Language Acquisition

Question 1

Language Acquisition

Answer 1

process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate

Question 2

Innateness Hypothesis

Answer 2

the hypothesis in language acquisition that human ability to acquire language is innate (genetically encoded)

Question 3

Universal Grammar

Answer 3

set of structural characteristics shared by all languages

Question 4

Imitation Theory

Answer 4

the theory in language acquisition that children acquire language by imitating what they hear

Question 5

Reinforcement Theory

Answer 5

the theory in language acquisition that children learn language through positive and negative reinforcement

Question 6

Active Construction of Grammar

Answer 6

the theory in language acquisition that children invent grammar rules themselves and the ability to develop new rules is innate

Question 7

Working Grammar

Answer 7

grammar that is currently in the speaker’s usage; rules they use of grammar and that modified as necessary

Question 8

Regression

Answer 8

a return to a former or less developed state

Question 9

Connectionist Theories

Answer 9

theory in language acquisition that claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens neural connections

Question 10

Critical Period

Answer 10

a period during someone’s development in which a particular skill or characteristic is believed to be most readily acquired

Question 11

Critical Period Hypothesis

Answer 11

the hypothesis in language acquisition that there is a critical period in development which a language can be acquired like a native speaker

Question 12

Prelinguistic Stage

Answer 12

the stage in development from infancy to about 6 months where babies make noise such as crying or cooing as a response to stimuli

Question 13

Babbling Stage

Answer 13

the stage in development starting at about 6 months of age where an infant’s pitch and intonation resembles language spoken around them, not linked to biological needs

Question 14

One-Word Stage

Answer 14

the stage in development beginning around the age of 1 where children speak in one-word sentences, usually 1 syllable words

Question 15

Two-Word Stage

Answer 15

the stage in development beginning around 1.5-2 years of age where sentences consist of 2 words which could have a number of relations and usually occur in a fixed order but usually lack function words and inflectional morphology

Question 16

Beyond Two-Word Stage

Answer 16

the stage in development where the child begins using function words, using sentences with 3 or more words, and have already learned some aspects of grammar

Question 17

Function Words

Answer 17

words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker

Question 18

Inflectional Morphology

Answer 18

study of the processes that distinguish the forms of words in certain grammatical categories

Question 19

Language Acquisition Theory

Answer 19

the theory that infants as young as 12 months reported to have sensitivity to the grammar needed to understand causative sentences

Question 20

Nativism

Answer 20

a theory that grammar is largely hard-wired into the brain (also known as Innateness)

Question 21

Behaviorism

Answer 21

the view in language acquisition that language is a behavior (Reinforcement)

Question 22

Cognition

Answer 22

cluster of overlapping approaches to the study of language

Question 23

Motherese

Answer 23

term used in the study of language acquisition for the way mothers often talk to their young children

Question 24

Input

Answer 24

theory in language acquisition based on the maternal approach to language acquisition

Question 25

B.F. Skinner

Answer 25

psychologist that championed the Behavioristic view of development

Question 26

Noam Chomsky

Answer 26

theoretical linguist that believed in the innate, biological grammatical categories that facilitate entire language development in children and overall language processing in adults; Universal Grammar, minimalism

Question 27

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Answer 27

hypothetical tool in the brain that helps children quickly learn and understand language

Question 28

Linguistic Competence

Answer 28

a speaker’s subconscious, intuitive knowledge of the rules of their language

Question 29

Performance

Answer 29

psychological processes child uses in learning language and how child establishes meaning in the language input

Question 30

Structure Dependency

Answer 30

a principle that language is organized in such a way that it crucially depends on structural relationships between elements in a sentence

Question 31

Parameters

Answer 31

markers or switches that determine ways in which languages can vary

Question 32

Head Parameter

Answer 32

specifies position of the head in relation to its compliments within phrases for different languages

Question 33

Head

Answer 33

central element in a phrase

Question 34

Transformation Model of Chomsky

Answer 34

each sentence in a language has two levels of representation: deep structure and a surface structure

Question 35

Surface Structure

Answer 35

represents the physical properties of language (outward form of a sentence); version of a sentence that can be spoken and heard

Question 36

Deep Structure

Answer 36

core semantic relations of a sentence; underlying syntactic structure of a sentence

Question 37

Minimalism

Answer 37

family of approaches exploring a conjecture concerning the nature of the human language facility

Question 38

Economy of Derivation

Answer 38

principle stating that movements (ie.e transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features

Question 39

Economy of Representation

Answer 39

principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose

Question 40

Generalized Transformations

Answer 40

take small structures which are either atomic or generated by other rules and combine them like embedding