Vocab and Terms Chapter 8

Question 1

innate

Answer 1

determined by factors present from birth

Question 2

innateness hypothesis

Answer 2

a hypothesis that humans are genetically predisposed to learn and use language

Question 3

imitation theory

Answer 3

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

Question 4

reinforcement theory

Answer 4

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

Question 5

active construction of a grammar theory

Answer 5

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

Question 6

connectionist theories

Answer 6

theory of language acquisition that claims that children learn language through neutral connections in the brain. A child develops such connection through exposure to language and by using language

Question 7

social interaction theory

Answer 7

theory of language acquisition that claims that children acquire language through social interaction - in particular with older children and adults - and prompt their caregivers to supply them with the appropriate language experience they need

Question 8

linguistic universals

Answer 8

property believed to be held in common by all natural languages

Question 9

universal grammar

Answer 9

the theory that posits a set of grammatical characteristics shared by all natural languages. Also, the name of this set of shared characteristics

Question 10

critical period

Answer 10

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

Question 11

neglected children

Answer 11

children who are neglected by caretakers, often resulting in significantly lower exposure to language as a child

Question 12

feral children

Answer 12

children who grew up in the wild without care by human adults, often with animals

Question 13

homesign system

Answer 13

a rudimentary 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 14

child-direct speech

Answer 14

speech used by parents or caregivers when communication with young children or infants. In many western societies, child-direct speech is slow and high-pitched and has many repetitions, simplified syntax, exaggerated intonation and simple and concrete vocabulary

Question 15

high amplitude sucking (HAS)

Answer 15

experimental technique used to study sound discrimination in infants from birth to about 6 months. Infants are given a special pacifier that is connected to a sound-generating system. Each suck on the pacifier generates a noise, and infants, sucking behavior is used to draw conclusions about discrimination abilities

Question 16

conditioned head-turn procedure (HT)

Answer 16

experimental technique usually used with infants between 5 and 18 months with 2 phases; conditioning and testing. During the conditioning phase, the infant learns to associate a change in sound with the activation of visual reinforces, 1st presented at the same time and the in succession, such that the infant begins to anticipate the appearance of the visual reinforces and look at them before they are activated. During the testing phase, when the infant looks to the visual reinforces immediately after a change in sound, it suggests that the infant has perceived the change in sound, thereby demonstrating the ability to discriminate between the 2 sounds involved.

Question 17

voice onset time (VOT)

Answer 17

the length of time between the release of a consonant and the onset of voicing, that is, when the vocal folds starts vibrating

Question 18

atriculatory gestures

Answer 18

a movement of a speech organ in the production of speech (ex: the movement of the velum for the production of a nasal consonant)

Question 19

babble

Answer 19

a phase in child language acquisition during which the child produces meaningless sequences of consonants and vowels. Generally begins around the age of 6 months

Question 20

canonical babbling

Answer 20

the continuous repetition of sequence of vowels and consonants like “mamamam” by infants; also called repeated babbling

Question 21

variegated babbling

Answer 21

production of meaningless consonant-vowel sequences by infants

Question 22

holophrastic stage AKA one-word stage

Answer 22

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

Question 23

telegraphic stage

Answer 23

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

Question 24

holophrase

Answer 24

a one-word sentence

Question 25

overgeneralization

Answer 25

in the study of child language acquisition, a relationship between child and adult application of rules relative to certain context; a process in which children extend the application of linguistic rules to context beyond those in adult language

Question 26

complexive concept

Answer 26

a term used in he study of child language acquisition. 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 any one unifying property

Question 27

overextension

Answer 27

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

Question 28

underextention

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

relational term AKA relative intersection

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

word or expressions that takes its meaning relative to the time, place and speaker of the utterance

Question 31

attention getters

Answer 31

word or phrase used to initiate an address to children

Question 32

attention holders

Answer 32

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

Question 33

conversational turms

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 on to another speaker

Question 34

code-switching

Answer 34

using words or structural elements from more than one language within the same conversation (or eve withing a single sentence or phrase)

Question 35

fossilization

Answer 35

process through which forms from a speaker’s non-native language usage becomes fixed (generally in a way that would be considered ungrammatical by a native speaker) and do not change, even after years of instruction

Question 36

second-language acquisition

Answer 36

acquisition of a second language as a teenager or adult

Question 37

simultaneous bilingualism

Answer 37

bilingualism in which both languages are acquired from infancy

Question 38

sequential bilingualism

Answer 38

bilingualism in which the 2nd language is acquired as a young child

Question 39

foreign accent

Answer 39

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

Question 40

multilingual

Answer 40

the state of commanding 3 or more languages; having linguistic competence in 3 or more languages. In machine translation, a system that can translate between more than 2 languages.