Child Language Acquisition - Terminology (A01) Flashcards
What is the pre-verbal stage?
Experimenting with noises/sounds but without producing recognisable words – it can be further broken down into the vegetative state, cooing and babbling.
What is the vegetative state?
The baby makes discomfort sounds such as crying - this is instinctive to how a baby feels.
Explain cooing
Distinct from crying but not yet forming recognisable vowels and consonants. A baby experiments with the noises that can be made when the tongue and back of the mouth come into contact; the baby begins to develop control over the vocal muscles.
What is Babbling?
The baby produces phonemes, often in the form of combinations of vowels and consonants (eg. ma, ga, ba, baba, gaga), they are largely those that appear in the child’s native language.
What is reduplicated babbling?
Appears first and consists of a child making the same sounds again and again (eg. babababa)
What is variegated babbling?
Emerges later and involves variation in the consonant and vowel sounds being produced. This does not resemble recognisable words yet (eg. daba, manamoo)
What are proto words?
‘Made up’ words that a child will use to represent a word they cannot pronounce (eg. ‘rayray’ for raisin’). These are not true first words as they have no semantic content.
What is overextension?
When a word is used more broadly to describe things with similar properties, other than the specific item to which the word actually applies (eg any round fruit may be an ‘apple’ or rats, squirrels, and rabbits are all ‘mice’).
What is underextension?
When a word is used in a limited way which does not recognise its full meaning (eg. knowing the word banana for one in real life but not for a bunch of bananas or a picture of a banana).
What is a hypernym?
An overarching (category) noun which encompasses many other nouns
What is a hyponym?
A noun with a narrower meaning which is part of a hypernym (category member)
What is a content word?
Content words convey meaning.
What is a virtuous error?
Errors in morphology that have some underlying logic to demonstrate that learning has taken place (eg. I runned, Three mens).
What is syntactic inversion?
Reversal of the normal order of the words and phrases in a sentence, learnt when forming a question (eg. ‘I can eat the cake’ (S;MAV;V;O) becomes ‘Can I eat the cake?’ (MAV;S;V;O)).
What is assimilation?
Swapping one consonant/vowel for another (eg. borry = lorry)
