MID-SEMESTER EXAM Flashcards
When is the general word splur?
Around 18 months
50 words mark
Word acquisition rate around 12 mos.?
1 word/ week
Word acquisition rate around 18 mos.?
1-2 words/ day
Word acquisition rate between 2 to 6 y/o?
10 words/ day
Word acquisition rate at 6+ y/o?
2 words/ day
By the age of 18, how many words are acquired?
Around 60,000 words.
True or false:
Neonates have preferences toward non-womb-like language experiences.
FALSE. Neonates have preferences toward womb-like language experiences.
What are the 5 general stages in phonological development?
Stage 1: reflexive vocalizations (<2 months)
Stage 2: cooing and laughter (2-4 months)
Stage 3: vocal play (4 to 6 months) ‘pseudo-syllables’, intonation contours
Stage 4: canonical babbling (CV sequences, 6 months +)
Stage 5: jargon stage (10 months +)
What are the two main areas in speech development?
Speech production
Speech perception
How are researches on speech production analyzed?
- Recording sounds
- X-rays of larynx
- Filming
How are researches on speech perception analyzed?
- HAS
- Head turning experiments
- Brain imaging
What is HAS?
- HAS stands for High amplitude sucking
- Mostly reliable 1-4 mos.
- Discrimination between 2 synthetic speech sounds with initial consonant.
When does the perception of phonemic contrasts not used in the environment decline?
Between 6 to 12 months
According to Werker & Tees’ Head-turning exp with English-speaking children in 1984, what happens to speech perception between 6-12 months?
6-8 months: perceive contrasts in all 3 languages,
8-10 months: no longer perceive Salish contrast
10-12 months: perceive English contrast only
Biological capacity
Innate factors, which are those present in the organism by virtue of its genetic makeup.
Child-directed speech (CDS):
One of many names for the speech register used with young children.
Communicative functions
The purposes for which language is used; for instance, even infants use language to express rejection, requests, and comments.
Cooing
Vowel-like sounds made by infants starting at about 8 weeks of age.
Format/scaffold:
In Vygotskyian theory
The help brought by adults to reach a level children could not reach without it.
Gaze-coupling
Early communicative behaviour
staring into the caregiver’s eyes
Intentional communication
Any communicative act that an individual engages in purposefully
Joint attention
Two individuals are paying attention to the same thing at the same time.
i.e. reading a book
Means-ends concept
The notion of causality (concept of means-ends)
appears at approx. same time as children learn to communicate intentionally
lending support to the notion that certain cognitive developments might be prerequisites to language acquisition
Metalinguistic awareness
Knowledge about language; for instance, an understanding of what a word is and a consciousness of the sounds of language; the ability to think about language.
Neonate
newborn
Object permanence
The understanding that an infant gains during the later part of the first year that objects continue to exist even though they may no longer be visible.
Prosodic features
Aspects of the speech stream, such as stress and intonation, that convey differences in the meaning of words or sentences.
Sensorimotor stage
In Piagetian theory
The first eighteen months (approx.)
When the major mode of cognition is through the senses and action of the body
Assimilation
The process by which a sound in a word is changed to make it resemble an adjacent or nearby sound
i.e. pronounce ‘greenbeans’ as ‘greembeans’.
Auditory discrimination
The process of hearing accurately the individual sounds of language; for instance, the ability to hear the difference between sat and fat.
Babbling
Prespeech consisting of relatively long strings of syllables that may be used communicatively or as solo sound-play.
Canonical form
A sequence of phonological features expressing the properties that a group of highly similar words have in common (e.g., CVCV).
Categorical perception
Two sounds with the same magnitude of acoustic difference are heard as different sounds if they fall into different phonemic categories, but they are heard as the same sound if they are from the same phonemic category.
High amplitude or non-nutritive sucking (HAS or NNS)
A technique used to study infant perceptual abilities. Typically involves recording an infant’s sucking rate as a measure of its attention to various stimuli.
Modulated babble (or conversational babble)
Babble with intonation contours resembling those of adult speech. Because intonation carries some aspects of meaning, modulated babble can be used (especially in conjunction with gesture) for communicative purposes even though the sound sequences themselves are meaningless.
