Language Flashcards
What is langauge?
The meaningful arrangement of sounds.
What is psycholinguistics?
The study of the psychology of language.
What are phonemes?
Discrete sounds that make up words but carry no meaning, such as ee, p, or sh. Infants make these sounds when learning.
What are morphemes?
Made up of phonemes; the smallest units of meaning in language; words or parts of words that have meanings. Boy and -ing are morphemes.
What is a phrase?
A group of words that when put together function as a single syntactic part of a sentence. “Walking the dog.”
What is syntax?
The arrangement of words into sentences as prescribed by a particular language.
What is grammar?
The overall rules of the interrelationship between morphemes and syntax that make up a certain language.
What is morphology?
Grammar rules; how to group morphemes.
What is prosody?
Tone inflections, accents, and other aspects of pronunciation that carry meaning.
Who is Noam Chomsky?
His work is most important in psycholinguistics.
What is transformational grammar?
It differentiates between surface structure and deep structure in language.
What is surface structure?
The way words are organized. “I studied the material for hours.” “The material was studied for hours by me.” “For hours, I studied the material.”
What is deep structure?
The underlying meaning of the sentence.
What is a language acquistion device?
Humans have an inborn ability to adopt generative grammar rules of the language that they often hear. “I founded the toy.” It is a nativist or genetic interpretation. Children only need to be exposed to a language in order to apply the LAD. They do not imitate, memorize, or learn through conditioning.
What is overregularization?
Th overapplication of grammar rules. “I founded the toy.” “Sheeps.”
What is overextension?
Generalizing with names for things. This is done through chaining rather than logic. A three year old may call any furry thing a doggy.
What is telegraphic speech?
Speech without the articles or extras, such as how they would appear in a telegram. “Me go.”
What is holographic speech?
When a young child uses one word (holophrases) to convey a whole sentence. “Me” for “give that to me.”
What is the gender difference for language learning
Girls are faster and more accurate than boys.
Are bilingual children faster or slower at language learning?
They are slower.
What is processed in the same regions of the brain as producing and understanding speech?
Reading and writing, although there are slight differences.
What do children usually use first, nouns or verbs?
Nouns first, then verbs. “Me want” or “Mommy shirt.”
What are the lanuage acquisition milestones at 1, 2, 3, and 4 years?
1 year: first spoken word(s)
2 years: >50 spoken words, usually in two- (and then three-) word phrases
3 years: 1,000-word vocabulary, but use has many grammatical errors
4 years: grammar problems are random exceptions.
What is the Whorfian hypothesis?
Language or how a culture says things influences that culture’s perspective. It has been found, however, that cultures that don’t have words for certain colors can still recognize them, so it is unclear to what extent language really affects our perceptions.
What did Roger Brown research?
Studied the areas of socials, developmental, and linguistic psychology and found that children’s understanding of grammatical rules develops as they make hypotheses about how syntax words and then self-correct with experience.
What is active speech?
Katherine Nelson found that language really begins to develop with the onset of active speech rather than during the first year of only listening.
What did William Labov study?
Ebonics and found it had its own complex internal structure.
What did Vygotsky and Luria find?
They studied the development of word meanings and found them to be complex and altered by interpersonal experience. They also stated that language is a tool (and not just a byproduct) in the development of abstract thinking.
What are semantic differential charts?
Founded by Osgood, these allow people to plot the meanings of words on graphs. People with similar backgrounds and interests plotted words similarly. Words have similar connotations (implied meaning) for cultures or subcultures.
