Morphology & Syntax
content words (cat, play, do, red) and function words (no, the, you, this) and affixes (un-, -s, -ed)
What are Morphemes?
Acquisition of the first word and its meaning, entire lexicon/vocabulary with their meanings and the links between the words
What is Semantic Development?
Chomsky believed all individuals (across languages) contained an innate understanding of rules for word and sentence construction. The name for this part of Chomsky's theory is...
What is Universal Grammar?
At what age do infants seem to lose the ability to perceive phonetic differences that are not important in their home language?
What is 10-12 months of age?
The ability to adapt one’s language across social situations.
What is pragmatic competence?
Children tend to use only content words (nouns/verbs/adjectives), and omit function words, such as prepositions, conjunctions, articles, pronouns, auxiliaries, and inflections
What is Telegraphic Speech?
The age at which children, on average, say at least 50 words.
What is 2 years?
When comparing structuralists vs. functionalists, what part of language most interests structuralists?
What is the form of language? (syntax or grammar is ok too)
An individual who has acquired the phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics of a language has acquired ___________.
What is Linguistic Competence?
The smallest unit of meaning in a language.
What is a morpheme?
Grammatical rules develop almost unnoticed---with no explicit instruction. Parents have been focusing on teaching vocabulary , and often never try to consciously teach syntax. They focus more on “what” the child is saying rather than “how” the child says it
What is special about syntactic development?
Sound Effects, Food and drink, Animals, Body Parts and Clothing, House and outdoors, People, Toys and vehicles, Actions, Games and routines, Adjectives and descriptives
What are Examples of Early Vocabulary?
Proponents of these theories claim that language develops through a stimulus-response pattern to the child's language attempts.
What is behaviorism?
____________ includes the ability to use language appropriately in many different situations.
What is Communicative Competence?
Alternating between languages or dialects depending on the context.
What is code-switching?
Based on average length of a child’s sentences
What is Mean Length of Utterance?
A term that describes the way that word meanings are organized in relation to each other....
Semantic network
Chomsky claimed that environment alone was not sufficient to explain language acquisition because of this argument... the __________________of _____________ argument.
What is poverty of stimulus argument?
Communication through gestures and crying
What is Prelinguistic Stage?
Saying “goed” instead of “went” is an example of this common error.
What is overregularization?
The words 'butterfly' and 'danger' are ______ because they can stand alone.
Children often use this lexical principle when learning new words - Each object can only have one label. Another term for this is...
What is mutual exclusivity?
In this learning mechanism, infants track multiple examples of important sounds, grammar structures, and words in their world in order to make sense of the most relevant language components and rules for their own language.
What is statistical learning?
When the developing brain is best able to absorb a language, this is known as the
what is the critical period?
The understanding that words are made up of smaller sound units.
What is phonological awareness?