Exam 2: Ch. 7-9

Question 0

Initial Lexicons: Structure & Phonemic Properties

Answer 0

Structure: 50+% consist of a single CV syllable with the remainder split between single vowels and two CV syllables (CVCV)

Phonemic Properties: front and back consonants predominate; no consonant clusters present

Question 1

3 Typical Categories of a Child’s Early Lexicon

Answer 1

1) animals
2) foods
3) toys

Question 2

Early Lexicon Growth

Answer 2

initially is slow and may appear to plateau for short periods;
child’s lexicon has a small core of high-usage words;
vocabulary (especially receptive) “spurt” between 18-24 months

Question 3

First 50 Words

Answer 3

acquired by 18 months of age;
nouns predominate–over 60% of lexicon consists of nouns;
most entries are people/animals in child’s environment or objects the child can manipulate;
not all noun types are represented–no collections or abstractions

Question 4

timing of “vocabulary spurt”

Answer 4

cause of and reason for timing is unknown, but may be related to:

(1) development of more articulation control
(2) the role of syntactic patterns–syntactic frames that child can “fill”
(3) underlying growth in cognitive capacities
(4) learning and using words

Question 5

cause of “vocabulary spurt”

Answer 5

pairing of the semantic learning with quickly developing phonological advances, a system of syntactic patterns, or cognitive advances

Question 6

explanations for the early predominance of nouns:

Answer 6

• child may already have the concept of objects
• nouns are perceptually/conceptually distinct–represent concrete “things”
• linguistic predictability makes nouns easier to use (nouns = things, things relate to each other/other words in specific ways)
• higher frequency of adult use
• location at the end of adult utterances for emphasis
• fewer morphological adaptations than other parts of speech
• mothers prompt children to produce nouns more frequently
• more frequent in toy play and short maternal utterances

Question 7

vocabulary development may consist of a process of…

Answer 7

…continually fine-tuning lexical/vocabulary system in order to increase storage and accessibility to information

Question 8

the lexical system is enhanced through _______.

Answer 8

use

Question 9

verbs are more frequent in…

Answer 9

• non-toy (social) play

* conversations

Question 10

individual children have either ______ style or ______ style.

Answer 10

• referential

* expressive

Question 11

referential style

Answer 11

• “noun lovers”
• use many nouns
• tend to elaborate the noun/noun phrase of sentences
• seem to have more adult contacts, use more single words, and employ an analytic (bottom-up) strategy to build longer utterances from individual words

Question 12

expressive style

Answer 12

• “noun leavers”
• use few nouns, prefer interactional and functional words
• tend to elaborate on verb/verb phrase of their sentences
• seem to have more peer contacts, attempt to produce longer utterances, and employ a holistic (top-down) strategy to break longer utterances up into their parts

Question 13

holistic acquisition of adult expressions

Answer 13

• “swallowing language whole”
• acquiring multi-word expressions as if they were single-word expressions, unaware of the smaller units of meaning
• example: “I-wanna-do-it”

Question 14

modifiers and verb-like words (such as “down”) appear…

Answer 14

…soon after the first word

Question 15

true verbs

Answer 15

(ex: “eat” and “play”)

appear after modifiers and verb-like words

Question 16

relational function of verbs

Answer 16

bring together items or events

Question 17

unlike nouns, verbs…

Answer 17

(1) are not permanent

(2) may not be accompanied by any consistent maternal gesturing

Question 18

challenges in learning a verb

Answer 18

(1) to establish meaning, child must find underlying concept; concepts of verbs are abstract and hard to determine from the physical environment
(2) some describe momentary actions, others have more duration
(3) some nouns can be verbs
(4) child must be able to identify verb in the speech stream

Question 19

as many as 60% of the verbs in maternal speech refer to…

Answer 19

…future action

Question 20

with _____ growth and the emergence of _____, the proportion of _____ increases substantially.

Answer 20

• vocabulary
• grammar
• verbs

Question 21

early lexicons until about 18 months of age seem to follow a principle of…

Answer 21

…mutual exclusivity (if the word means X, it can’t mean Y or Z)

Question 22

2 processes used by children to form internal representations

Answer 22

(1) context-bound symbols, attached to a certain event and only used in that context
(2) words used to designate entities, actions, and relationships in several contexts

Question 23

word learning is unlike most other kinds of learning; much of human learning is _____, meaning…

Answer 23

• associative

* …it is learned by relationships of time or location and perfected through repetition

Question 24

in word learning, children attend to these two things:

Answer 24

(1) social information, such as eye gaze | (2) a speaker's intent

Question 25

the semantic-feature hypothesis and the functional-core hypothesis have been proposed to explain...

