Language & Communication Part 2 Flashcards
What does grammar enable us to do?
Combine words in different ways so that they can convey different meanings
There is no limit on the number of different utterances we can produce
What are the two key components of grammar?
Syntax - the branch of grammar dealing with the organisation of words into large structures
Morphology - the branch of grammar dealing with word structure
How is syntactic development tested?
Novel words are used
E.g. Two year old points to correct video: “point to where the lion weefed the dog”
What do we use morphology for?
To mark things e.g. the tense walk/walked
number dog/dogs
possession my dog’s bone
But not all plurals are formed by adding ‘s’
What is the developmental trajectory that children tend to follow?
- Discover an inflection
- Begin to over apply the inflection (He blewed it up)
- Manage to balance applying inflections productively and remembering exceptions
What did Chomsky argue?
That children cannot learn by creatively copying what they hear around them because of:
- The poverty of stimulus problem
- The no negative evidence problem
What is the Language Acquisition Device?
Something that helps us get started as language learners, it is innate in our minds.
Chomsky proposed a universal grammar, grammatical categories and principles used to generate the grammatical sentences of the world’s languages
UG is constantly being revised but is still proposed to be innate and available to guide language acquisition from the start
What is the problem with universal grammar/LAD?
There is no complete account of what innate knowledge makes up UG and how children could use it to learn their specific languages they are exposed to
What do constructivist approaches argue?
That there is no problem of the poverty of the stimulus nor of no negative evidence
Grammar is learnable
Emphasis on the social context of development and learning mechanisms e.g. reading, imitation
What are the challenges of these approaches?
No fully worked out account of how different learning mechanisms interact to allow children to creatively produce language based on what they have previously heard and stored in memory
What are pragmatics?
The ability to adapt our language to the context in which we are speaking and the people we are speaking to
What are the skills developed in pragmatics?
- Turn taking
- Using the right expression to refer to something
- Understanding implicatures (“I ate some biscuits” emphasis on some)
- Being able to talk in different registers
- Narrative skills
Outline referential choice in infant’s development?
Development in preschool years in children’s ability to take into account their addressee’s point of view when choosing how to refer to something
Children may sometimes point to something their addressee can’t see, or refer to unknown pronouns
Repairing these utterances helps them to learn how to be more explicit in the future
This might help theory of mind
How do caregivers scaffold language development?
- Child directed speech or ‘motherese’
- Following in: commenting on object of children’s attention
- Adjustment of language
- Expansion
- Recasts (of incomplete or unconventional speech)
- Clarification Requests
What are some problems that may arise due to atypical development?
- From hearing loss (often helped by cochlear implant) or difficulty in producing speech sounds (due to a cleft palate)
- Sometimes language delays can be result of a learning disability
- Delayed communication or unusual language is one of the diagnostic features of Autism