(progressive) phonological idiom
A word in a child’s vocabulary that is pronounced more accurately than most other words of the same general adult target form. Idioms are an exception to the child’s current set of rules and are progressive in the sense that they anticipate the ability the child will soon have.
protoword (vocable or phonetically consistent form)
A sequence of sounds (used by a child) that has a relatively consistent meaning but is not necessarily based on any adult word.
Reduplicated babbling
Babbling in which consonant-vowel combinations are repeated, such as “bababa”. Also called repetitive babbling.
Regression
A change backward from behavior that is more adult-like to behavior that is a poorer approximation of the adult model and representative of earlier stages of development.
Variegated babble
Babbling that includes a variety of sounds, such as “babideeboo.”
VOT (Voice onset time)
A measure that describes the point during the production of a speech sound at which vocal cord vibration, or voicing begins
Semantic development
The acquisition of words and their many meanings and the development of that knowledge into a complex hierarchical network of associated meanings.
Core group
A small subset of the vocabulary of a child, used very frequently.
Functional core
According to some theorists, a functional core underlies children’s early words. This implies that early meanings are based on how objects are used, and that the labels are later extended to similar objects.
Holophrastic
Describes infants’ one-word speech that is thought to embody a complete intention.
Metalinguistic awareness (knowledge)
Knowledge about language; for instance, an understanding of what a word is and a consciousness of the sounds of language. The ability to think about language.
Operating principles
Cognitive strategies that a child might employ in learning language, such as ‘pay attention to the ends of words.
Overextension
Refers to a child’s use of a word in a broader context than is permissible in the adult language: for instance, an infant may call all men ‘daddy’.
Probabilistic concept
A concept characterized by a variable set of criteria, unlike a classical concept. For instance, “bird” is a probabilistic concept, because no criterion defines it exclusively; that is, a creature need not fly, have a beak, feathers, etc. to qualify as a bird.
Prototype
An instance of a category that best exemplifies it; for instance, a robin is a prototypical member of the category bird because it has all of the important defining features.
Semantic feature
One of the criteria by which a concept is defined and distinguished from other concepts. For instance, + male and + relative are two features of the concept brother.
Semantic network
A word and all of the words that are related to it through various hierarchies of meaning.
Semantic transparency
Obvious meaning. One of the principles children use in making new words, “plant man” for “gardener,” for instance.
Shape bias
A constraint on early word learning that leads the child to assume that a new word refers to the shape of an object rather than to its color, texture, or other properties.
Underextension
Use or understanding of a word that does not include its full range; assuming, for instance, that ‘dog’ refers only to collies.
The whole object assumption
A new word refers to a whole object.
The type assumption
A new word refers to a type of thing, not just to a particular individual.
The basic level assumption
A new word refers to types of objects that are alike in basic ways (ex.: ‘sheep’ have elements in common that other animals don’t share.)
The mutual exclusivity assumption
Things should have only one label
Classical conditioning
A form of learning of receptive skills in where a neutral stimuli and an other one are repeatedly paired to enforce a certain responses.
Competence
Linguistic term for the knowledge of language and all of its linguistic rules and structures someone acquired/ has.
Constructivism
In Piaget’s theory, the idea that behaviours or knowledge are neither totally inherited nor learned, but derived from continual, active interaction of innate structures acting upon environmental data, and vice versa.
Empiricism
A theoretical approach emphasizing observable, environmental explanations of behavior.
Functionalism
A theoretical approach emphasizing the functions or uses of any behavior (e.g., the function of requesting) rather than the structure of the behavior itself.
Logical problem of language acquisition
Linguistic:
without Universal Grammar, language learning would be impossible because the input data are insufficiently rich to allow acquisition, much less so uniformly and so quickly.
Nativism
A theoretical approach emphasizing the innate, possibly genetic contributions to any behavior.
Operant conditioning
Behavioral training of expressive-production skills as a result of reinforcement and punishment.
Performance
Linguistic term for the actual use of language.
Scaffolding
Sociocultural:
The role of teachers and others in supporting the learner’s development and providing support structures to get to that next stage or level.
Structuralism
A theoretical approach emphasizing the organization or structure of a behavior as opposed to its use or function.
Zone of proximal development
refers to Vygotskian concept of the distance between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help.
Bootstrapping
Process of learning language
The child uses acquired knowledge to decode more mature language.
Mean length of utterance (MLU)
A measure applied to children’s language to evaluate syntactic development; the average length of the child’s utterances is calculated in morphemes.
