Language Acquisition Flashcards
Language Acquisition
process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate
Innateness Hypothesis
the hypothesis in language acquisition that human ability to acquire language is innate (genetically encoded)
Universal Grammar
set of structural characteristics shared by all languages
Imitation Theory
the theory in language acquisition that children acquire language by imitating what they hear
Reinforcement Theory
the theory in language acquisition that children learn language through positive and negative reinforcement
Active Construction of Grammar
the theory in language acquisition that children invent grammar rules themselves and the ability to develop new rules is innate
Working Grammar
grammar that is currently in the speaker’s usage; rules they use of grammar and that modified as necessary
Regression
a return to a former or less developed state
Connectionist Theories
theory in language acquisition that claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens neural connections
Critical Period
a period during someone’s development in which a particular skill or characteristic is believed to be most readily acquired
Critical Period Hypothesis
the hypothesis in language acquisition that there is a critical period in development which a language can be acquired like a native speaker
Prelinguistic Stage
the stage in development from infancy to about 6 months where babies make noise such as crying or cooing as a response to stimuli
Babbling Stage
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
One-Word Stage
the stage in development beginning around the age of 1 where children speak in one-word sentences, usually 1 syllable words
Two-Word Stage
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
Beyond Two-Word Stage
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
Function Words
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
Inflectional Morphology
study of the processes that distinguish the forms of words in certain grammatical categories
Language Acquisition Theory
the theory that infants as young as 12 months reported to have sensitivity to the grammar needed to understand causative sentences
Nativism
a theory that grammar is largely hard-wired into the brain (also known as Innateness)
Behaviorism
the view in language acquisition that language is a behavior (Reinforcement)
Cognition
cluster of overlapping approaches to the study of language
Motherese
term used in the study of language acquisition for the way mothers often talk to their young children
Input
theory in language acquisition based on the maternal approach to language acquisition
B.F. Skinner
psychologist that championed the Behavioristic view of development
Noam Chomsky
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
Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
hypothetical tool in the brain that helps children quickly learn and understand language
Linguistic Competence
a speaker’s subconscious, intuitive knowledge of the rules of their language
Performance
psychological processes child uses in learning language and how child establishes meaning in the language input
Structure Dependency
a principle that language is organized in such a way that it crucially depends on structural relationships between elements in a sentence
Parameters
markers or switches that determine ways in which languages can vary
Head Parameter
specifies position of the head in relation to its compliments within phrases for different languages
Head
central element in a phrase
Transformation Model of Chomsky
each sentence in a language has two levels of representation: deep structure and a surface structure
Surface Structure
represents the physical properties of language (outward form of a sentence); version of a sentence that can be spoken and heard
Deep Structure
core semantic relations of a sentence; underlying syntactic structure of a sentence
Minimalism
family of approaches exploring a conjecture concerning the nature of the human language facility
Economy of Derivation
principle stating that movements (ie.e transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features
Economy of Representation
principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose
Generalized Transformations
take small structures which are either atomic or generated by other rules and combine them like embedding
