Lecture 4 - Morphological & Syntactic Development Flashcards
What is language, according to Harley (2014)?
Language is a system of symbols that enables communication
What are the core components of linguistics (Harley, 2014)?
- Syntax
- Semantics
- Phonolgy
- Phonetics
- Pragmatics
- Morphology
What is a phoneme?
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that distinguishes meaning between words (e.g., /p/ in ‘pat’ vs /b/ in ‘bat’)
What is a morpheme?
A morpheme is the smallest unit of language that carries meaning
What is inflectional morphology?
Morphology that changes the form of a word without altering its core meaning (e.g., walk –> walked)
What is derivational morphology?
Morphology that changes the meaning or category of a word (e.g., happy –> unhappy)
What is MLU (Mean Length of Utterance)?
MLU is a measure of syntactic development based on the average number of morphemes per utterance (Brown, 1973)
What does an increasing MLU indicate?
Growing syntactic complexity and language development over time
What is the WUG test (Berko, 1958)?
The WUG test assesses children’s ability to apply learned morphological rules to novel words (e.g., “This is a wag. Now there are two____”)
What is the mental lexicon?
The internal mental store of all words and associated linguistic knowledge (meaning, pronunciation, grammar)
How does semantic dementia affect language?
Semantic dementia patients struggle to link words with their meanings, especially regular words
What is syntax?
Syntax is the set of rules that govern the structure of sentences and phrase combinations
What is syntactic bootstrapping?
Syntactic bootstrapping is the theory that children use the structure of sentences (syntax) to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words
What is the Gavagai problem?
The Gavagi problem refers to a challenge in word learning: when hearing a new word in the presence of multiple possible referents, how does one identify the correct one?
What are two constraints that help solve the Gavagai problem?
- Mutual exclusivity (new word = new object)
- Joint attention (shared focus between speaker and listener)
What are syntactic frames?
Syntactic frames are sentence structures that cue grammatical categories (e.g., “This is a ____” suggests the blank is a noun)
What is a transitive verb?
A verb that requires a direct object (e.g., “The duck is gorping the bunny”)
What is an intransitive verb?
A verb that does not require a direct object (e.g., “The duck and the bunny are gorping”)
How did Naigles (1990) study syntactic bootstrapping?
By showing children a video and using transitive vs. intransitive sentence structures to test if they inferred the verb; ‘s meaning based on syntax
What is the Distributional Learning theory of grammar acquisition?
The view that children learn grammar through exposure to language patterns and statistical regularities in input
What is the Innate Knowledge theory (Universal Grammar)?
Chomsky’s idea that humans are born with domain-specific, innate grammatical knowledge
What are verb islands? (Tomasello, 2000)
The tendency for children to initially use verbs in fixed syntactic contexts, resisting generalisation
What did Tomsello & Brooks (1998) find about children’s grammar generalisation?
- Young children struggle to use newly learned verbs in different syntactic frames
- Generalisation improves with age
What is the nature view of language acquisition?
Language ability is innate, robust across development, and domain-specific (e.g., Chomsky, 1986)
What is the nurture view of language acquisition?
Language is learned through environmental input and reinforcement (e.g., Skinner, 1957)
What does the case of Genie suggest about language learning
The case of Genie suggests there may be a critical period for language development, supporting the idea that timely input is essential
Why is understanding language development important?
It informs diagnosis, education, and intervention strategies
What did the YouGov (2019) survey reveal?
The survey revealed widespread public misconceptions about language learning, emphasising the need for evidence-based education and training
