Chapter 8 Language Acquisition Flashcards
(40 cards)
Innate
Determined by factors present from birth.
Innateness hypothesis
A hypothesis that human are genetically predisposed to learn and use language.
Imitation Theory
Theory of language acquisition that claims that children acquire language by listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear.
Reinforcement Theory
Theory of language acquisition that says that children learn to speak like adults because they are praised, reward, or otherwise reinforced when they use the right forms and are corrected when they use the wrong ones.
Active Construction of a Grammar Theory
Theory of language acquisition that says that children acquire a language by inventing rules of grammar based on the speech around them.
Connectionist Theories
Theory of language acquisition that claims that children learn language through neutral connections in the brain. A child develops such connections through exposure to language and by using language.
Linguistic universals
Property believed to be held in common by all natural languages.
Universal Grammar
The theory that posits a set of grammatical characteristics shared by all natural languages.
Critical period
Age span, usually described as lasting from birth to the onset of puberty, during which children must have exposure to language and must build the critical brain structures necessary in order to gain native speaker competence in a language.
Neglected child
A child who is neglected by caretakers, often resulting in significantly lower exposure to language as a child.
Feral child
Child who grew up in the wild without care by human adults, often with animals.
Homesign
A rudimentary visual-gestural communication system that is developed and used by deaf children and they families when a signed language is not made available for they communication.
Child directed Speech
Speech used by parents or caregivers when communicating with young children or infants.
High amplitude sucking
Experimental technique used to study sound discrimination in infants from birth to about six month.
Conditioned Head Turn Procedure
Experimental technique usually used with infants between five and eighteen months with two phases.
Voice Onset Time
The length of time between the release of a consonant and the onset of voicing, that is, when the vocal folds start vibrating.
Articulatory Gestures
A movement of a speech organ in the production of speech, for example, the movement of the velum for the production of a nasal consonant.
Babbling
A phase in child language acquisition during which the child produces meaningless sequences of consonants and vowels.
Canonical babling
The continuous repetition of sequences of vowels and consonants like [mamama] by infants; also called repeated babbling.
Variegated babbling
Production of meaningless consonant-vowel sequences by infants.
Holophrastic Stage
Stage in first-language acquisition during which children can produce only one word at a time.
Telegraphic Stage
A phase during child language acquisition in which children use utterances composed primarily of content words.
Overgeneralization
In the study of child language acquisition, a relationship between child and adult application of rules relative to certain contexts; a process in which children extend the application of linguistic rules to contexts beyond those in the adult language.
Complexive Concept
A term used in the study of child language acquisition.
