Week 1 Flashcards
How is the age of the child denoted (years, months, days)?
years;months.days
What are the big four levels of language according to Matthew Saxton?
Phonology, vocabulary, morphology and grammar.
Linguistics
The study of language
Pragmatics
The study of how people use language.
Intonation
The pitch contour of an utterance created by successive rises and falls in pitch.
Metalinguistics
Knowledge about language and the ability to reflect on it.
Vocabulary spurt
A huge increase in rate of word learning between the ages of two and six.
Segmentation problem
The problem of identifying individual linguistic units from continuous speech.
Morpheme
The smallest unit of meaning in a language.
How did Jean Berko Gleason test children’s knowledge of inflectional morphemes?
He showed them one ‘wug’, added one and then said: ‘There are now two of them. There are two …’.
Syntax
The rules that determine how words are put together to make sentences.
Innateness
The property of being inborn or genetically determined.
How big is the vocabulary of an average six-year old?
10.000-14.000 words
gavagai problem
How to determine what a given word refers to, given the infinite possibilities
heritability estimate
A figure that indicates what proportion of the variance in behaviour can be attributed to genetic factors.
Linguistic universals
Principles and properties that are true of language and define what it is to be a language.
What are the two types of linguistic universals?
Absolute: syntactic principles or structures that appear in every language
Relative: syntactic features and categories + typically binary parameters
The poverty of stimulus argument
States that input contains too little information for children to reach the final state.
Case filter
An absolute universal, the requirement that all overt nouns and pronouns in every language have case.
the Learnability Problem
A child’s knowledge of the language goes beyond what you can assume based on the information they have received. There has to be another source from within.
POS
Reasoning from poverty of stimules, an argument.
FOXP2
A gene that is found to cause language difficulties among other things.
What 3 periods compose the history of Child Language Studies?
1) dairy studies
2) large sample studies
3) longitudinal studies
When was the period of dairy studies?
1876-1926
When was the period of large sample studies?
1926-1957
When was the period of longitudinal studies?
1957-present
When can the nominative case be assigned to the subject of a sentence?
When the sentence is finite, i.e. it has tense.
What is the default case in English?
accusative
What is the default case in Dutch?
nominative
affix
A morpheme that is added to the word either on the left hand side or the right hand side.
affricate
A sequence of two consonants, stop + fricative, that often behave as a single phoneme in languages.
agent
A person who intentionally causes something to happen.
case
marks the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun.
CDS
Child Directed Speech
Child Directed Speech (CDS)
A special mode of speech adopted by adults or older children when speaking with younger children. Different aspects are simplified and clarified.
Clause
Contains a subject and a verb at minimum. A sentence can contain multiple clauses.
linguistic competence
The knowledge we have of language.
Consonants
Are produced with some restriction of airflow through the mouth.
Minimal pair
Two words that differ only in one phoneme and have a different meaning.
copula
A verb that connects the subject to the rest of the sentence, in absence of a main verb.
derivational morpheme
A morpheme added to a stem to produce a new word, which may belong to a different category than the stem.
ecological validity
The extent to which a study reflects conditions in the real world.
Homophone
Two words which are pronounced in the same way, but have a different meaning.
inflectional morpheme
Inflections added to the ends of words to denote a particular grammatical function. Do not change the grammatical category.
proper noun
picks out a specific person or entity.
common noun
refers to a group of properties.
mutual exclusivity bias
The assumption that two different words do not have the same meaning.
overextension
Using a word beyond its conventional meaning, for larger categories than it actually captures the meaning of.
elicited production
getting someone to produce something
Name 3 plausible causes of overextension:
1) an immature category
2) lexical gap
3) retrieval failure
How big is the vocabulary of an 18-month old?
about 50 words
What 4 principles do we expect objects to adhere to?
1) cohesion
2) continuity
3) solidity
4) contact
What 4 principles do we expect objects to adhere to?
1) cohesion
2) continuity
3) solidity
4) contact
The cohesion principle
Objects compromise a connected and bounded region of matter.
The continuity principle
Objects follow a continuous path through space.
The solidity principle
One object cannot pass through another.
The principle of contact
Inanimate objects move only when they are touched by another object or person.
Shape bias
The shape of an object overrides all other properties.
ALA
Attentional Learning Account
Attentional Learning Account (ALA)
Relies on associative learning.
What is the smallest unit of words?
Sounds
What does lexical acquisition require?
Dividing up the speech stream into word-sized units and associating these units with meaning.
What are the building blocks of sentences?
Words
Syntactic priming
First give a child an utterance with a particular syntactic construction, then have the child to produce a new utterance that uses that same construction.
Repetition elication
USed when the structure is rather complex. Children are asked to repeat the utterance.
Peabody picture vocabulary test
Estimates the child’s receptive vocabulary. The child points at a picture that matches the words.
Act-out tasks
Children are given toys and a linguistic description and mnust make the toys act out the appropriate scenario.
Picture matching task
Children hear a sentence and are asked to point to the matching picture.
Truth value judgement task
A child looks at stories and indicates if the used by the experimenter to describe the story is right or wrong
When does the child only do reflexive crying/vegetative sounds?
0-1 months
When does the child exhibit cooing?
1-4 months
When is the babbling stage?
From 6 months.
How does the cooing stage develop itseld?
From vowel to intonational patterns.
Give some examples of behaviour during the babbling stage:
Internal behaviour, no response. Non reduplicated babbling.
Holophrastic
The use of a single word to express a whole idea.
When is the one-word stage?
1 year
What are some characteristics of the one-word stage?
Sounds relate to meanings. Single words are used to mean whole sentences.
When is the two-word stage?
At 2 years
What are three possible interpretations during the two-word stage?
Subject-verb
verb-complement
posessor-posessed
What are some characteristics of the two-word stage?
Words lack morphological and syntactic markers. There are different combinations of word order.
When is the telegraphic stage?
2 years
What are some characteristics of the telegraphic stage?
Utterances are 2-5 words with little extra morphology, morphological overgeneralisation, a vocabulary of about 400 words.
What is the miracle of language according to Charles Yang?
The ability to arrange sounds into infinitely many ways to convey infinitely varied meanings.
What is the research question of Fromkin, Hyam and Radman
How do children acquire such an intricate system so quickly and effortlessly?
What is the logical problem of language acquisition according to Saxton (and Lightfoot)?
If the child’s linguistic knowledge does not provide the basis for establishing a particular aspect of linguistic knowledge, there must be another source for that knowledge.
What are some characteristics of dairy studies?
They generally talk about everything from muscle development to musical skills, there is a tremendous variation in quality and detail. The parent is the observer.
What is the goal of large sample studies?
To develop a theory of learning where the child’s changes in behaviour are explained by observable conditions of the environment.
What are some characteristics of large sample studies?
Theoretically oriented, fairly systematic observation.
How does behaviourism explain language acquisition?
By determining the set of environmental conditions that lead the child to identify and associate events with internal states.
Longitudinal studies
Where the child is visited at frequent predetermined intervals for a reasonable length of time with the purpose of collecting a representative sample.
