Language Development Chapter 2

Phonological Development

involves the process of acquiring the rules of language that govern the sound structure of syllables and words. It is a process that happens over time

Minimal Pair

differs by only 1 phoneme

Phonotactic rule

develop a sense of rules that specify the order of sounds in syllables and words and where specific phonemes can and cant occur

Phonemic Inventory

1. acquisition of internal representation of the phonemes composing native language.

Phonological Awareness

ability to attend to the phonological units of speech through explicit or implicit analysis

Prosodic cues

infants draw on their familiarity with word and syllable stress patterns, or the rhyme of language, to break into the speech stream

Phonotactic cues

infants also use this to parse the speech stream. Early in development, infants become sensitive to the probability that certain sounds will occur both in general an din specific positions of syllables and words.

Functional load

the importance of a phoneme in the phonemic inventory of the language

Morphological Development

the internalization of the rules of language that govern word structure.

Grammatical Morphemes (inflectional morphemes)

the meaning is typically set, they facilitate the language code. Ex: ed, s, 's, ing

Bound morphemes

must be bound or attached to other morphemes

free morphemes

can stand alone. they include both words with clear semantic referents, and words that serve primarily grammatical purposes

Derivational Morphemes

they change a words syntactic class and semantic meaning. ex: un, dis, en, able, ness

Influences on morphological development

Secondary Language Acquisition, Dialect, Language Impairment

Syntactic Development

Children's internalization of the rules of language that govern how words are organized into sentences.

3 Major syntactic achievements

a. an increase in utterance length

b. use of different sentence modalities

c. the development of complex syntax

Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)

provides a simple proxy for estimating the syntactic complexity of children's utterances

Declarative sentences

make a statement, and simple declaratives

Negative sentences

express negation and rely on such words as no, not, cant, wont, dont

Interrogative sentences

involve the act of questioning

Phrasal Coordination

allows them to connect phrases, as in this sentence in which and links two noun phrases

Complex Syntax

refers to the use of phrase and clause structures, as well as conjunctive devices for organizing internal structures of sentences

Child directed speech (CDS)

refers to the talk directed to children by others

Simple syntax

grammatically well-formed utterances containing simple noun phrases and verb structures

Acquired Language disorders

occur as a result of injury or illness that damages the language centers of the brain.

Developmental language disorders

are present at birth. Affect only language and no other aspect of development, such as cognition

Semantic Development

refers to an individual's learning and storage of the meaning of words.

Semantic development involves 3 major tasks for the learner

a. acquiring a mental lexicon of about 60,000 words between infancy and adulthood

b. learning new words rapidly

c. organizing the mental lexicon in an efficient semantic network

Vocabulary spurt

a word spurt, that begins near the end of the second year and continues for several years

5 categories of Semantic taxonomy

1. Specific Nominals

2. General Nominals

3. Action words

4. Modifiers

5. Personal-social words

Factors that influence a childs ability to understand a new words:

1. Concept represented by the word

2. Phonological form of the word

3. Contextual conditions at initial exposure

Lead-in

which an adult labels an object or event that is outside of the child's attentional focus

Follow-in

which an adult labels an object or event that is currently the child's attentional focus

Ostensive word-learning contexts

a great deal of contextual information is provided about a novel word either linguistically or extralinguistically

Nonostensive word-learning contexts (inferential contexts)

little contextual info is provided to help a person derive the meaning of a new word

Spreading activation

activation of specific entries spreads across the network according to the strength of connections among entries

Influences on semantic development:

Gender

Language impairment

language exposure

Pragmatic Development

involves acquiring the rules of language that govern how language is used as a social tool

3 important aspects of pragmatic development

a. using language for different communication functions

b. developing conversational skill

c. gaining sensitivity to extralinguistic cues

Joint Attention

instances in which infants and caregivers focus attention on a mutual object, in such exchanges, the infant must coordinate their attention between the social partner and the object of intrest

Register

the stylistic variations in language that occur in different situational contexts

Temperament

the way in which an individual approaches a situation, particularly one that is unfamiliar. Describes a person's behavioral style or personality type