Week 6 - Language Development Flashcards
Syntax
rules specifying how words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) can be combined
Pragmatics
refers to the understanding of how language is typically used in a specific cultural context
brain-language lateralization
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.
Sensitive period for language development
ends sometime around the age of 5-7
infant-directed speech
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’
Prosody
characteristic rhythmic and intonational patterns of a language
categorical perception
grouping sounds into categories based on how often they occur together
Reasons for a sensitive period (language)
(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.
Word segmentation
discovering where words being and end in fluent speech
Distributional properties of speech
in any language, certain sounds are more likely to occur together than are others
Babbling
occurs between 6 and 10 months of age
Babbling and deaf infants
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
early interactions/taking turns
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)
early word recognition
around the age of 6 months
early word production
around the age of 10 - 15 months
underextension
an overly narrow interpretation of the meaning of a word
overextension
an overly broad interpretation of the meaning of a word
mutual exclusivity
children’s assumption that a given entity has only one name
pragmatic cues
aspects of social environment used for word learning, e.g adults’ focus of attention, parents’ emotional expressions/facial expressions
whole-object assumption
children’s assumption that a novel word refers to a whole object rather than to a part
Cross-situational word learning
determining the word’s meaning by tracking whether the word and the entity occur repeatedly across various situations and settings
Syntactic bootstrapping
the strategy of using grammatical structure to infer the word’s meaning
telegraphic speech
short phrases that leave out nonessential words, e.g “Read me”, “Mommy tea”
Overregularization
speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular, e.g go-goed
private speech
a strategy that help the child organise their actions
Collective monologues
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.
Narratives
begin around the age of 5
Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar
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.
