Normal Lanuge STUDY GUIDE

Phonology

is the study of speech sounds and the sound system of a language.

phoneme

The smallest sound unit that helps differentiate meaning

Understand the difference between producing a sound and understanding how a language uses sounds.

When studying phonological development, we are interested in sound patterns, not simply whether a child can produce one individual sound.

Place of articulation

Where the constriction occurs.

Bilabial

closed lips

Labiodental

lower lip resting aginst lower teeth

Dental/interdental

tounge touching the upper teeth

Alveolar

tounge near the avelor ridge

Palatal

tounge near the hard plate

Velar

back of tounge toches soft plate

Glottal

narrowing or closing glottals

Place of Articulation

• Bilabial

• Labiodental

• Dental/interdental

• Alveolar

• Palatal

• Velar

• Glottal

Manner of articulation

How the airflow is modified

Manner of Articulation

• Stops

• Fricatives

• Affricates

• Nasals

• Liquids

• Glides

Stops

sounds that stop airflow

Fricatives

sounds that constict airflow

Affricates

sounds that begin like stops and end like friclives

Nasals

sounds that allow nasel airflow

Liquids

sounds that have less constration than frictives

Glides

sounds that have less constration than frictives

 Voicing

Are the vocal folds vibrating?

Be able to distinguish voiced from voiceless sounds.

Minimal pairs

Know that a minimal pair consists of words that differ in one phoneme and have different meanings.

Example:

• bat – cat

Phonotactic constraints

Know that languages have rules governing how sounds can combine to form words.

Prosodic/suprasegmental elements

• Pitch

• Loudness

• Timing

Know the major stages of early vocal development.

Be able to put these in developmental order:

Reflexive vocalizations	Birth–2 months
Cooing and laughter	2–4 months
Vocal play	4–6 months
Canonical babbling	6 months and older
Jargon	Around 10 months and older

Know canonical babbling.

Canonical babbling involves repeated consonant-vowel syllable patterns.

Understand why babbling is important.

Babbling provides an important foundation for the development of real words and speech production.

Know protowords.

Protowords are phonetically consistent forms that are less stable and more context-bound than true words.

Know characteristics of early words.

• Have simple syllable structures.

• Use a limited set of sounds.

• May have variable pronunciations.

• May simplify consonant clusters.

• Are influenced by stress patterns.

Know assimilation.

Assimilation occurs when one sound changes to become more like another sound.

Understand the relationship between vocabulary and phonology.

Vocabulary development and phonological development interact.

Children's ability to perceive and produce sounds influences their developing word forms.

Know examples of factors associated with speech sound difficulties.

• Cognitive-linguistic factors

• Cerebral palsy

• Childhood apraxia of speech

• Cleft lip and/or palate

• Hearing loss

Know the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness.

Understand that these skills involve awareness of the sound structure of language and are important for later literacy development.

Semantics

• the study of meaning in language

• Semantic development involves learning, understanding, organizing, and using words and concepts.

Understand the relationship between a word and its referent.

• A word is a symbol that refers to something—the referent.

• The relationship between a word/sign and its referent is arbitrary and symbolic.

Know these types of semantic relationships.

• Category: animals

• Synonyms: happy–joyful

• Antonyms: hot–cold

• Part–whole: wheel–car

• Function: scissors–cutting

• Attribute: apple–red/round/sweet

fast mapping

Fast mapping is the initial mapping of a new word to a referent after relatively few exposures

 vocabulary spurt.

Around 18 months, many children show a rapid increase in word acquisition.

However, not all children show a sudden vocabulary spurt; vocabulary growth may also occur gradually.

 noun bias

Early vocabularies tend to contain relatively more nouns than verbs or function words.

 overextension.

A child uses one word for too many objects or concepts.

Example: Calling every four-legged animal “dog.”

underextension

A child uses a word for a more limited meaning than adults do.

Example: Using “dog” only for the family's own dog.

Understand comprehension versus production

Children may understand more words than they can produce.

The lecture identifies differences between comprehension and production as an important finding in early semantic development.

Know how adult speech can influence vocabulary development.

• Richness of parental input

• Basic-level categories

• Joint attention

• Shared focus

Know the major environmental predictors of vocabulary development.

• Quantity of language input

• Variety of language

• Contextual richness

• Back-and-forth conversation

• Home and school experiences

Know important principles for assessing bilingual children.

• Assessment should consider both languages.

• The amount and context of exposure to each language matter.

• Bilingualism itself is not considered to cause cognitive disadvantage.

• Language exposure environments must be considered when evaluating vocabulary.

Vocabulary breadth

 how many words a child knows.

Vocabulary depth

how well the child understands the meanings and relationships associated with words.

Know these later semantic concepts.

• Word families

• Word associations

• Semantic networks

• Multiple meanings

• Figurative language

 Know the general pattern of vocabulary growth.

The lecture presents rapid vocabulary growth throughout childhood, with school-age children learning approximately 5–10 new words per day.

