Me 3.5 Communication and Language Development Flashcards
language
our agreed-upon systems of spoken, written, or signed words, and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.
Phonemes
the smallest distinctive sound units in a language. (To say that, English speakers utter the phonemes th, a, and t.)
Morphemes
the smallest language units that carry meaning. (The word readers contains three morphemes: read; er, signalling that we mean “one who reads”; and s, signalling that we mean not one, but multiple readers.)
Grammar
language’s set of rules that enable people to communicate.
Semantics
the language’s set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds,
syntax
set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.
universal grammar (UG)
universal grammar (UG) humans innate predisposition to understand the principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages.
Receptive language
the “input” of language, the ability to understand and comprehend spoken language that you hear or read
babbling stage
the stage in speech development, beginning around 4months, during which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds that are not all related to the household language.
one-word stage
the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.
Nativist Theory
children are born with an innate ability to organise laws of language.
telegraphic speech
the early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram - “go car” -using mostly nouns and verbs.
two-word stage
the stage in speech development, beginning about age ,2 during which a child speaks mostly in two-word sentences.
Behaviourist Theory
Believed we learned language through imitation & reinforcement.
Sociocultural Theory
Believed we learned language through social interaction.
