language acquisition Flashcards
what is psycholinguistics
the study of aquisition, storage, comprehension, and production of lanugage
language is:
communicaiton
arbitrary/symbolic
grammar
sounds
meaning
words
phrases
generative: novel utterances
dynamic: always evolving
what are fundamental aspects of language?
verbal comprehension
- input
- comprehension of written and spoken language
verbal fluency
- output
- ability to produce verbal utterances
what are properties of language
- phonology
- smallest unit of speech
- sounds of language
- /s/, /f/ - morphology
- word structure
- smallest unit that denotes meaning
- content morphemes: core meaning
- function morphemes: nuances of words (un, ing, ed)
- lexicon: set of morphemes for a language - syntax
- rules used to put words together for a sentence - semantics
- study of meaning in a language - pragmatics
- using language appropriately in different situations/audiences
approach to language comprehension: speech perception
- speech perception
- we hear sounds
- we put sounds together to form words
- we comprehend phrases of sentences
- we understand ideas being conveyed
- coarticulation: phonemes overlap
- phoneme restoration effect
- mcgurk effect
what is the phoneme restoration effect
(speech perception)
top down processing
- what we know combined with what we hear to produce what we perceive
ex: cough inturrupting a sentence, but we fill in the blank with context
__eel in the shoe
what is evidence of categorical perception
(speech perception)
continuous dimension perceived as discrete
sudden break between categories (blue to black)
no discrimination within categories (blend from white to blue)
what is the mcgurk effect
- evidence of categorical perception
watching lip movements for “ba” but hearing “da” produces a completely different perception “tha”
second approach to language comprehension (grammatical structure approach)
semantics:
- denotation - definition of a word
- connotation - additional nuances of word meaning (emotion, social)
ex: hungry vs starving
syntax: the grammatical arrangement of words into a sentence or phrase
grammatical structure approach
chomsky’s transformational grammar
surface structure: the actual phrase (phonemes)
deep structure: the meaning of the structure (semantics)
universal stages of language acquisition
- cooing
- born with an ability to hear all phonemes then specialize for native language - babbling
- babble in phonemes
- repetition of similar/identical syllables first
(ba ba, ma ma) - one-word utterances
- holophrases like shoe or blankie - two-word utterances
- want juice - basic adult speech
nature vs nurture
nature:
- chomksy
- universal grammar
- proposes that humans are biologically ready to learn language
nurture:
- environment is necessary during sensitive period of language development
- ex: Genie
