Module 9 Vocabulary & Terms

Question 1

Innateness Hypothesis

Answer 1

Living organisms have innate behaviors:
• newly-hatched sea turtles move toward ocean
• honeybees perform dance for communication
• birds fly

• The ‘Innateness Hypothesis’ argues that our ability to acquire(human) language is innate (genetically encoded).
• not simply derived from other human cognitive abilities
• Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Question 2

Universal Grammar

Answer 2

• Universal Grammar (UG) refers to the “set of structural
characteristics shared by all languages”
• Innateness Hypothesis takes UG to be innate.
• UG is not, however, dependent on innateness hypothesis.

Question 3

Imitation

Answer 3

children imitate what they hear
• Specific languages are not transferred genetically.
• Words are arbitrary, thus children must hear them to ‘imitate’ them.

Question 4

Reinforcement

Answer 4

children learn through positive and negative

reinforcement

Question 5

Active Construction of a Grammar

Answer 5

• Children invent grammar rules themselves.
• Ability to develop rules is innate.
• Acquisition process:
• Listen
• Try to find patterns
• Hypothesize a rule for the pattern
• e.g. past tense /-ed/
• Test hypothesis
• Modify rule as necessary

Question 6

Connectionist Theories

Answer 6

• Claims that exposure to language develops and strengthens neural connections.
• Higher frequency → stronger connections
• allows for exploitation of statistical information
• ‘rules’ derived from strength of connections

Question 7

Critical Period Hypothesis

Answer 7

there is a critical period in development during

which a language can be acquired like a native speaker

Question 8

holophrastic

Answer 8

speaks one-word sentences

Question 9

telegraphic

Answer 9

sentences consist of two words

Question 10

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Answer 10

The Language Acquisition Device is a controversial claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language.

Question 11

Linguistic competence

Answer 11

is concerned with the child’s grammar, the linguistic input and construction of the grammatical structures

Question 12

Performance

Answer 12

deals with the nature of the child’s rule system; the psychological processes the child uses in learning the language, and how the child establishes meaning in the language input

Question 13

Parameters

Answer 13

determine the ways in which languages can vary

Question 14

Syntactic Structures

Answer 14

In 1957, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, in which he developed the idea that each sentence in a language has two levels of representation– a deep structure and a surface structure

Question 15

Surface structure

Answer 15

represents the Physical properties of language

Question 16

Deep structure

Answer 16

represented the core semantic relations of a sentence, and was mapped onto the surface structure (which followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely) via transformations

Question 17

Context-fee grammars

Answer 17

Context-free grammars arise in linguistics where they are used to describe the structure of sentences and words in a natural language, and they were in fact invented by the linguist Noam Chomsky for this purpose

Question 18

Economy of derivation

Answer 18

is a principle stating that movements (i.e. transformations) only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features

Question 19

Economy of representation

Answer 19

is the principle that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, i.e. the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex than required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality

Question 20

Transformations

Answer 20

refers to a rule that takes and input typically called the deep structure (in the standard theory) or D-Structure (in the extended standard theory or government and binding theory) and changes it in some restricted way to result in a surface structure (or S-structure)

Question 21

Government and Binding Theory

Answer 21

Government and binding is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s.

Question 22

Recursion

Answer 22

occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics and computer science, where a function being defined is applied within its own definition. While this apparently defines an infinite number of instances (function values), it is often done in such a way that no infinite loop or infinite chain of references can occur.

Question 23

Social Cognitive Theory

Answer 23

Social cognitive theory, used in psychology, education, and communication, holds that portions of an individual’s knowledge acquisition can be directly related to observing others within the context of social interactions, experiences, and outside media influences.

Language acquisition must be viewed within the context of a child’s intellectual development

Linguistics structures will emerge only if there is an already established cognitive foundation

Question 24

Diminuitive

Answer 24

is a root word that has been modified to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment.

In many languages, formation of diminutives by adding suffixes is a productive part of the language.

Question 25

Reduplicative

Answer 25

is a word or lexeme (such as mama) that contains two identical or very similar parts. Words such as these are also called tautonyms. The morphological and phonological process of forming a compound word by repeating all or part of it is known as reduplication.

Question 26

Motherese

Answer 26

Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child. It is also called caretaker speech, infant-directed speech, child-directed speech, child-directed language, caregiver register, parentese, or motherese.

Question 27

Mentalism

Answer 27

In linguistics, mentalism is associated both with generative linguistics and with more modern approaches that go under the heading of cognitive linguistics. Mentalist linguists try to describe the mental patterns of language (or the internalized grammars) that underlie linguistic behaviour.

Question 28

Nativist Theory

Answer 28

Nativist theories hypothesize that language is an innate fundamental part of the human genetic make-up and that language acquisition occurs as a natural part of the human experience. They believe that children have language-specific abilities that assist them as they work towards mastering a language.

Question 29

Behaviourism

Answer 29

focuses on observable behaviours which are changed as the symptoms of learning. According to Brown (1987: 17), the behaviouristic approach focuses on the immediately perceptible aspects of linguistic behaviour – the publicly observable responses.

Question 30

Head-directionality parameter

Answer 30

In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial or head-final. The head is the element that determines the category of a phrase: for example, in a verb phrase, the head is a verb.

Question 31

Structure dependency

Answer 31

principle that states that language is organized in such a way that it is crucially depends on the structural relationships between elements in a sentence

Question 32

Semantic relationships

Answer 32

are the associations that there exist between the meanings of words (semantic relationships at word level), between the meanings of phrases, or between the meanings of sentences (semantic relationships at phrase or sentence level).

Question 33

Semantic Theory

Answer 33

is a theory which assigns semantic contents to expressions of a language. In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that studies meaning. Semantics can address meaning at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, or larger units of discourse. One of the crucial questions which unites different approaches to linguistic semantics is that of the relationship between form and meaning.[2]

Question 34

Phrase structure rules

Answer 34

are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957.[1] They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known as syntactic categories, including both lexical categories (parts of speech) and phrasal categories. A grammar that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed operate according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that employs phrase structure rules is therefore a constituency grammar; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency grammars, which are based on the dependency relation.

Question 35

Input

Answer 35

refers to the exposure learners have to authentic language in use. This can be from various sources, including the teacher, other learners, and the environment around the learners. Input can be compared to intake, which is input then taken in and internalized by the learner so it can be applied.

Question 36

Generative grammar

Answer 36

Generative grammar is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure.

Question 37

Utterance

Answer 37

In spoken language analysis, an utterance is the smallest unit of speech. It is a continuous piece of speech beginning and ending with a clear pause. In the case of oral languages, it is generally, but not always, bounded by silence. Utterances do not exist in written language, however, only their representations do.

Question 38

empiricism

Answer 38

is a theory that states that knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience. It is one of several views of epistemology, along with rationalism and skepticism. Empiricism emphasizes the role of empirical evidence in the formation of ideas, rather than innate ideas or traditions.

Question 39

Stimulus

Answer 39

a stimulus is something that provokes or causes an action or response, as in Failing that test was the stimulus I needed to start studying harder. The plural of stimulus is stimuli. Its verb form is stimulate, which typically means to spur into action or to invigorate.

Question 40

Conditioned behavior

Answer 40

Conditioned behaviors are types of associative learning where a stimulus becomes associated with a consequence. Two types of conditioning techniques include classical and operant conditioning.