Vocabulary & Terms

Question 1

Imitation, Nativism, or Behaviorism

Answer 1

based on the empiricist or behavioral approach.

Question 2

Innateness, Nativism or Behaviorism

Answer 2

based on the rationalistic or mentalist approach.

Question 3

Innateness or Mentalism

Answer 3

based on the rationalistic or mentalist approach.

Question 4

Cognition

Answer 4

based on the cognitive-psychological approach.

Question 5

Motherese or Input

Answer 5

based on the maternal approach to language acquisition.

Question 6

Children learn language

Answer 6

Imitation, repetition, memorization, controlled drilling, reinforcement.

Question 7

Two kinds of evidence used to criticize behaviorist theory

Answer 7

The first evidence: Based on the kind of language children produce.
Second Evidence: Based on what children do not produce.

Question 8

The first evidence: Based on the kind of language children produce.

Answer 8

The first piece of evidence taken from the way children handle irregular grammatical patterns.

Question 9

Second Evidence: Based on what children do not produce.

Answer 9

The other evidence is based on the way children seem unable to imitate adult grammatical constructions exactly.

Question 10

language acquisition device (LAD)

Answer 10

LAD explains the remarkable speed with which children learn to speak and the similarity in the way grammatical patterns are acquired between different children and languages.

Question 11

Two distinct views about lad functions

Answer 11

LAD provides children with a knowledge of linguistic universals such as the existence of word order and word classes.
LAD provides children only general procedures for discovering language to be learned.

Question 12

What Constitutes Knowledge of language and how it is acquired?

Answer 12

UG claims that all human beings inherit a universal set of principles and parameters which control the shape human language can take.

Question 13

Competence

Answer 13

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

Question 14

Performance

Answer 14

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 15

Principles

Answer 15

The learners initial state is supposed to consist of a set of universal principles common to all human languages.

Question 16

Parameters

Answer 16

Determine the ways in which languages can vary.

Question 17

Criticism of UG Theory

Answer 17

Theory is preoccupied with modeling of competence. The study of naturalistic performance is not seen as a suitable source to analyze mental representations of language.

Question 18

Transformational Model of Chomsky
Deep structure and surface structure

Answer 18

The deep structure represented the core semantic relations of a sentence.

The surface structure followed the phonological form of the sentence very closely.

Question 19

Minimalism

Answer 19

The economy of derivation is a principle stating that movements only occur in order to match interpretable features with uninterpretable features.

The economy of representation is the principal that grammatical structures must exist for a purpose, the structure of a sentence should be no larger or more complex that required to satisfy constraints on grammaticality.

Question 20

Cognitive Theory

Answer 20

Main Argument: Language acquisition must be viewed within the context of a child’s intellectual development.
Most influential figure: focuses on exploring the links between the stages of cognitive development and language skills.