Prelinguistic & Lexical Development

What is Arbitrariness?

No necessary connection between the sounds used and the message being sent

What is Displacement?

The ability to communicate about things that are currently not present.

What is Productivity?

The ability to create new utterances from previously existing utterances and sounds.

What is the Duality of Patterning?

Meaningless phonic segments (phonemes) are combined to make meaningful words, which in turn are combined again to make sentences.

What are Phonological language forms?

Sounds

What are Prosodic language forms?

The rising intonation of a question

What are Syntactic language forms?

The structured combination of words

What are Semantic Language functions?

Saying something about the world

What are Pragmatic Language forms?

Managing communicative exchange in relation to your audience and context

How does language develop early?

Infants have auditory perceptual abilities that are shaped by experience

What are the features of comprehension in infants?

Prefer speech over music

Left side of the brain process speech

Distinguish languages

What is evidence of categorical perception in infants?

Babies suck more when the sound changes

What are Phones?

Different sounds in language

What are Phonemes?

When different phones change the meaning of a word

How does phonological development relate to language distinction?

Experience with a language over the first year of life allows them to tune into the phonemic contrasts that are used in their language and tune out those that are not

How can infants retain foreign phonemic contrasts?

Brief social interaction

What is Conditioned Head Turning?

Infants are rewarded when they move their head to a sound

How do children produce language early on in life?

Language get more advanced and sophisticated from birth to their first birthday

What is the range of infant vocalisation limited to?

Size and placement of tongue in relation to vocal cavity & neuromuscular limits on the tongue

What happens related to the outside world at 6 months old?

Weaving together language and knowledge of the world

What is Joint Attention?

When two (or more) people are attending to something and they are mutually aware that they are attending to it together

What can Joint Attention predict?

Later word learning

What are the types of gestures in prelinguistic communication?

Showing, Giving & Pointing

What are the types of pointing in infants?

Imperative, declarative & interrogative

What can pointing predict?

Later vocabulary learning

What are the stages of vocalisation?

Perlocutionary (no control)

Illocutionary (non-verbal)

Locutionary (verbal)

When do babies tend to first start producing words?

12 months

How many words do children learn by the age of 6?

10-14000

How does word recognition improve with age?

At the age of 2, spoken words are recognised faster with children with a larger lexicon recognising words faster

What are under/over extensions in the learning of semantics?

Errors of scope where the wrong words are used over/under generalise objects

Is there a ‘most important’ learning mechanism?

Different learning mechanisms change in importance during development

How does simple association work in word learning?

Children learn through statistical learning by adjusting the probability of the word-function mapping as they get more info

How do social-pragmatic cues work in word-learning?

Narrows down space of possible word meanings as something to do with what we are currently attending to and/or trying to do

What is intention reading?

Children learn how words function by figuring out what that other person is intending to communicate

What is mutual exclusivity in word-learning?

“I know what that is, so it must be this!”

What is syntactic bootstrapping in word-learning?

Using language structure to identify what a word means

What is syntax?

The rules for combining words into sentences.

What is pragmatics?

The social use of language

What is the “vocabulary spurt”?

A rapid increase in word learning, usually around 18 months.

What is overextension?

Using a word too broadly (e.g., calling all animals “dog”).