Language Acquisition

Question 1

innate

Answer 1

determined by factors present from birth

Question 2

innateness hypothesis

Answer 2

a hypothesis that humans are genetically predisposed to learn and use language

Question 3

imitation theory

Answer 3

theory of language acquisition that claims that children acquire language by listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear

Question 4

reinforcement theory

Answer 4

theory of language acquisition that says that children learn to speak like adults because they are praised, rewarded, or otherwise reinforced when they use the right forms and corrected when they use the wrongs ones

Question 5

active construction of a grammar theory

Answer 5

theory of language acquisition that says that children acquire a language by inventing rules of grammar based on the speech around them

Question 6

connectionist theories

Answer 6

theory of language acquisition that claims that children learn language through neural connection in the brain

Question 7

social interaction theory

Answer 7

theory of language acquisition that claims that children acquire language through social interaction in particular with older children and adult and prompt their caregivers to supply them with the appropriate language experience they need

Question 8

linguistics of universals

Answer 8

property believed to be held in common by all natural languages

Question 9

universal grammar

Answer 9

the theory that posits a set of grammatical characteristics shared by all natural languages

Question 10

critical period

Answer 10

age span, usually described as lasting from birth to the onset of puberty, during which children must have exposure to language and must build the critical brain structures necessary in order to gain naive speaker competence in a language

Question 11

neglected children

Answer 11

a child who is neglected by caretakers, often resulting in significantly lower exposure to language as a child

Question 12

feral children

Answer 12

child who grew up in a wild without care by human adults often with animals

Question 13

homesign

Answer 13

a rudimentary visual-gestural communication system that is developed and used by deaf children and their families when a signed language is not made available for their communication

Question 14

child-directed speech

Answer 14

speech used by the parents or caregivers when communicating with young children and infants

Question 15

high amplitude sucking

Answer 15

experimental technique used to study sound discrimination in infants from birth to about six months

Question 16

conditioned head turn procedure

Answer 16

experimental technique usually used with infants between five and eighteen months with tow phases: conditioning and testing

Question 17

voice onset time

Answer 17

the length of time between the release of a consonant and the onset of voicing, that is, when the vocal folds start vibrating

Question 18

articulatory gestures

Answer 18

a movement of a speech organ in the production of sound, the movement of the velum for the production of a nasal consonat

Question 19

babble

Answer 19

a phase in child language acquisition during which the child produces meaningless sequences of consonants and vowels

Question 20

canonical babbling

Answer 20

the continuous repetition of sequences of vowels and consonants like (mamama) by infants

Question 21

variegated babbling

Answer 21

production of meaningless consonant-vowel sequences by infants

Question 22

holophrastic stage

Answer 22

stage in first language acquisition during which children can produce only one word at a time

Question 23

telegraphic

Answer 23

a phase during child language acquisition in which children use utterances composed primarily on content words

Question 24

overgeneralization

Answer 24

in the study of child language acquisition, a relationship between child and adult application of rules relative to certain contexts: a process in which children extend the application of linguistic rules to context beyond those in the adult language

Question 25

complex concepts

Answer 25

a term used in the study of child language acquisition. a group of items that a child refers to with a single word for which it is not possible to single out any one unifying property

Question 26

overextension

Answer 26

the study of child language acquisition, a relationship between child and adult perception of word meaning: the child’s application of a given word has a wider range than the application of the same word in adult language

Question 27

underextension

Answer 27

application of a word to a smaller set of objects that is appropriate for mature adult speech or the usual definition of a word

Question 28

relational term

Answer 28

type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference

Question 29

deictic expression

Answer 29

word or expression that takes its meaning relative to the time, place, and speaker of the utterance

Question 30

infant directed speech

Answer 30

speech used by parents or caregivers when communicating with young children or infants

Question 31

attention setters

Answer 31

word or phrase used to initiate an address to children

Question 32

attention holders

Answer 32

a tactic used to maintain children’s attention for extended amounts of time

Question 33

conversational turn

Answer 33

the contribution to a conversation made by one speaker from the time that she takes the floor from another speaker to the time that she passes the floor on to another speaker

Question 34

bilingual

Answer 34

state of commanding two languages; having linguistic competence in two languages

Question 35

second language acquisition

Answer 35

acquisition of a second language as a teenager or adult

Question 36

foreign accent

Answer 36

an accent that is marked by the phonology of another language or other languages that are more familiar to the speaker

Question 37

code switching

Answer 37

using words or structural elements from more than one language within the same conversation

Question 38

fossilization

Answer 38

process through which forms from a speaker’s non-native language usage become fixed and do not change, even after years of instruction

Question 39

transfer

Answer 39

the influence of one’s native language on the learning of subsequent languages

Question 40

sequential bilingualism

Answer 40

bilingualism in which the second language is acquired as a young child