Edu 173 Midterm Key Terms and Concepts

Infant Perception of Native & Nonnative Sound Contrasts

• Newborn: prefers listening to native language but can distinguish sounds in other languages

• 8-10 Months: lose ability to discriminate nonnative speech sounds

Statistical Learning

• General Cognitive Ability

• Language learning where ability to use general cog. mech. to use distributional cues in input to derive rules of linguistic elements & co-occurrence probabilities

  • Without resort to innate linguistic knowledge

Reflexive Vocalizations

• Stage 1 (Birth - 2 Months)

• Crying, fussing, coughing, burping, sneezing

• Some vowel-like sounds

Cooing

• Stage 2 (2 - 4 Months)

• Greater variety of sounds, mostly made in the back of mouth, velar consonants, back vowels

• Laughter and infant chuckling

Vocal Play

• Stage 3 (4 - 6 Months)

• Yells and whispers, squeals and growls, raspberries (bilabial trills), tongue clicks, consonant + vowel syllables

Canonical Babbling

• Stage 4 (6+ Months)

• Sequences of consonant-vowel syllables

• Trying to produce words

• Reduplicated (strings of identical syllables, babababa)

• Variegated (strings with varying consonants and vowels, bagidabu)

Jargon

• Stage 5 (10+ Months)

• Overlaps with early period of meaningful speech

• Strings of sounds and syllables with variety of stress and intonational patterns

Protowords

• Phonetically consistent forms

• “Na” said to indicate wanting an object

Phonetic Inventory

• List of speech sounds and word patterns that occur in word production

• Limited

• m, n, b, d, w, y, f, s

Assimilation

Change in one sound to make it more like another

• Bump —> “mump”

Weak/Unstressed Syllable Deletion

• Omitting the initial syllable of a word or sometimes in the middle

  • “MAto” > tomato, “EH-funt” > elephant

Cluster Reduction

• Deletion of consonant in words that have sequence of 2+ consonants

• “ack” > ask, “hep” > help

Intentional Communication Criteria

• Eye contact while gesturing or vocalizing

• Consistent and ritualized gestures

• Consistent and ritualized vocalizations

• Pause to wait for a response

• Persistence in attempting to communicate

Intentional Communication - Imperatives

Infant indicates what they want a caregiver to perform

Intentional Communication - Declaratives

Infant calls caregiver’s attention to something often by gesturing or pointing

Joint Attention

Mutual attention between child and parent

Pointing

• Early form of communication (9-12 months)

• Children who develop this early develop early in language development

Fast Mapping - Ostension

Ability to make initial word to object/concept connection after only a few exposures without explicit instruction

Fast Mapping- Explicit Labeling

Learning nouns effectively through incidental learning

Early Nouns

• 40% of children’s first 50 words

  • Verbs and other only 10%

Classical Concepts

• All members of the group to share specific features

  • Triangle: all triangles must have 3 angles

Probabilistic Concept

• All members of the group share set of features but not all of them

  • Bird: penguin vs robin

Prototype Theory

Children acquire the core members of a group first and only later come to recognize more distant members of the group

• Collie for first dog vs also recognizing a chihuahua as a dog

Semantic Feature Theory

Children acquire categorical concepts made up of members that share a discrete set of essential features

• Dog: own dog

• Dog: other dogs

• Dog: animate, warm-blooded, have four legs, etc.

Underextensions

When children use a word in few contexts than they should

• Using dog to only refer to collies

Overextensions

When children use a word in more contexts than they should

• Daddy to refer to all men

Clark’s Principles for Inventing Words

• Simplicity- use of conventional works in an unconventional way

  • “to pillow”

• Semantic Transparency

  • “pause clip” for bookmark

• Productivity- use of forms that are frequently used by adults

  • Cook-er

Vocabulary Spurt

• Rapid increase around 18 months

  • Some say it’s a more gradual process, not all children display this abrupt increase

Principle of Mutual Exclusivity

• Avoid 2 referents for 1 label

• Makes learning of superordinate or subordinate terms and synonyms difficult

Telegraphic Speech

Speech that consists of content words without functors

• Simplicity: More open-class/content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives)

• Closed/function words (prepositions, articles, etc.) missing

Grammatical Morphemes

Small units of words that carry function

• Stand alone: a, an, in, on, at, but, and, will, can, do

• Bound: -s, -ed, -’s

Overregularization

Ability to apply correct morphemes to novel words

• “Go-ed”

Comprehension > Production

• Young children use cues to help understand grammatical forms

• Cues include prosody, semantics, syntax, environmental, and social contexts

Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)

• Good indicator of syntactic development, determined by number of meaningful units (morphemes)