Normal lang dev chapters 1-5

What is communication?

The process of conveying information, intent, or feeling between people.

What is language?

A rule-governed symbolic system used to represent and share meaning.

What are the 5 domains of language?

Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

What is phonology?

The sound system of a language and how sounds are organized and combined.

What is morphology?

The structure of words and how meaningful units combine.

What is syntax?

Rules for combining words into phrases and sentences.

What is semantics?

The meaning system of language, including word and sentence meaning.

What is pragmatics?

The social use of language across different contexts.

Why study language development?

To understand language and inform education, clinical practice, and policy.

What is behaviorism?

Behavior changes in response to consequences of previous behavior.

What is cognitivism?

Behavior is understood by considering internal mental processes.

What is the nativist view?

Language acquisition depends partly on innate knowledge of language.

What is the interactionist view?

Language develops through interaction between innate abilities and experience.

What is a generativist theory?

Language is supported by innate Universal Grammar and language-specific knowledge.

What is Universal Grammar?

Innate universal properties of language that apply across languages.

What is social interactionist theory?

Language develops through social interaction and the desire to communicate.

What is usage-based theory?

Grammar develops from experience, patterns, and intended meanings.

What is connectionist theory?

Language develops through patterns and connections in an interconnected network.

What is the behaviorist theory of language?

Language is acquired through external factors affecting behavior.

What is continuity?

Development occurs through gradual accumulation of small changes.

What is discontinuity?

Development occurs through distinct qualitative changes.

What is formalism?

Language and acquisition are viewed as separate from communication.

What is functionalism?

Language and acquisition are shaped by communicative functions.

What is a language sample?

A collection of a child's language used to study language development.

Why is typical development important in CSD?

It provides a foundation for recognizing communication disorders.

What is statistical learning?

Tracking frequency patterns among sounds or syllables to detect structure.

What is rule learning?

Learning abstract patterns or regularities in language input.

What is phonological memory?

The ability to briefly hold newly encountered sound sequences.

What is central executive function?

The ability to coordinate attention across multiple demands.

What is habituation?

A method testing whether an infant notices a change in a stimulus.

What is a head-turn procedure?

A method testing whether an infant detects or prefers an auditory stimulus.

What is preferential looking?

A method using where or how long infants look to infer recognition or preference.

What is IPLP?

A method presenting two images while language is heard to test emerging knowledge.

What is infant speech perception?

Infants' ability to perceive and discriminate speech sounds.

What is categorical perception?

Perceiving speech sounds as categories rather than as a continuous gradient.

What is early speech-perception tuning?

Language exposure narrows infants' speech discrimination toward their language.

When does speech-perception tuning mainly occur?

Across the first year, with narrowing especially evident by 9–12 months.

What is joint attention?

Relating to another person about the same object or event.

When does joint attention develop?

Around 9–12 months.

Why is joint attention important?

It is a positive predictor of early language development.

What is intention reading?

Understanding that others have communicative intentions and what they are.

How does eye gaze support intention reading?

Infants follow gaze to connect language with a person's focus or concept.

What is gesture?

A communicative behavior used before words and an early form of symbolic communication.

What are examples of communicative gestures?

Gestures involving objects, requests, and attributes.

What is infant-directed speech (IDS)?

Speech caregivers modify when talking with infants and young children.

What are common features of infant-directed speech?

Higher pitch, wider pitch range, slower rate, longer pauses, shorter phrases, and repetition.

What is environmental support for language?

Linguistic input plus prosody, context, gesture, gaze, and affect.

What does language learning depend on?

Interaction among perceptual, cognitive, social, and communicative foundations.

What is a phone?

An actual, physically produced speech sound.

What is a phoneme?

An abstract sound category that can distinguish meaning in a language.

What is an allophone?

A physically different realization of the same phoneme.

What is a minimal pair?

Two words differing by one phoneme that have different meanings.

What is phonotactics?

Language-specific rules about which sounds can occur together and where.

What is a phonological rule?

A predictable relationship between a phoneme and its realization in context.

What is phonological structure?

Organization of sound units from features to phonemes, syllables, words, and prosody.

What are the 3 main consonant features?

Place of articulation, manner of articulation, and voicing.

What is place of articulation?

Where in the mouth or vocal tract a sound is produced.

What is manner of articulation?

How airflow is changed or blocked during sound production.

What is voicing?

Whether the vocal folds vibrate during sound production.

What is prosody?

The rhythm and melody of speech, including stress, pitch, timing, and intonation.

What is a consonant?

A speech sound produced with some narrowing or blocking of airflow.

What is a vowel?

A speech sound produced with a relatively open vocal tract.

What are the 3 main vowel features?

Tongue height, tongue advancement, and lip rounding.

What is an onset?

The consonant or consonants before the vowel in a syllable.

What is a rime?

The nucleus and coda of a syllable.

What is a nucleus?

The central vowel or vowel-like element of a syllable.

What is a coda?

The consonant or consonants after the nucleus.

What are Stark's prelinguistic stages?

Reflexive/vegetative sounds, cooing, vocal play, babbling, then first words.

When do reflexive crying and vegetative sounds occur?

At birth.

When does cooing emerge?

About 6–8 weeks.

When does vocal play emerge?

About 16–30 weeks, or roughly 4–7 months.

When does canonical babbling emerge?

About 6–9 months.

When does variegated babbling emerge?

About 10–12 months.

When do first words generally emerge?

Around 1 year of age.

What is vocal play?

Experimentation with the voice and expanding vocal repertoire.

What is canonical babbling?

Repeated, well-formed speech-like consonant-vowel syllables.

What is phonological awareness?

Awareness of and ability to think about the sound structure of language.

What are phonological processes?

Systematic simplifications children use in producing speech sounds.

Can perception and production differ?

Yes. A child may perceive a sound accurately but not produce it yet.

What is the mental lexicon?

The organized network of word knowledge stored in the mind.

What information does the mental lexicon contain?

Word form, meaning, grammatical role, and relationships to other words.

What is a word?

A meaningful linguistic unit with a recognizable form and usable information.

What is a symbol?

Something that stands for or represents something else.

What is a referent?

The person, object, event, or entity a linguistic expression refers to.

What is a concept?

A person's mental knowledge or representation of what something is.

When do first words usually occur?

About 12–15 months.

What are context-bound words?

Words used only in a specific situation, routine, or context.

What are referential words?

Words used flexibly to identify something across different situations.

What is the difference between context-bound and referential words?

Context-bound use is narrow; referential use is flexible across contexts.

When do children produce about 50 words?

Around 18 months, with substantial individual variation.

What categories appear in early 50-word vocabularies?

Nominals, action words, modifiers, social words, and grammatical function words.

Why are nouns often common in early vocabularies?

Objects may be easier to map words onto than properties or actions.

What is underextension?

Using a word too narrowly, such as using "dog" only for one dog.

What is overextension?

Using a word too broadly, such as calling every four-legged animal "dog."

What is a word approximation?

An attempt at a word that does not yet match the adult form.

What is fast mapping?

Making an initial word-meaning connection after very limited exposure.

What is a word spurt?

A period when vocabulary growth becomes much faster than before.

Do all children show a word spurt?

No. Vocabulary growth varies widely across children.

What is word segmentation?

Identifying individual words within continuous speech.

What is referent mapping?

Connecting a word form with its meaning or referent.