Design Features of Language
This person wrote about the 13 design features of language (pg. 10)
Who is Hockett?
The rich use of presemantic, semantic, postsemantic, and extrasemantic information in human communication (pg. 17)
What is indexicality?
There are 6 steps. The first step requires the speaker to sort through thoughts and decide which of these thoughts to express, as well as how to express them (pg. 23)
What is the speech chain?
The ability to use verbal and nonverbal language/behaviors as is socially appropriate within a given context (pg. 4)
What is pragmatics?
This group of people believe that children are genetically predisposed to talk (pg. 28)
What are nativists?
Human speakers can monitor what they say and how they say it (pg. 13)
What is Total Feedback
Each language is limited to a finite number of sounds, and each sound has very specific characteristics. Similarly, animals have a limited number of variations in their type of sounds (bark, croak, etc.) (pg. 15)
What is discreteness?
These steps of the speech chain occur only in the brain (pg. 23)
What are the first two steps?
The grammatical rules and structure of language (pg. 5)
What is syntax?
These people believe that the environment is the critical and most important factor in language acquisition. With this view, the child is passive in the process of learning a language. Skinner is most closely associated with this theory. (pg. 40-41)
What are behavioralists?
Humans can talk about things that are distant in time or space (pg. 19)
What is Displacement?
The human brain’s dynamic ability to change constantly as individuals learn (pg. 31)
What is plasticity?
Child: truck!
Mother: Red truck!
This is an example of: (pg. 55)
What is vocabulary expansion?
The word “flowers” has two of these (pg. 5)
Hint: the answer is NOT syllable. Think about the Big 5.
What is a morpheme?
Verbal behavior that associates the name with an object, action, or event.
Example: parents holds up a cookie and the child responds: “cookie.” (pg. 43)
What is a tact?
Humans communicate by forcing air through the vocal folds of the larynx and breaking the vibrating airstream into sounds of speech, which are organized into words and sentences (Pg. 10)
What is the vocal-auditory channel?
This theory suggests that the order in which language forms are acquired is determined by what these forms accomplish (pg. 51)
What is the information processing theory?
Higher pitched, slower rate, and exaggerated intonations (pg. 54)
What is motherese?
The syllables in each word are produced with varied degrees of stress. Words and phrases are pronounced with pitch and loudness variations to convey meaning (pg. 7)
What are suprasegmentals?
Any behavior whose frequency can be affected by the responses that follow it (pg. 41)
What is an operant behavior?
Any human being can say anything that is said by any other human being, which removes communication barriers (pg. 16)
What is interchangeability?
These design five features of language are only observed in humans (pg. 11)
With the interactionist view, the child is active/passive in the process of acquiring language (pg. 46-48)
What is active?
These fire when an individual (or monkey) is engaged in an activity, as well as when one observes an activity (pg. 30-31)
What are mirror neurons?
Chomsky (a nativist) devised this to account for the production of an unlimited number of grammatically acceptable sentences (pg. 36)
What is transformational generative grammar?
Important suggestion: I would also know what phrase structure rules are. This is also on page 36