposed to language during the sensitive period?
Feral children
Can never fully understand
How is social interaction important to the development of language?
Conversing w/ a child is better than tv & radio
Higher competence
Understand the similarities and differences between three different theories of language
development: behaviorist, nativist and interactionist.
Behaviorist - language learning through operant conditioning
Problems - grammar rules not actively taught
Children generate novel sentences (not imitation)
Nativist - language learning is an innate capacity
Evidence - inability to learn grammar is separate from other cognitive abilities
Feral children still have some language skills
Interactionist - interaction of innate ability & social interaction
What is aphasia? How is Broca’s aphasia different from Wernicke’s aphasia?
Aphasia - loss of ability to speak or understand language
Broca’s aphasia - difficulty producing speech
Wernicke’s aphasia - speech is rapid & fluent but meaningless (problems w/ comprehension)
What is dyslexia? What are some common symptoms?
Difficulties w/ writing & spelling words, reading quickly, pronouncing words when reading aloud, understanding what one reads, difficulty distinguishing between similar sounding phonemes
What do brain imaging studies tell us about how people with dyslexia use ‘workaround
solutions’?
Less activity in pathway connecting visual cortex to Wernicke’s area
More activity in Broca’s area
Koeser et al. (2015): What was the independent variable? Dependent variable? What do the results of the study tell us about men’s and women’s use of gender-fair vs. gender-biased terms?
IV - language type (pronouns, no pronouns)
DV - fill-in-the-bank task w/ masc, fem, or genderless)
Women more likely to use gender-fair terms when given gender-fair terms, women less likely to use gender-fair terms in other groups
Men very unlikely to use gender-fair terms no matter what
