Language Acquisition Final

Bilingualism Dominancy

Language you feel the most confident in

Sequential bilingualism

Learn two or more languages, one after another

Simultaneous bilingualism

Acquire two or more languages from birth

What is code switching?

Speakers are alternating between languages that they have in common with their communication partner

Why do bilinguals code switch?

Fill in lexical or grammatical gaps: Not knowing a word in one language, code switch to the other

Single-language assessment

Testing bilinguals in one language and comparing to monolingual norms

Why is single-language assessment bad?

To have a language disorder, it has to appear in both languages

Total vocabulary

Sum of all of the words that child knows in both languages

Conceptual vocabulary

Only giving children credit for the concept, not the word

Seperate Underlying Proficiency

Languages are viewed as entirely separate. Thus, skills learned in one language will not transfer to the second language.

Common Underlying Proficiency

Languages are viewed as interdependent. Thus, skills in one language influence skills in the other language.

What is a dialect?

Develop over a prolonged period when people are separated by geographical or social barriers

Southern Dialect

Pin-Pen Merger

Diphthongs → Monophthongs

Vowel lengthening

Northern Dialect

Non-Rhoticity: Dropping postvocalic r sounds as is cah for car and yahd for yard

Midwestern Dialect

Merge vowel /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ sounds into a single vowel

Northern Cities Shift

Western Dialect

Many dialects have a single vowel for the words caught and cot, fronted back vowels, so that totally sounds like tewtally

Hearing loss: Prevalence

Total number of existing cases

Hearing loss: Incidence

Number of new cases that develop over a specific time period

Language outcomes in children with hearing loss

Form → Can’t hear some morphemes, voiceless fricative /s/, plural/third person present

How many root words are in preschooler’s vocabulary?

By age 2, approximately 200 words

By the start of kindergarten, estimated 2300-4700

2 versus 4 alternative tasks

Knowledge for something that is all-or-none

How do we measure speed of word processing in children?

Look while listening procedure → 2 images on a screen, track how long it takes for child to focus on image relating to noun once it is heard

How does the brain organize meaning?

Related Category Condition

Mixed Category Condition

Head-turn preference procedure

Playing two noises, turn their heads to the sound they are aiming for

Naming errors

Typing the word “dog” to other animals, like cat, fox, and bird

How do children define nouns?

Physical characteristics

Functional properties

Locational properties

What is the typical order of spatial preposition development?

in/on/under/beside

between

in front of/behind

in front of/behind with objects like a box or a bottle

Why are adjectives difficult?

Often restricted to certain objects at first

How should we teach children adjectives?

Two objects that are different from another object in just one way OR two objects that are alike in just one way

What types of words are showing the most growth?

Derived words

Tier One Vocabulary

High frequency in oral language

Words of everyday speech

Fire, Flame

Tier Two Vocabulary

Characteristic of written language, used by more mature language users, used across content domains

General Academic Words

Blaze, Fiery

Tier Three Vocabulary

Domain specific words

Conflagration, Inferno

Homonyms

Often a dominant meaning and a subordinate meaning

Homographs

Spelled the same way with different meanings

Record → Record, Row → Row

Homophones

Sound alike with different meanings

Bear/bare, plain/plane

Lexical ambiguity

A word has more than one accepted meaning, the potential for a word to have multiple meanings, leading to ambiguity in communication

“I still miss my ex-husband, but my aim is improving.”

Phonological ambiguity

Vary the pronunciation of a word. Occurs when a word or sound sequence can be interpreted as multiple words or sounds, leading to uncertainty about the intended meaning or pronunciation

“I keep reading ‘The Lord of the Rings’ over and over. I guess its just force of hobbit.”

Figurative language

Language that we use in non-literal and often abstract ways

Metaphors

Use of an expression to refer to something that it does nor denote literally, in order to convey similarity

“Time is a thief”

Similes

Make the comparison explicit by using the word “like” or “as”

“As busy as a bee”

Oxymorons

Figurative speech that combines 2 contradictory terms in order to achieve rhetorical effect

“Alone together”

Hyperboles

Use exaggeration for emphasis or effect

“I’m so tired I could sleep for a year”

Idioms

A group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words

“Rain cats and dogs” “See the light”

Irony and Sarcasms

Involves incongruity between what a speaker says and their intended meaning

More directed at another person

“A cat-lover being allergic to cats”

Proverbs

Most difficult

Statements that express the conventional values, beliefs, and wisdom of society

“Better late than never”

How do school-age children typically learn words?

Reading (sentence context)

What are the major changes in school-age morphological development?

Add prefixes to the beginnings of words in order to change their meaning

Add suffixes to the ends of words to change their form class

What is derivational morphology?

