Levey Chapters 1 & 2, Capone Singleton Chapter 2 Flashcards
prosody
allows us to communicate different attitudes such as sarcasm or sympathy through the use of methods
Communication
The process of exchanging information -Ideas -Thoughts -Feelings -Needs -Desires We are able to communicate through verbal, written, gesture, pantomime, drawing, or through sign language.
Cognition
- involves knowledge and intellectual capacity with the mental ability to: • Adapt to the environment • Draw abstractions • Generalize experiences • Think about experiences with people, objects, and events • Infer conclusions • Store information for later retrieval
Schemas
psychological structures that allow children to understand the meaning of things in their environment
Zone of Proximal Development
The distance between a child’s actual developmental level (determined by independent problem solving) and her/their/his level of potential development
Communicative Competence
Involves the ability to communicate a message successfully and to understand the concepts being communicated
Phonemes
consists of sounds in language; smallest units of sound that create different meanings
Linguistic Competence
The acquisition and the use of morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics.
Language
A shared code that represents arbitrary concepts through symbols
- in a rule based system
Speech
the verbal means of communicating through articulation
Encode
Involves communicative interaction, In the exchange of information, a sender transmits information (encodes).
Decode
information that a receiver comprehends or understands
what are the methods of prosody?
- duration (length)
- vocal intensity (loudness)
- frequency (pitch)
paralinguistic cues
the nonverbal cues that accompany spoken language
what are some examples of paralinguistic cues?
- affect (facial expressions)
- gestures (head nods)
- posture
- proximity between speaker and listener
- intonation (vocal pitch)
- speech rate
- pauses in speech
- word stress
Phonation
The production of vocal sound and speech
Parameters
Language-specific rules that apply to the syntactic rules for different languages
Metalinguistic Abilities
The ability to think overtly about language; ability to manipulate the structural features of language that are at the phoneme, word or sentence level.
Syntax
The component of language that involves the rules for combining words to form meaningful sentences. Basic sentences are composed of Subject + Verb.
Ex: The woman ran.
Syntax begins to develop around 18 months
Orthography
Describes the symbols or alphabet letters of written language.
Overextension
extending meaning beyond the entity (call a cow “doggy”)
Metacognition
Refers to the mental processes used to
plan, monitor, and to analyze one’s thinking and
behaviors.
Content
The meaning of an expression
Graphemes
Alphabet letters
Executive function
The ability to control and regulate one’s thought processes - utilizes Inhibition, Cognitive task or set shifting, and working memory.
Morpheme
minimal distinctive units of words
Dialect
A rule governed variant of language.
Phonology
the part of language that is concerned with the combination of speech sounds for word formation.
Morphology
the study and pattern of word formation. consists of morphemes, which is the smallest unit of meaning. They can be expressed by a monosyllabic or multi syllabic word, a syllable such as the “un” in unforgiving, or sound segment such as the “s” in apples.
Grammar
Description of a language with respect to components of language
Overgeneralize
the regular past-tense inflectional morpheme “-ed” (e.g., walk + ed) to form the past tense of irregular verbs.
Theory of Mind
ability to understand the mental states of others; understanding that others have different mental states; understanding & predicting how someone else will act and explaining why they acted in that way
Form
The components of language that include syntax, morphology, and phonology.
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
A part of the human mind that provides children with the ability to grasp the basic structure of a language.
Generative
A speaker’s ability to generate many types of sentence (to generate or to produce).
pragmatics
the rules for the use of language in a social interaction. e.g., eye contact in conversation, turn taking.
Perception
The process of taking in, organizing, and interpreting sensory information. Children use their senses to gather and understand information around them.
Phonological Processes
describe children’s production of target words produced by adults or older language users.
ex: “nana” instead of banana
Modal auxiliary verbs
A verb that combines with another verb to express mood or tense (e.g., can, could, would, and should).
Morphophonology
The study of the interaction between a language’s morphemes and its phonological process, focusing on the sound changes that occur when morphemes (minimal meaningful units) combine to form words.
