Module 9 Vocabulary and Terms

Question 1

First language acquisition

Answer 1

process by which children acquire the lexicon and grammatical rules of their native language

Question 2

Innate

Answer 2

determined by factors present from birth

Question 3

Innate hypothesis

Answer 3

hypothesis that humans are genetically predisposed to learn and use language

Question 4

Imitation theory

Answer 4

theory of language acquisition that claims that children acquire language by listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear

Question 5

Reinforcement theory

Answer 5

theory of language acquisition that says that children learn to speak like adults because they are praised, rewarded, or reinforced when they use the right forms and are corrected when they use the wrong ones

Question 6

Active construction of a grammar theory

Answer 6

theory of language acquisition that says that children acquire a language by inventing rules of grammar based on the speech around them

Question 7

Connectionist theory

Answer 7

Theory of language that claims that children learn language through neural connections in the brain, which are built by exposure and use of language

Question 8

Social Interaction theory

Answer 8

theory of language that claims that children acquire language through social interaction and prompt their caregivers to supply them with the appropriate language experience

Question 9

Linguistic universals

Answer 9

property believed to be geld common by all natural languages

Question 10

Universal grammar

Answer 10

the theory that posits a set of grammatical characteristics shared by all natural languages

Question 11

Critical period

Answer 11

age span, usually described as lasting from birth to the onset of puberty, during which children have exposure to language and must build the critical brain structures necessary in order to gain native speaker competence in a language

Question 12

Homesign

Answer 12

visual-gestural communication system (not a language) that is developed and used by deaf children and their families when a signed language is not made available for their communication

Question 13

Child-directed speech

Answer 13

speech used by parents or caregivers when communicating with young children or infants

Question 14

High amplitude sucking

Answer 14

experimental technique used to study sound discrimination in infants from birth to about six months

Question 15

Conditioned head-turn procedure (HT)

Answer 15

experimental technique where the infant learns to associate a change in sound with the activation of visual reinforcers (conditioning phase) and reaction to visual reinforcer immediately after a change in sound, demonstrating the ability to discriminate between two sounds involved

Question 16

Voice onset time (VOT)

Answer 16

the length of time between the release of a consonant and the onset of voicing

Question 17

articulatory gestures

Answer 17

a movement of a speech organ in the production of speech

Question 18

babble

Answer 18

a phrase in child language acquisition during which the child produces meaningless sequences if consonants and vowels

Question 19

Canonical babbling

Answer 19

the continuous repetition of sequences of vowels and consonants by infants

Question 20

Variegated babbling

Answer 20

production of meaningless consonants-vowel sequences by infants

Question 21

One-word stage

Answer 21

stage in first-language acquisition during which children can produce only one word at a time; holophrastic stage

Question 22

holophrase

Answer 22

a one-word sentence

Question 23

Two-word stage

Answer 23

stage in firs-language acquisition at which children produce two-word utterances in addition to one-word utterances

Question 24

telegraphic stage

Answer 24

a phase during child language acquisition in which children use utterances composed primarily of content words

Question 25

Overgeneralization

Answer 25

a process in which children extend the application of linguistic rules to context beyond those in the adult adult language

Question 26

Complexive concept

Answer 26

a group of items (abstract or concrete) that a child refers to with a single word for which it is not possible to single out anyone unifying property

Question 27

Overextension

Answer 27

a relationship between child and adult perception; the child’s application of a given word has a wider range than that application of the same word in adult language

Question 28

Underextension

Answer 28

application of a word to a smaller set of objects than is appropriate for mature adult speech or the usual definition of the word

Question 29

relative intersections

Answer 29

type of relationship between adjective and noun reference where the reference of the adjective is determined relative to the noun reference

Question 30

deictic expressions

Answer 30

words referring to personal, temporal, or spatial aspects of an utterance and whose meaning depends on the context in which the word is used

Question 31

attention getter

Answer 31

word or phase used to indicate an address to children

Question 32

attention holder

Answer 32

a tactic used to maintain children’s attention for extended amounts of time

Question 33

Conversational turns

Answer 33

the contribution to a conversation made by one speaker from the time that she takes the floor from another speaker to the time that she passes the floor to another speaker

Question 34

simultaneous bilingualism

Answer 34

bilingualism in which both languages are acquired from infancy

Question 35

sequential bilingualism

Answer 35

bilingualism in which the second language is acquired as a young child

Question 36

second-language acquisition

Answer 36

acquisition of a second language as a teenager or adult

Question 37

code switching

Answer 37

using words or structural elements from more than one language within the same conversation

Question 38

Transfer

Answer 38

the influence of one’s native language on the learning of subsequent languages

Question 39

foreign accent

Answer 39

an accent that is marked by the phonology of another language or other languages that are more familiar to the speaker

Question 40

multilingual

Answer 40

speakers of more than two languages