Week 1

Question 1

What are the four components of oral language development?

Answer 1

Communication, phonology, lexicon and morphology & syntax

Question 2

What is pragmatics?

Answer 2

the knowledge that underlies the use of language to serve communicative functions

Question 3

What’s included in acquiring a language?

Answer 3

• the idea that it is possible to communicate with language
• self-awareness
• control your muscles to make sounds
• abstract thought
• different words have different inflectional forms

Question 4

What are the two views of language acquisition? Explain them.

Answer 4

Behaviourism:

• you learn the correct response to a stimuli
• the idea that mental states can’t be observed and aren’t worth being observed
• language is just verbal behaviour

Cognitivism:

• mental states are worth our attention
• the behaviour that we observe is the result of mental processes of what’s in the mind
• trying to model and figure out what’s in the mind of a child

Question 5

Why is being a cognitivist challenging?

Answer 5

• kids can’t tell us what they’re thinking
• every kid has a different language environment (even twins)
• kids’ production doesn’t always match their comprehension
• kids can use non-language cues for comprehension

Question 6

What’s the nature of acquisition?

Answer 6

biological process, social phenomenon, nativism, emergentism

Question 7

Define nativism.

Answer 7

(universal grammar)

• the mind must have some preexisting structure in order to organize and interpret experience (specialized linguistic knowledge)
• all languages are alike in certain restrictive ways

Question 8

Define emergentism.

Answer 8

(domain-general cognitive ability)

• child’s mind is a blank state when they are born
• nothing special about language
• child uses same cognitive skills, same domain cognitive skills in other situations too (not specific to language)
• plays more details on the environment, the patterns in the details of the environment that the child notices

Question 9

How do we learn about acquisition?

Answer 9

• isolated children (Genie, deaf children)
• diaries (transcribe what kids say)
• normative studies (what age do most kids know these words, vocabulary size for certain age)
• naturalistic observation (CHILDES database)
• experiments (measuring reaction times)
• brain imaging (harder with kids though)

Question 10

List 5 properties of human language

Answer 10

• reference, abstraction, displacement (notion that you have a symbol that refers to a thing or abstract concept in the world)
• spontaneous, effortless acquisition
• structure dependence & recursion (syntactic principles, not aware of any other species with syntax)
• productivity/creativity/generativity
• intentionality (we can’t know for sure if other species use language intentionally)

Question 11

Define neural plasticity

Answer 11

the brain’s ability to form new connections according to new experiences