Language Acquisition Flashcards
What is involved with the Naturalistic approach to language acquisition in babies?
- Diary studies
- Recording of sample utterances by trained researcher
What is involved with the Experimental approach to language acquisition in babies?
- Comprehension
- Production
- imitation
_______ acquired before ________
vowels
consonants
______ acquired before other consonants
Stops
_______ acquired before _______, ___________, and ___________
labials
velars
alveolars
alveolopalatals
________ acquired last
Interdentals
_______ sounds acquired before _______
Frequent
Infrequent
What are the early phonetic processes of babies?
- Substitution
- Syllable simplification
- Assimilation
What is Substitution?
The systematic replacement of one sound by another
What is syllable simplification?
When under stressed syllables are dropped
What is Assimilation?
When one speech sound becomes much like a nearby sound
How do children learn Morphology?
By following rules and applying them, not by memorization and imitation
What are the stages that a child goes through when they learn Morphology?
- Perfection (almost) “Daddy came home”
- Over-regularization (frequent) “Daddy comed home”
- Perfection (gradual transition to this) “Daddy came home”
Who developed the Wug Test?
Jean Burko-Gleason in the 1950’s
Phonological development at 0-8 weeks
Only capable of reflexive crying
Phonological development at 8-20 weeks
Cooing and laughter appear in child’s vocal expressions
Phonological development at 20-30 weeks
Child begins to use verbal play with vowels and consonants (trying them out)
Phonological development at 25-50 weeks
child begins to babble
What are the two types of babbling?
- reduplicative babbling (CVCV) ex: baba
- variegated babbling (VCV) ex: adu
Phonological development at 9-18 months
Child starts to produce melodic utterances (the presence of stress and intonation)
Describe the holophrastic utterance phase of Language Acquisition
- This occurs at about 12 months
- Holophrase=one word
- One word can be used to indicate things or people
- Some words can be representative of whole thoughts
Describe the two word phrase phase of Language Acquisition
- Occurs between 18-24 months
- They can use one or two word sentences
(ex: my book)
Describe the telegraphic speech phase of Language Acquisition
- Starts at two years and continues
- Sentences are adult like in structure but without function words
- Like a telegram (simplified speech)
At what age does a child’s speech typically become mostly adult like in nature?
Three years (36 months)
Describe “The kid’s Problem” when it comes to innateness
-poor data: people make mistakes when talking -inconsistent data: different people use different dialects -many different grammars consistent with the data he hears: the kid has no way to know what people cant say.
Describe the “poverty of the stimulus”
The “stimulus” (language) that the child hears doesnt provide enough information to
determine what the details are of the
language the child is learning
Language ______ be taught to a child because it is ________ like walking or eating.
cannot
innate
Why is the theory of imitation in language acquisition shown to be false?
Because children are able to say and understand things that they have never been exposed to before.
A major example of this would be the over-regularization that children do (comed, holded, goed)
Name the characteristics of innate abilities
- The behavior emerges before it is necessary
- It is not a result of a conscious decision
- Not triggered by external events
- Direct teaching has little effect
- Has a regular sequence or milestones in development
- There is a “critical period”
When do infants start to say their first words?
10-12 months
Infants are sensitive to picking up language ______________ birth.
Directly after
Many experiments confirmed
that at________ infants can
discriminate their native language
from a foreign language!
4 days
How did the researchers establish
that the infants can discriminate
languages?
The standard technique is a habituation- recovery procedure that exploits infants sucking behavior aka HAS (High Amplitude Sucking)
