Chapter 9 - Language

Question 1

5 Components of Languages

Answer 1

Sound – phonology
Rules of meaning - morphology
Word meaning – semantics
Overall structure – grammar
Everyday social use - pragmatics

Question 2

phonology

Answer 2

the sounds of a language, about 200 different sounds are used in all known spoken languages; all the different words in English are constructed from only about 45 of them

Question 3

semantics

Answer 3

the study of words and their meaning, a typical college-educated English speaker has a vocabulary of about 150,000 words

Question 4

syntax

Answer 4

rules that specify how words are combined to form sentences

Question 5

pragmatics

Answer 5

the communicative functions of language and the rules that lead to effective communication

Question 6

language

Answer 6

a system that relates sounds (or gestures) to meaning, expressed in many forms—through speech, writing, and gestures

Question 7

phonemes

Answer 7

unique sounds that can be joined to create words, basic building blocks of language, infants can distinguish phonemes that are not used in their native language, but as babies grow and are more exposed to a particular language, they only notice the linguistic distinctions that are meaningful in their own language

Question 8

infant directed speech

Answer 8

when adults speak slowly and with exaggerated changes in pitch and loudness

Question 9

ways infants identify words

Answer 9

• 7 and 8-month-olds can listen to sentences and recognize the words/sound patterns that they hear repeatedly
• by 6 months of age, infants pay more attention to content words (e.g., nouns, verbs) than to function words (e.g., articles, prepositions), and they look at the correct parent when they hear “mommy” or “daddy”
• infants pay more attention to stressed syllables than unstressed syllables, which is a good strategy for identifying the beginnings of words
• infants use the co-occurence of sounds and familiar function words to break up the speech stream and identify words

Question 10

cooing

Answer 10

a phenomenon when at 2 months, infants begin to produce vowel-like sounds, such as “ooooooo” or “ahhhhhh”

Question 11

babbling

Answer 11

speech-like sound that has no meaning, becomes more elaborate as babies experiment with more complex speech sounds, a precursor to real speech, involves more intonation as the baby develops

Question 12

intonation

Answer 12

pattern of rising or falling pitch

Question 13

What is a child’s normal vocabulary at age 2? age 6?

Answer 13

by age 2, most youngsters have a vocabulary of a few hundred words, and by age 6, a typical child’s vocabulary includes more than 10,000 words

Question 14

naming explosion

Answer 14

at about 18 months, when many children begin to learn new words, particularly names of objects, much more rapidly than before

Question 15

fast mapping

Answer 15

children’s ability to connect new words to their meanings so rapidly that they cannot be considering all possible meanings for the new word

Question 16

underextension

Answer 16

defining a word too narrowly, ex. using car to refer only to the family car, younger infants

Question 17

overextension

Answer 17

defining a word too broadly, ex. children may use car to also refer to buses and trucks, occurs more frequently when children are producing words than when they are comprehending words, older infants

Question 18

phonological memory

Answer 18

the ability to remember speech sounds briefly, ex. immediate repetition

Question 19

Differences in bilingual children vs. monolingual children?

Answer 19

• compared to monolingual children, bilingual children better understand the symbolic nature of words
• bilingual children are more skilled at switching back and forth between tasks and oft en are better able to inhibit inappropriate responses

Question 20

What is children’s sentence creating ability at age 1.5? 2?

Answer 20

at about 1½ years, children begin to combine individual words to create two-word sentences, beginning at about the second birthday, children move to three-word and even longer sentences

Question 21

telegraphic speech;

Answer 21

used by 2 year olds, when sentences consist of only words directly relevant to meaning

Question 22

grammatical morphemes

Answer 22

words or endings of words (such as -ing , - ed , or -s ) that make a sentence grammatical

Question 23

By what age do most children use grammar with great skill?

Answer 23

by the time most children enter kindergarten, they use most of the grammatical forms of their native language with great skill

Question 24

What is the Behaviourist Answer of language acquisition?

Answer 24

• children imitate the grammatical forms they hear
• B. F. Skinner: claimed that all aspects of language, sounds, words, grammar, and communication, are learned through imitation and reinforcement
• flaw: even when children imitate adult sentences, they do not imitate adult grammar, grammatical rules are far too complex for toddlers and preschoolers to infer them solely on the basis of the speech that they hear

Question 25

What is the Social Interaction Answer of language acquisition?

Answer 25

• draws on each of the views we’ve considered so far, it takes an emphasis on the environment, says that language learning is distinct to humans, and that children have powerful cognitive skills they can use to master language
• children master language generally and grammar specifically in the context of social interactions

Question 26

What is the Cognitive Answer of language acquisition?

Answer 26

• children learn grammar through powerful cognitive skills that help them rapidly detect regularities in their environments, including patterns in the speech they hear
• children learn language by searching for regularities across many examples that are stored in memory, not through an inborn grammar-learning device

Question 27

What is the Nativist/Linguistic Answer of language acquisition?

Answer 27

• Chomsky: children are born with mechanisms that simplify the task of learning grammar
• children are born with neural circuits in the brain that allow them to infer the grammar of the language that they hear

Question 28

semantic bootstrapping theory

Answer 28

children are born knowing that nouns usually refer to people or objects and that verbs are actions; they use this knowledge to infer grammatical rules

Question 29

Findings that support the Nativist/Linguistic Answer of language acquisition.

Answer 29

• specific regions of the brain are known to be involved in language processing, ex. Broca’s area
• only humans learn grammar readily, if grammar is learned solely through imitation and reinforcement, then it should be possible to teach rudimentary grammar to nonhumans
• there is a critical period for learning language, ex. Genie
• the development of grammar is tied to the development of vocabulary