Agent-suffix

Comparative adjective-suffix

Diminutive suffix

What is a morphophonemic change?

The study of a sound changes in morphemes that occur when they are combined with other morphemes to form words

What are morphophonemics?

Sound modifications we make when we join certain morphemes, usually occurs as change in the vowel

Derivational morphology

Alter grammatical category, often creating a new word

Teach → Teacher

Inflectional morphology

Changes the tense/plural

Walk → Walked

Value in understanding language - MLU school-age

No longer routinely used as a measure of sentence length

How it changes with discourse - MLU school-age

MLU does increase, in a way that depends on social context

What are the two key components of phonological processing?

Phonological Awareness

Phonological Working Memory

What is phonological working memory and how can we measure it?

Use your phonological memory ability to solve the following problem

Nonword repetition task: A task for measuring phonological memory

What is the relationship between phonological working memory and word learning?

Very closely related

Word → A sequence of sounds/syllables

How do we measure phonemic categorization?

Identifying words that share the same initial or final sound, or finding the “odd one out” from a group of words within a similar sound

What are the differences between written and oral language?

Written language is built on oral language

Written language is not universal

Written language must be directly taught

What is the simple view of reading?

Language comprehension combined with word recognition → skilled reading

What is word recognition?

Recognizing words in text and sounding them out phonemically

What is decoding?

Sound out a word, automatically letters to meaning

Direct vs. Indirect route

Direct: Familiar words, “Sight reading” (Men)

Indirect: Unfamiliar words (nonwords) (Swof)

What is a grapheme phoneme correspondence (alphabetic principle)?

Individual letters (or groups of letters, called graphemes) represent individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken language

Metalinguistics

Awareness of what’s going on, actively thinking about your own language

Phonological Awareness

The ability to hear and manipulate the sound structures of spoken words, encompassing skills like rhyming, syllable counting, and blending sounds

Phonemic Awareness

Can be taught

Helps children learn to read and learn to spell, most effective when focusing one or two types of skills and eventually involve letters

Lexical Restructuring Model

Learning words that are phonologically similar causes greater specificity in phonological representations of words

What is the Matthew effect and why does it matter?

Rich get richer, poor get poorer

Intervene early on, so poorer readers catch up before they fall too far behind

What is the whole-language approach?

Children learn to read just like they learn oral language

See a table → Say “table”

What is the phonics approach?

Map orthography, sound-letter correspondence

“T A BL”

What is culture?

A set of factors from multiple dimensions that can describe how one person, or a group of people experience life, and engage in daily practices

Visible parts of culture

Rituals, traditions, religious practices, language use, forms of dress, hairstyles

Invisible parts of culture

Underlying values, beliefs, assumptions, worldviews

Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory

Understand the whole system around a patient

What are the steps of culturally responsive practice?

i. Cultural humility

ii. Cultural self-awareness

iii. Critical thinking (and dialectical thinking)

iv. Cultural knowledge

v. Cultural reciprocity

What is racism?

Racial prejudice plus power

Institutional racism

The privilege and power of some groups based on race that occurs when racial inequalities take place within institutional policies and practices

Structural racism

Interaction of multiple institutions in an ongoing process of producing radicalized outcomes

What is linguicism?

Attributing positive characteristics to a desired language and negative characteristics to a dominated language

What is imperial linguicism?

Where there is an imperialist structure of exploitation of one society by another

Social Cognition Model: Social Attention

Attending to the social environment (e.g., other people, facial expressions, body language, words, actions)

Social Cognition Model: Social Interpretation

Making assumptions about those signals mean (e.g., assigning intention, motive, other meaning)

Social Cognition Model: Problem Solving

Deciding what to do based on your interpretation

Social Cognition Model: Social Response

Responding (i.e., the “social skill”)

Different factors that influence dialectal variation

Geographical barriers: Region of the country where one lives

Social barriers: Income level

Race/Ethnicity: Familial dialect, dialect heard/used at home

Occupation, Education, Age

Why is dialect use not homogenous between dialect users?

Is not a uniform within a community of dialect users

Code switching: Not exclusive to multilingual, can also refer to dialect

How can dialects affect form?

Devoicing final /z/ in Chicago English

Third-person singular -s absence in African American English

Perfective done with past tense verbs in Southern African English

How can dialects affect content?

“Schlep,” “Schmooze,” and “Klutz” in Jewish-American English

How can dialects affect use?

Code switching

Different cultural dialects may necessitate altered pragmatic behaviors

How are language disorders (e.g., DLD) different from dialect?

Dialects are differences, not disorders

How does dialects affect form, content, and use?

It affects all three

How does accents affect form, content, and use?

Only affects use