Overregularization errors (also, ‘overgeneralization’)
A common tendency among children and second language learners, overregularization involves applying regular and productive grammatical rules to words that are exceptions: hurted and mouses, for example.
Semantic relations
Characterizing the limited set of meanings conveyed by children’s early utterances.
Telegraphic speech
Speech that consists of content words, without function words, much like a telegram.
Universal grammar
Hypothetical set of restrictions governing the possible forms all human languages may take
MLU calculation
Morphemes/Utterances
In MLU what counts as meaningful elements?
• Do not try to analyze sentences that contain incomprehensible parts.
(do not count unrecognizable utterances, ex: ‘yyyy’, ‘jum, jum’)
• If there is stuttering (dysfluencies), count the repeated word only once (ex: b-b-baby).
• Do not count fillers such as um or oh, but do count no, yeah, and hi.
• Count compound words (birthday, pocketbook), names (Mary Jane), and reduplications (night-night) as one element.
• Count diminutives (doggie, mommy) as one element.
• Count contracted elements such as gonna, hafta, and wanna as one element.
• Count irregular past tense forms (got, did, went, etc.) as one element.
• […]
Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory
- Cognitive development varies across cultures.
- Cognitive growth stems from social interactions.
- Social processes become individual-psychological processes.
4 Adults are especially important as change agents.
Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory
- Cognitive development is mostly universal across cultures.
- Cognitive development stems largely from independent explorations.
- Individual (egocentric) processes become social processes.
- Peers are especially important as change agents.
The 3 types of interactionist approach
- Cognitive constructivist approach
- Socio-cultural approach
- Social interactionist approach
CHILDES is..
A computerized data base of child speech transcripts
“Telegraphic children’s early multi-word utterances” means…
- 2 words and more
- Few function words
- Highly stressed words
- Many content words
Contrastive analysis hypothesis
The idea that the L1 affects the acquisition of L2
The 3 major theoretical approaches to L1 Acquisition are…
- Behaviourist
- Linguistic
- Interactionist
What is the difference between referential and expressive
Referential: nouns, descriptive.
Expressive: social, interactive.
Name the 5 general development stages, the age at which they occur, and what development to they refer to?
Babbling: (5-6 mos-1 yr )
CV sequences
One-word (1-1.5 yrs)
Single words
Two-word (1.5-2 yrs)
Early word combinations
Telegraphic (2-3 yrs)
- Basic sentence structure
- Few function words
Later (3+ yrs)
- Functional categories emerge
- Specifiers (art, aux.)
Two-word stage means…
- Important stage, first ‘sentences’
- Intonation contour
- Evidence of rule-governed behaviour
- In general, appropriate word order
- Creative, not imitations
List the typical frequency in a parental speech in order
- the, a
- -ing
- Plural –s
- Aux, be
- Possessive –s
- 3rd person sing. –s
- Past tense -ed
List children’s order tendency (acquisition)
- Ing
- In, on
- Plural -s
- Possessive -s
- The, a
- Past tense -ed
- 3rd person sg -s
- Aux ‘be
What is MLU?
MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE
- Measures increase in morphemes
- Reflects syntactic growth
Steps to development of affixes
Begin with no tense marking
Stage 1: case-by-case learning
Stage 2: overuse of general rule (over-regularization)
Stage 3: learning exceptions to general rules
Stage 4: production of adult forms
What is the development U-shaped curve?
Case learning: went
Overregularization: goed
(Overegularization+ exceptions: wented)
Learning exceptions: went
When do W-question words usually occur?
Emerge between 2 and 4 yrs.
In what typical sequence do W-question words occur?
- What, where
- Who, how, why
- When, which, whose
The taxonomic assumption
The new label is assumed to refer to other objects within the same taxonomic category.
What are the 2 learning styles?
Analytic: breaking down speech at the very beginning
Gestalt: memorize and produce large chunks of speech
What are the 2 ways children find words in sentences?
Spotlight: refers to stressed syllables and patterns
Making matches: refers to acquired knowledge
What is the wug test?
An image of a unkonw animal was presented, the children were informed it was called a “wug”. They were then shown 2 of them and asked to finish the sentence. There are two…
aswer: wugs
What are the 3 ways of creating words?
Conversion: take an existing word and use it in a new way
Derivation: adding an ending to create a new word
Compounding: putting words together to create a new one
