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LING 3C03 Child language acquisition > Week 1 > Flashcards

Flashcards in Week 1 Deck (11)
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1
Q

What are the four components of oral language development?

A

Communication, phonology, lexicon and morphology & syntax

2
Q

What is pragmatics?

A

the knowledge that underlies the use of language to serve communicative functions

3
Q

What’s included in acquiring a language?

A
  • the idea that it is possible to communicate with language
  • self-awareness
  • control your muscles to make sounds
  • abstract thought
  • different words have different inflectional forms
4
Q

What are the two views of language acquisition? Explain them.

A

Behaviourism:

  • you learn the correct response to a stimuli
  • the idea that mental states can’t be observed and aren’t worth being observed
  • language is just verbal behaviour

Cognitivism:

  • mental states are worth our attention
  • the behaviour that we observe is the result of mental processes of what’s in the mind
  • trying to model and figure out what’s in the mind of a child
5
Q

Why is being a cognitivist challenging?

A
  • kids can’t tell us what they’re thinking
  • every kid has a different language environment (even twins)
  • kids’ production doesn’t always match their comprehension
  • kids can use non-language cues for comprehension
6
Q

What’s the nature of acquisition?

A

biological process, social phenomenon, nativism, emergentism

7
Q

Define nativism.

A

(universal grammar)

  • the mind must have some preexisting structure in order to organize and interpret experience (specialized linguistic knowledge)
  • all languages are alike in certain restrictive ways
8
Q

Define emergentism.

A

(domain-general cognitive ability)

  • child’s mind is a blank state when they are born
  • nothing special about language
  • child uses same cognitive skills, same domain cognitive skills in other situations too (not specific to language)
  • plays more details on the environment, the patterns in the details of the environment that the child notices
9
Q

How do we learn about acquisition?

A
  • isolated children (Genie, deaf children)
  • diaries (transcribe what kids say)
  • normative studies (what age do most kids know these words, vocabulary size for certain age)
  • naturalistic observation (CHILDES database)
  • experiments (measuring reaction times)
  • brain imaging (harder with kids though)
10
Q

List 5 properties of human language

A
  • reference, abstraction, displacement (notion that you have a symbol that refers to a thing or abstract concept in the world)
  • spontaneous, effortless acquisition
  • structure dependence & recursion (syntactic principles, not aware of any other species with syntax)
  • productivity/creativity/generativity
  • intentionality (we can’t know for sure if other species use language intentionally)
11
Q

Define neural plasticity

A

the brain’s ability to form new connections according to new experiences