Lecture 4 Flashcards
(14 cards)
What are requirements of language?
must be Meaningful (share dysmbosl for representing thoughts, ideas, etc), involve Displacement ( talking about past or future), and Genarative (ability for infinite new creations with a limited number of pieces)
What are the four components of language?
- Phonology (sound system - basic sound units phonemes)
- Semantics (system for expressing meaning -words)
- Syntax (the structure of language, how words can be combined and recombined)
- Pragmatics (use of language beyond literal meaning of words)
What is the universal chronological process of language development in infants?
6-8 weeks: cooing
6-10 months: babbling, non referential
10-15 months: single words, referential
18-24 months: two word sentences (telegraphic speech)
What’s the chronological order of comprehension and production of language in infants?
Babies can comprehend starting at 8-10 months, orienting to their name, or “the ball”. They can begin to produce language at 10-15 words.
Are there maturational constraints on language learning? What evidence supports your answer?
Yes, there is a critical period for language learning. There is a lot of evidence but you can look at the study done on grammatical competence of long-term ASL users who learned at different stages is their childhood (from birth, between 4-7, or after 12. The same pattern emerges for second language acquisition.
Describe an experiment that shows how children use social abilities to learn words.
Discrepant labeling problem is a hard one, children have to figure out what adult is referencing. Study with 18 month olds, infant and experimenter both have buckets with objects in them. The experimenter names the object using follow-in focus and discrepant labeling in group 1 and 2. Infants were able to identify which one was the labelled object by paying attention to the speaker’s intentions.
What is prosody?
characteristic rhythmic and intonation patterns with which a language is spoken – how fetuses develop preference for mothers voice in womb
what is intersubjectivity?
when two interacting partners share a mutual understanding, founded in joint attention. parents establish this by commenting on what the kid is looking at
What is the holophrastic period?
the kids communicate using one word at a time
What is overextension?
when kids use one word in a broader context than it usually conveys due to a limited vocabulary
What is fast mapping?
the process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of a familiar word and the unfamiliar word.
What is the mutual exclusivity assumption?
A useful but sometimes hindering assumption that children have, that objects will only have one name.
What are overregularization errors?
grammatical errors using certain conjugation/pluralization rules for words it doesn’t apply to (i.e. “breaked”)
How do children’s conversational skills develop over time?
first children engage in private speech, as a strategy to organize their actions. their initial conversations with others are egocentric, a series of nonsequitors, even when they take turns speaking. in preschool, kids start talking more about the past. 4 year olds produce narratives, descriptions of past events in the form of a story. conversational skills increase with cognitive skills, ability to inhibit assumption of one’s own perspective, interpret others’ emotional cues, and understand their perspectives.
