Language Flashcards
What is language?
a system that relates sounds (or gestures) to meaning
What are the four components of language?
- symbolism
- structured & meaningful
- displacement
- generativity
What are the four components of language?
- symbolism
- structured & meaningful
- displacement
- generativity
phonemes
the smallest unit of sound
/p/ and /b/
phoneme
the smallest unit of sound
/p/ and /b/
morpheme
the smallest unit of meaning
prefixes, suffixes, roots
syntax
rules for word combinations
Stage of Language Development:
0 months
crying
Stage of Language Development:
1 month
cooing
Stage of Language Development:
6 months
babbling
Stage of Language Development:
1 year
patterned speech
Stage of Language Development:
18 months
naming explosion
Stage of Language Development:
2 years
combining words
When do infants start to say their first words?
10-15 months
behaviorist theory of language development
we learn language through reinforcement
nativist theory of language development
children are born with innate mental structures that guide their acquisition of language
What aspects of language support the nativist theory?
- linguistic universals
- children apply rules of grammar to novel words
- language is learned more easily in the critical period
- animals don’t learn language as successfully as humans
intersectionalist theory of language development
innate capacity for language interacts with experience
“Motherese”
What is the critical period?
as you get older, it becomes harder to learn a new language
What happened to Genie?
suffered extreme child abuse and was forbidden to speak –> never fully developed language skills
categorical speech perception
the phenomenon of perceiving speech sounds as two distinct categories instead of on a continuum
True or False:
We think of /ba/ and /da/ as two distinct sounds.
True
Voice Onset Time (VOT)
interval between articulatory release and onset of voicing
As VOT ____, /ba/ sound becomes closer to ____
increases, /pa/
