LANGUAGE ACQUISITION PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering key concepts from the Pragmatic Development and Language Acquisition notes.

Pragmatic development

The study of how language users infer meaning beyond the literal content, including implicatures and how audience knowledge shapes expression.

Scalar implicature

An inference drawn from using a weaker term on a scale (e.g., some vs all), implying the stronger term does not apply.

Grice’s cooperative principle

The idea that conversations rely on cooperative use of language, guided by maxims like quantity, quality, relation, and manner.

Theory of Mind

The ability to attribute beliefs, desires, and intentions to others, informing how we interpret speakers’ meanings.

Common ground

Shared information known to both speaker and listener used to tailor referential expressions.

Privileged ground

Information known to the speaker but not necessarily shared or known by the listener.

Audience design

Adjusting utterances to the listener’s perspective, knowledge, and communicative needs.

Generic-listener adjustment

Adding information that would help a typical listener identify the intended referent.

Particular-listener adjustment

Tailoring utterances to a specific listener’s perspective or knowledge.

Nadig & Sedivy findings

Studies showing children as young as 5–6 use common-ground information in referential communication; younger children show weaker or slower use; adults adjust readily.

Crain & Nakayama (1987) findings

Research showing that children’s Yes/No question formation is guided by a structure-dependent rule, with observable errors when the rule is violated.

Yes/No question rule (structure-dependent)

Forming Yes/No questions in English by moving the auxiliary, not just rearranging words; relies on hierarchical syntax.

Type I error

An extra auxiliary appears in a question (e.g., Is the boy who is playing football is happy?).

Type II error

Restarting the sentence in a question (e.g., Is the boy who is playing football, is he happy?).

Type III error

Moving the wrong auxiliary (e.g., Is the boy who watching Mickey Mouse is happy?).

Long-distance dependencies

A relation between a word and a later position in the sentence (a non-local dependency), as in Who did you see __?

Hierarchical structure

Syntactic structure is built from nested constituents; higher-level units are made from smaller ones.

Constituent

A group of words that functions as a unit within a sentence.

Head-turn preference

An infant method to study language processing by measuring preferential listening or looking behavior.

Transitional probabilities

Statistical cues about the likelihood of one syllable following another, used to segment speech.

Whole object constraint

The assumption that a new word maps to the whole object rather than parts or properties.

Mutual exclusivity constraint

The assumption that a new word refers to an object that does not already have a label.

Taxonomic constraint

Children map new words to objects within the same basic category (e.g., animal) rather than to perceptual features.

Shape constraint

Mapping a new word to objects sharing perceptual shape similarities with known referents.

Syntactic bootstrapping

Using syntactic structure to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words, especially verbs.

Learning by association

Word meanings learned through associations and co-occurrence with contexts and objects.