Language Acquisition Flashcards
Phonetics
The sounds of a langauge
Phonology
The sound patterns of a language
Morphology
Rules of word formation
Syntax
Howards combine into phrases and sentences
Innateness hypothesis or Nativist
The Innateness hypothesis argues that our ability to acquire language is innate. Children must be born with the capacity for language development.
Universal Grammar
Universal Grammar refers to the set of structural characteristics shared by all languages
Receptive language stage
Associating sounds with facial movements and learning word boundaries in speech (0-4 months).
Productive language stage
Babbling in multilingual sounds and gestures (4 months).
Babbling stage
Sounds more like parents’ or household’s language (10 months).
One word stage
Understanding and beginning to say many nouns (12 months).
Two words stage
Adding verbs and making sentences but missing words (18-24 months).
Full sentences stage
Speaking and understanding complex sentences (24+ months).
Theoretical linguistics
Theoretical linguistics is the branch of linguistics that inquires into the nature of language or languages without regard for practical application
Imitation
Children imitate what they hear. The theory is based on an empirical or behavioral approach
Reinforcement
Children learn through positive and negative reinforcement. Very little evidence to support.
Connectionist Theory
Claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens neural connections
Critical Period Hypothesis
There’s a critical time in development during which a language can be acquired like a native speaker
Sensitive Period Hypothesis
A period of development begins and ends gradually, but there is a maximum period of sensitivity.
Pragmatic Cues
social context in which language is
Intentionality
Children draw inferences about a word’s meaning from what is being done as the word is used.
Infant-directed speech
A distinctive mode of speech used in talking to infants and young children.
Associationist theory
Language development occurs as the result of the gradual strengthening of connections that matter.
Word
Arbitrary symbol used to refer to some thing
Lexicon
Dictionary of words
Function Words
Words that are not meaningful by themselves but give structure to language (articles).
Comprehension vocabulary
Words that infants understand
Fast Mapping
The way in which children quickly form an idea of the meaning of an unfamiliar word they hear in a familiar and highly structured social interaction.
Code switching
the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation
LAD Language acquisition device
The hypothetical tool in the human brain that lets children learn and understand language quickly. Theory developed by Noam Chomski.
Competence
Linguistic competence is concerned with the child’s grammar, linguistic input and construction of the grammatical structures
Performance
Performance deals with the nature of child’s rule system; the psychological processes the child uses in learning the language, and how the child establishes meaning in the language input
Structure dependency
This principle of universal grammar states that language is organized in such a way that it crucially depends on the structural relationships between elements in a sentence
Parameters
Determine the ways in which languages can vary
Head
Specifies the position of the head in relation to its complements within phrases for different languages. English is a headfirst language because head of the phrase always appears before it’s complements whilst Japanese is a head last language.
Surface structure
Surface structure represents the physical properties of language
Deep Structure
The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of the sentence
Economy of derivation
The principal stating that movements only occur in order to match the interpretable features with an interpretive all features
Economy of representation
principle that grammatical structures must exist for a reason
Transformations
A rule that takes an input typically called the deep structure and changes it in some restricted way to result in a surface structure
Cognitive theory
Language acquisition must be viewed within the context of a child’s intellectual development. Linguistic structures will emerge only if there is an already established cognitive foundation
Input Theory
Learners progress in their knowledge of the language when they comprehend language input that is slightly more advanced than their current level
Motherese
Simplified and repetitive type of speech with exaggerated intonation in rhythm, often used by adults when speaking to babies