Metalinguistic awareness

ability to consciously think about, evaluate, and analyze language rather than simply use language to communicate.

Examples: Humor,Metaphor, Irony,Sarcasm,Word definitions,Awareness of word meanings

Know examples of populations in which semantic difficulties may occur.

• Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)

• Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)

• Intellectual disability

• Hearing impairment

• Traumatic brain injury

• Anomia/word-finding problems

Recognize possible semantic difficulties.

A child may:

• Have limited vocabulary.

• Misuse words.

• Have difficulty naming objects.

• Confuse word meanings.

• Have difficulty understanding categories.

• Have difficulty with word relationships.

• Struggle with figurative language.

Morphology

the study of word structure.

Syntax

the rules for combining words to form sentences.

morpheme

the smallest unit of meaning or grammatical function.

Free morpheme:

can stand alone.

Bound morpheme

• must be attached to another form

Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)

is a measure used to describe syntactic development.

Know methods used to study children's comprehension of multiword utterances.

Be able to recognize:

• Diary studies

• Act-out tasks

• Direction tasks

• Picture-choice tasks

• Preferential looking

• Electrophysiological methods

preferential looking

Researchers observe where a child looks in response to language.

Know how researchers study what children actually say.

• Spontaneous speech samples

• Corpora

• CHILDES

• CLAN

• TalkBank

Know an important limitation of production data.

What children produce may underestimate what they actually know.

Production can also depend on chance or the particular language sample collected.

 Know the characteristics of two-word utterances.

Early multiword utterances are dominated by content words, including:

• Nouns

• Verbs

• Adjectives

Function words are often missing.

Examples of function words include:

• Prepositions

• Conjunctions

• Articles

• Pronouns

• Auxiliaries

Telegraphic speech

 characterized by the omission of many closed-class/function words.

Examples:

• “Mommy do.”

• “Eat it.”

• “See boy.”

Understand why age alone is not a sufficient measure of syntactic development.

Children of the same chronological age may differ in their level of syntactic development.

The lecture specifically notes that age is not a good indicator by itself.

Know MLU calculation.

To calculate MLU:

Total number of morphemes ÷ total number of utterances = MLU

Be able to:

1. Separate an utterance into morphemes.

2. Count the morphemes.

3. Add the morphemes across utterances.

4. Divide by the number of utterances.

The class activity specifically requires students to perform this calculation.

Prepositions

in, on

Articles

• a

• the

Noun inflections

• possessive 's

• plural –s

Verb inflections

• progressive –ing

• past irregular

• past regular

• third-person regular

• third-person irregular

• uncontractable copula

• contractable copula

• uncontractable auxiliary

• contractable auxiliary

Know the proposed explanations.

Three possibilities discussed are:

1. Frequency

2. Semantic complexity

3. Syntactic complexity

Importantly, the lecture notes that frequency alone does not explain the acquisition order.

Know the optional infinitive stage.

Children may go through a period in which they treat tense as optional in main clauses.

The production of infinitive verbs in main clauses gradually declines around age 3 and disappears by approximately 4½ years.

overregularization.

Children sometimes apply a regular grammatical rule to an irregular form.

This demonstrates that children are not simply memorizing individual forms; they have developed productive morphological rules.

Know the importance of Berko's research.

Berko's 1958 study provided evidence that children have internalized rules for English morphology and can apply those rules to novel words.

Know the general development of negatives.

Bellugi identified three major periods:

1. Negative marker outside the sentence

   • “No Mommy do it.”

2. Negative word inside the sentence

   • “I no like it.”

3. Use of appropriate auxiliaries

   • “I don't have money.”

Know the general development of questions.

Children progress from:

• Rising intonation

• Single-clause questions

• Yes/no questions

• Wh- questions

• More complex question forms

Some question forms develop later than others.

Recognize these later-developing structures.

Know the basic meaning/characteristics of:

• Verb-particle combinations

• Tag questions

• Passives

• Coordination

• Relative clauses

Know that some sentence structures are more difficult to comprehend than others.

The lecture specifically notes that object-gap relative clauses are more difficult to comprehend than subject-gap relative clauses

Apply

You should be able to look at a child language example and identify the concept being demonstrated.

Examples of the type of thinking you should practice:

A child calls a horse, cow, and dog “dog.”

What concept? Overextension.

A child says “Mommy go” rather than “Mommy is going.”

What concept? Telegraphic speech/early multiword production.

A child says “I goed home.”

What concept? Overregularization.

A child produces /p/ instead of /k/ in a word.

What should you examine? The child's phonological pattern, including the place, manner, and voicing characteristics of the sounds.

A child says “No Mommy do it.”

What stage of negative development does this represent? The negative marker is placed outside the sentence.

Jargon

The last stage of babbling generally overlaps with the early period of meaningful speech. It is characterized by strings of sounds and syllables uttered with a rich variety of stress and intonational patterns. This kind of output is also called conversational babble, or jargon.

Learning theroy

How people receive, prosses, retain, and absorb knowlege during learing.