Week 6 - Language Development

Question 1

Syntax

Answer 1

rules specifying how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) can be combined

Question 2

Pragmatics

Answer 2

refers to the understanding of how language is typically used in a specific cultural context

Question 3

brain-language lateralization

Answer 3

For 90% of people who are right-handed, language is primarily represented and controlled by the left hemisphere. Left-hemisphere specialisation for most aspects of language emerges early in life. The reasons for that are not yet known.

Question 4

Sensitive period for language development

Answer 4

ends sometime around the age of 5-7

Question 5

infant-directed speech

Answer 5

the distinctive mode of speech used toward infants and toddlers, characterised by: greater pitch variability, slower speech, more repetition, more questions, exaggerated facial expressions; infants’ preference for the infant-directed speech emerges because it is ‘happy speech’

Question 6

Prosody

Answer 6

characteristic rhythmic and intonational patterns of a language

Question 7

categorical perception

Answer 7

grouping sounds into categories based on how often they occur together

Question 8

Reasons for a sensitive period (language)

Answer 8

(a) language-related regions of the brain become less flexible over time,
(b) children learn language differently (working memory),
- learning more about your first language makes it harder to also learn a second language.

Question 9

Word segmentation

Answer 9

discovering where words being and end in fluent speech

Question 10

Distributional properties of speech

Answer 10

in any language, certain sounds are more likely to occur together than are others

Question 11

Babbling

Answer 11

occurs between 6 and 10 months of age

Question 12

Babbling and deaf infants

Answer 12

deaf infants who are regularly exposed to signed languages babble with their hands, they produce repetitive hand movements made up of pieces of full signs

Question 13

early interactions/taking turns

Answer 13

learning to take turns in social interactions is facilitated by parent-child games, e.g peekaboo; in these interactions, the infant has an opportunity to engage in both active and passive roles (they practice bidirectional communication)

Question 14

early word recognition

Answer 14

around the age of 6 months

Question 15

early word production

Answer 15

around the age of 10 - 15 months

Question 16

underextension

Answer 16

an overly narrow interpretation of the meaning of a word

Question 17

overextension

Answer 17

an overly broad interpretation of the meaning of a word

Question 18

mutual exclusivity

Answer 18

children’s assumption that a given entity has only one name

Question 19

pragmatic cues

Answer 19

aspects of social environment used for word learning, e.g adults’ focus of attention, parents’ emotional expressions/facial expressions

Question 19

whole-object assumption

Answer 19

children’s assumption that a novel word refers to a whole object rather than to a part

Question 20

Cross-situational word learning

Answer 20

determining the word’s meaning by tracking whether the word and the entity occur repeatedly across various situations and settings

Question 21

Syntactic bootstrapping

Answer 21

the strategy of using grammatical structure to infer the word’s meaning

Question 22

telegraphic speech

Answer 22

short phrases that leave out nonessential words, e.g “Read me”, “Mommy tea”

Question 23

Overregularization

Answer 23

speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular, e.g go-goed

Question 24

private speech

Answer 24

a strategy that help the child organise their actions

Question 25

Collective monologues

Answer 25

Piaget labeled young children’s talk with their peers as collective monologues since their conversations tend to be composed of series of sentences that have little or nothing to do with what the other child says.

Question 26

Narratives

Answer 26

begin around the age of 5

Question 27

Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar

Answer 27

Chomsky proposed that humans are born with a Universal Grammar, a hard-wired set of principles and rules that govern grammar in all languages. His view is consistent with the fact that, despite many surface differences, the world’s languages are fundamentally similar.