Foundations of Language

What are the 3 critical features of language?

Intentionality, reference, and syntax.

What is intentionality?

Intending to use communication to convey something to others.

What is reference?

Using symbols that stand for things.

What is syntax?

Productive rules for combining symbols into sentences.

What are the main components of language?

Phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax, and communicative competence.

What is phonology?

The sound system of a language.

What is a lexicon?

The words of a language.

What is morphology?

The structure of words and their meaningful parts.

What is communicative competence?

The ability to use language appropriately in interaction.

What is the difference between a pidgin and a creole?

A pidgin has no native speakers; a creole develops when children acquire it as a native language.

What is nativism?

The view that language is innate and humans have inborn language capacities.

What is Universal Grammar?

Inborn knowledge of the general form of language.

What is the Language Acquisition Device (LAD)?

A proposed brain mechanism that supports language acquisition.

What is the poverty of the stimulus argument?

Children acquire language despite receiving limited evidence and little direct instruction.

What is the critical period hypothesis?

The proposal that language learning has a biologically sensitive period, from birth to puberty.

What is interactionism?

The view that language develops through innate capacities interacting with the environment.

What is the difference between formalist and functionalist views?

Formalist: structure comes first. Functionalist: language use comes first.

What is domain-specific learning?

Learning supported by abilities specialized for a particular domain, such as language.

What is domain-general learning?

Learning supported by broader abilities such as memory, attention, and pattern recognition.

What is the difference between language and speech?

Language originates in the brain; speech is one way to produce language using the vocal tract.

What is lateralization?

The specialization of the brain's hemispheres for different functions.

What is the left hemisphere primarily specialized for?

Language processing, with dominance beginning in infancy and increasing with age.

What does the right hemisphere contribute to language?

Pragmatics, semantics, jokes, sarcasm, figurative language, and novel stimuli.

What is Broca's area associated with?

Speech production; damage can cause nonfluent speech with reduced grammatical structure.

What is Wernicke's area associated with?

Language comprehension; damage can cause fluent but largely meaningless speech.

What is Broca's aphasia?

Nonfluent speech that often contains content words but lacks grammatical structure.

What is Wernicke's aphasia?

Fluent speech that lacks meaning and is associated with impaired comprehension.

What is the arcuate fasciculus?

A pathway connecting language areas; damage can cause difficulty repeating utterances.

What is conduction aphasia?

Difficulty repeating utterances despite relatively preserved comprehension and speech production.

Why can children recover from aphasia more completely?

Greater brain plasticity and developmental processes such as synaptogenesis and pruning.

What is a normative study?

A descriptive study identifying typical milestones and pathways in language development.

What is cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research?

Comparing language development across cultures and languages to study differences in experience and input.

What are the steps in speech sample analysis?

Collect speech, transcribe it, code categories, then count and analyze the results.

What is CHILDES?

A publicly accessible archive of children's and caregivers' speech samples in many languages.

What is computational modeling in language research?

Modeling how information from the language environment can support language learning.

What does the PPVT measure?

Children's receptive vocabulary.

What does the MCDI measure?

Children's productive vocabulary and communicative development.

What does MLU measure?

Mean length of utterance; the average length of children's utterances.

What factors contribute to individual differences in language development?

Biology, gender, birth order, SES, number of languages learned, and prior language skills.

What is joint attention?

When a child and another person share attention to the same object or activity.

What is gaze-following?

Following another person's direction of gaze; infants demonstrate this by about 10 months.

Why is gaze-following important?

It helps children identify what words refer to and supports word learning.

What is caregiver responsiveness?

Responding contingently to a child's sounds, actions, or communication.

How does caregiver responsiveness affect language?

More responsive caregivers are associated with earlier language milestones.

What is infant-directed speech (IDS)?

A way adults speak to infants using exaggerated intonation, longer vowels, and a slower pace.

How does IDS support language learning?

It helps infants identify word boundaries and learn words.

What is infant-directed action (IDA)?

Exaggerated actions with longer pauses that make actions easier for infants to observe.