Answer 25

...concept formation and word learning.

Question 26

semantic-feature hypothesis

Answer 26

* child establishes meaning by combining features that are present and perceivable in the environment * as children mature, they add or delete features, and the concept becomes more specific, more closely resembling the generally accepted meaning

Question 27

functional-core hypothesis

Answer 27

* concept formation begins with the formation of a function or use meaning * focuses on motion features rather than static perceptual features

Question 28

associative complex hypothesis

Answer 28

each successive use of a word shares some feature or is associated with a core concept

Question 29

prototypic complex hypothesis

Answer 29

the child's underlying concept includes a central reference, or prototype; the closer the new referent is to the prototype, the more likely it is to be labeled with that name

Question 30

fast/initial mapping

Answer 30

formation of a link between a particular referent and a new name; typically quick, sketchy, and tentative

Question 31

underextensions

Answer 31

* overly-restricted meanings of a concept * occurs when child tends to stick to "confirmed core" of words * common in both receptive and expressive language

Question 32

overextension

Answer 32

* meaning assigned to concept is too broad when compared to the adult meaning * occur when a child must communicate about objects that are not inside the "confirmed core" * usually limited to expressive language

Question 33

3 general types of overextensions

Answer 33

(1) categorical: child uses a word to label a referent in a related category; usually referencing people (2) analogical: use of a word to label a referent based on inferred perceptual, functional, or affective similarity (3) predicate statements: child notes the relationship between an object and some absent person, object, property, or state

Question 34

three types of multiword utterances

Answer 34

(1) word combinations (2) pivot schemas (3) item-based constructions

Question 35

word combinations

Answer 35

multiword utterances that consist of roughly equivalent words that divide an experience into multiple units

Question 36

pivot schemas

Answer 36

multiword utterances that show a systematic pattern in which one word/phrase seems to structure the utterance by determining the intent of the utterance as a whole; often includes intonational pattern to convey intent

Question 37

item-based constructions

Answer 37

multiword utterances that do seem to be following word-order rules with specific words; dependent upon how the child has heard the word being used

Question 38

3 social-cognitive skills required for child to construct multiword utterances

Answer 38

(1) plan and create a multi-step procedure toward a single goal (2) form abstractions across individual items (3) create item-based constructions

Question 39

second-order symbols

Answer 39

syntactic and morphological markers

Question 40

3 lexical characteristics that influence linguistic processing

Answer 40

(1) word's frequency of use (2) neighborhood density (3) phonotactic probability

Question 41

word's frequency of use

Answer 41

frequently-used words are recognized by a child more quickly and accurately and produced more rapidly than infrequently-used words

Question 42

neighborhood density

Answer 42

the number of possible words that differ by one phoneme; words in less dense neighborhoods are easier to learn

Question 43

phonotactic probability

Answer 43

the likelihood of a sound pattern occurring; sound pattern probability is established for the child through experience, and common sound sequences are stored as patterns and used to divide the speech stream into separate words

Question 44

phonological processes

Answer 44

systematic procedures used by children to make adult words pronounceable; enable children to produce an approximation of an adult model to speech production

Question 45

reduplication

Answer 45

child attempts a polysyllabic word (like daddy) but is unable to produce one syllable correctly, so s/he compensates by repeating the other syllable (resulting in dada)

Question 46

open syllables

Answer 46

syllables in multisyllabic words that end in a vowel; | predominate over closed syllables

Question 47

consonant/cluster reduction

Answer 47

results in single-consonant production of a consonant blend

Question 48

factors that influence early language acquisition

Answer 48

* individual variation: occurs within and across components of early language * level of grammatical complexity: in toddlers, reflects vocabulary growth more so than the age of the child * lexical bootstrapping: vocabulary is the foundation for grammar syntactic bootstrapping: children can use syntactic knowledge to narrow down word meaning *phonological bootstrapping: prosody, phoneme, and syllable information in speech are used by a child to determine both * overall health, cognitive functioning, environment of home, middle ear infections (otitis media), motor speech problems, SES, exposure to television, and international adoption and second language-learning

Question 49

language socialization

Answer 49

language is central to the process of learning culture; cultural patterns teach children how to communicate; intertwined nature of this process = language socialization

Question 50

oral narratives (stories)

Answer 50

uninterrupted stream of language modified by the speaker to capture/hold the listener's interest; narrator maintains social monologue; include self-generated stories, telling familiar tales, retelling of books, movies, or television shows, and recounting personal experiences

Question 51

conversations are ______, while narratives are ______

Answer 51

* contextualized dialogues | * decontextualized monologues