Langauge Basics
Language Acquisition
Sounds and Speech
Grammar Development
Pragmatics and Reading
100

What is the term for the smallest unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning?

What is a phoneme?

100

At what age do children typically start producing their first words?

What is 9-14 months? 

100

What term describes the challenge infants face when they need to determine the boundaries between words in a continuous stream of speech?

What is gliding?

100

What type of speech is characterized by the use of only lexical words while function words are missing?

What is telegraphic speech?

100

What principle states that you should provide just enough information in a conversation, not too little or too much?

What is the Gricean maxim of Quantity?

200

What property of language allows humans to create and understand sentences they have never heard before?

What is generativity or recursion?

200

What is the phenomenon called when children learn words after just one or two exposures?

What is fast mapping?

200

What is the term for the process where children gradually lose the ability to perceive phonemic contrasts in languages they are not exposed to?

What is becoming culture-bound listeners? 

200

At what stage of Brown’s Grammatical Development do children start producing complex sentence structures, including negatives and questions?

What is Brown's Stage 3?

200

In reading development, what does grapheme-to-phoneme mapping refer to?

The ability to map written symbols (graphemes) to their corresponding sounds (phonemes).

300

How is language different from general communication?

Language is symbolic, rule-governed, and dynamic, whereas communication is the process of exchanging messages.

300

What cognitive ability is necessary for a child to learn that objects can exist even when they are not visible?

What is object permanence?

300

What are the two types of babbling children go through, and which one involves repeating the same syllables like "mamama"?

What is reduplicated and variegated babbling, with reduplicated being "mamama"?

300

What is the concept of MLU, and what does it measure in early childhood?

Mean Length of Utterance, and it measures morphosyntactic development

300

What is the Matthew Effect in reading development?

The phenomenon where children who are good readers improve faster than those who are poor readers.

400

What term refers to when a word can mean different things depending on the context?

What is ambiguity?

400

Name two methods used to study language development that measure changes in brain activity and explain how they differ. 

ERP (measuring electrical changes in the brain), MEG (measuring magnetic changes), fMRI (measuring blood flow), and eye-tracking are used to study brain and behavioral responses to language

400

By what age is children’s speech typically fully intelligible?

What is 4 years old?

400

What error in grammatical development occurs when children apply regular grammatical rules to words that are exceptions, like saying "foots" for "feet"?

What is overregularization?

400

When a child removes an unstressed syllable in a word, like saying "nana" instead of "banana", what phonological process is this?

What is weak syllable deletion?

500

What theory in linguistics suggests that all human languages share a common structural basis and that these rules are innate?

What is Universal Grammar?

500

What term describes the challenge infants face when they need to determine the boundaries between words in a continuous stream of speech?

What is the word segmentation problem?

500

What is the term for the phenomenon where children drop one of the consonants in a consonant cluster, like saying "ping" instead of "spring"?

What is cluster reduction?

500

According to this dialogue, what stage of Brown's Grammatical Development is this child in and what grammatical feature is being produced? 

Child: I’m eating my lunch.

Parent: What is your brother doing? 

Child: He’s going to play outside.

What is Brown’s Stage 5? The child is using the contractible auxiliary - “I’m eating,” and “He's going.”

500

What is the phenomenon called when children use invented words that have a specific meaning to them but are not recognized by adults, like saying “lala” for phone?

What is protowords?