Cognitive Theory
Based on the idea that language acquisition and cognition are connected
Scaffold/ Scaffolding
They are used to support children’s speech and language development. They add new information to a child’s utterance without taking away meaning. Can be syntactic, semantic, or phonological. Ex: Correcting a child saying “I going” to “I’m going”
Rhotic diphthongs
These are r-colored or rhotic vowels (also called retroflex vowels, vocalic /r/, or rhotacized vowels) that can be articulated in various ways: The tip or blade of the tongue may be turned up during at least part of the articulation of the vowel (a retroflex articulation) or the back of the tongue may be bunched. Examples are found in the following words: car, bear, ear, and four.
Emergentism
Language is acquired through the “emergent” effect of 4 factors:
- Cognition
- Social interaction
- Pragmatic skills
- Attention skills
Principles
Innate language general rules that apply to all languages, such as a the principle that a sentence must contain a subject
Innate
abilities present in the human brain at birth
Language Processing
The way we use words to communicate ideas and feelings, and how communication is understood. This is a process of the brain that allows individuals to create and understand language.
Recast
When the caretaker modifies or changes a child’s utterance, without changing the meaning, to help them reach their intended goal. Ex. Child- I want nana (You want a banana?)
Illocutions
The intentions of the speaker
locutions
refer to the meanings expressed in the utterance
Semantics
the component of language that
describes meaning conveyed by words, sentences,
narratives, and conversations. Also refers to the relationship between entities and events.
perlocutions
refer to how listeners interpret the speaker’s speech acts
Speech Act
Labels a speaker’s intent or meaning. They can take a direct or indirect form.
Primitive Speech Acts
one-word stage of language (eg. labeling, answering, greeting)
Cognition
The mental processes that consist of knowledge, along with the mechanisms to acquire knowledge. Cognitive skills consist of attention, working memory, reasoning, intuition, judgement, and perception.
Use
Pragmatics. Indirect form is more of a question while direct is more of a demand.
Child-Directed Speech (CDS)
AKA “motherese”. This occurs when adults speak differently to children, for example, shorter length in utterance, simpler grammar, and slower speech rate; It makes language more accessible to the young infant.
Retrospective Mental Development
The current skills that a child has mastered in relation to the child’s zone of proximal development.
Biological Basis
Developed by psychologist Eric Lenneberg who observed that language is biologically based.
He believed in these properties:
Little variation within the species (language is systematic)
• Specific organic correlates (universal timetable for acquisition
of language milestones)
• Heredity (innate capacity for language)
• No history within species (inherently human phenomenon)
Operant Conditioning
this nurture view argues that although environmental stimuli are not
always identifiable, the frequency of certain behaviors or
antecedent behaviors can be increased if positive reinforcers (or
consequences) are contingent upon the targets.
Prospective Mental Development
What a child needs to learn with guidance from an adult or more experienced peer, in relation to the child’s zone of proximal development.
Main Verb
The verb that conveys meaning in a sentence.
Classical Conditioning
a learned process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired. (Pavlov’s Dog Experiment)
Principles and Parameters
Principles are innate language-general rules (ex/ a sentence across all languages must contain a subject).
Parameters are language-specific rules (ex/ word order rules vary across languages, for English it is SVO but that cannot be said for other languages.)
Semantic Features
The perceptual or functional aspects of meaning that characterize a word. Semantic processing occurs when we hear a word and encode its meaning, which involves understanding.
Semantic Relations
The relationship between the concepts or meanings (e.g., agent + action = Dogs bark).
Social Cognition
The psychological processes that enable individuals to take advantage of social signals that include facial expressions, such as fear and disgust, which warn us of danger, and eye gaze direction, which indicate where interesting things can be found.
Indirect Speech Act
Has the syntactic form of a question but has the mean- ing of a request
ex: “Can I have a candy?” –> asking to get a candy without directly asking for one
Social Interaction Theory
Children acquire language through social interaction and experience with language used in the external environment
