CSD 330 Exam 1 Review: Language Development & Disorders

language

a complex and dynamic system of conventional symbols that is used in various modes for thought and communication (the rule-governed, code-based tool a person uses to represent thoughts and ideas)

4 specific characteristics of language

language is a system of symbols; the system of language is conventional; the language system is dynamic; language is a tool for human communication

morpheme

the smallest unit of language that carries meaning

the relationship between a word and its referent is ___

arbitrary (ex. there is no physical, logical, or natural connection between the sound or spelling of a word and the real-world object it represents; the word “cat” in no way has a physical connection to the actual furry feline, it’s just what people agree to call it)

the code we use to organize words into sentences is ___

not arbitrary (we have to follow specific rules)

language community

a group of people who use a common language

language communities emerge due to various reasons including: (list 3)

geographical circumstances (people in Ukraine speak Ukrainian); sociological reasons (ex. people of the deaf community use ASL); economic reasons (ex. the WTO conducts its activities in the main languages of the countries it conducts and regulates trade with)

communication

the process of sharing information, such as thoughts, feelings, and ideas, among two or more persons

the human brain uses language to store information and carry out many higher-level language skills / cognitive processes such as:

reasoning, hypothesizing, memorizing, planning, and problem-solving

modularity

a cognitive science theory about how the human mind is organized within the structures of the brain

modules

regions of the brain developed to process specific types of information

domain specific modules

can process very specific types of information, such as depth perception within the visual system

domain-general modules

carry out very general tasks like memory and reasoning

speech

the neuromuscular process by which humans turn language into a sound signal and transmit it through the air

hearing

the sensory system that allows speech to enter into and be processed by the human brain; aka audition; the perception of sound

speech involves the precise activation of muscles in 4 systems:

respiration, phonation, resonation, articulation

process of respiration in speech production

a breath of air is inspired into and then expired from the lungs to travel up through the trachea, or windpipe

process of phonation in speech production

within the trachea, the breath of air moves through the vocal cords, which are set into vibration to create one’s voice

process of resonation in speech production

the breath of air proceeds into the oral and neural cavities, where it __(term)

process of articulation in speech production

the breath of air is manipulated by the oral articulators to emerge as a series of speech sounds that are combined into words, phrases, and sentences

a basic model of speech production involves 3 stages:

a perceptual event/target; development of a motor schema; speech output

define the main points of the 1st stage of speech production (perceptual target)

1. the speech production process is initiated with a mental, abstract representation of the speech stream to be produced, which is the language code, providing a perceptual target of what is to be produces by speech

2. at the perceptual level, the code is represented by the phoneme

phoneme

smallest unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning; are combined to produce syllables and words

define the main points of the 2nd stage of speech production (motor schema)

1. a motor schema is developed to represent the perceptual language; this is a rough motor plan based on the abstract representation of the perceptual target

2. the rough plan organizes the phonemes into syllable chunks and is sent forward to the major muscle groups involved with speech production

define the main points of the 3rd stage of speech production (speech output)

1. the airflow, vocal cord vibration, and oral cavity movements are all finely manipulated to carry out the motor schema and create speech

2. ongoing feedback relays info about speech output back to the origination of the perceptual target and motor schema

how are speech and language related

while speech and language are largely independent processes, speech depends wholly on language because language gives speech its meaning

the transmission and reception of speech involve 4 acoustic events:

creation of a sound source; vibration of air particles; reception by the ear; comprehension by the brain

speech perception

how the brain processes speech and language

auditory perception

general term describing how the brain processes any type of auditory information

coarticulation

process where when humans produce phonemes, the phonemes overlap with one another (articulators like the lips and tongue coarticulate speech sounds because doing so is much more efficient than producing only one sound at a time)

communication involves 4 basic processes

formulation; transmission; reception; comprehension

process of formulation in communication

the process of pulling together your thoughts or ideas for sharing with another person

process of transmission in communication

the process of conveying ideas to another person, often by speaking, but also possibly through methods such as texting, writing, gesturing, signing, etc.

process of reception in communication

the process of receiving the info from another person

process of comprehension in communication

the process of making sense of a message from another person

symbolic/referential communication

occurs when an individual communicates about a specific entity (an object or event) and the relationship between the entity and its referent is arbitrary (ex. a 1 y/o says “bottle” to request something to drink)

preintentional communication

communication in which other people assume the relationship between a communicative behavior and its referent (ex. a baby cries, and its parents assume it means something like that they’re hungry)

intentional communication

precise in its intent and the relationship between the communicative behavior and its referent is not arbitrary; some forms of this are so transparent they are called iconic communication (ex. an infant pointing to a specific toy or its bottle is intentional)

oral communication

the combination of speaking and listening

linguistic feedback from a receiver

includes speaking and vocalizing (ex. “I agree,” “mm-hmm,” etc.)

nonlinguistic/extralinguistic feedback from a receiver

the use of eye contact, facial expression, posture, or proximity; can be used alone or to supplement linguistic feedback

paralinguistic feedback from a receiver

refers to the use of pitch, loudness, and pausing; are superimposed over the linguistic feedback

the 7 purposes of communication

instrumental, regulatory, interactional, personal, heuristic, imaginative, & informative

purposes of communication: instrumental

used to ask for something (ex. Will you pass me the butter, please?)

purposes of communication: regulatory

used to give directions and direct others (ex. Sit down over there.)

purposes of communication: interactional

used to interact and converse with others in a social way (ex. “How was the game last night?”)

purposes of communication: personal

used to express a state of mind or feelings about something (ex. There’s no way I passed that test!)

purposes of communication: heuristic

used to find out information and to inquire (ex. How much does this book cost?)

purposes of communication: imaginative

used to tell stories and to role-play (ex. Okay, let’s practice what you’re going to say when you call her.)

purposes of communication: informative

used to provide an organized description of an event or object (ex. So, we got to the hotel, and they had no record of our reservation. Then, they tell me they have no rooms left at all…)

3 major domains of language

form, content, and use

form (domain of language)

how words, sentences, and sounds are organized and arranged to convey content

content (domain of language)

the meaning of language; the words used and the meaning behind them; conveyed through our mental lexicon (vocabulary system)

contextualized language

language that focuses on the immediate context; content of this is concrete and supported by cues in the environment (ex. someone who just finished playing in a game is telling their parent who watched it about it)

decontextualized language

language that is shared with little reliance on the context for conveying content (ex. someone who played in a game calls their grandma and is telling them about it)

use (domain of language)

pertains to how people draw on language functionally to meet personal and social needs; the intentions behind someone’s utterances and how well their utterances achieve these intentions

5 components of form, content, and use

phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics

phonology

component of form; refers to the rules of language governing the sounds that make syllables and words

morphology

component of form; pertains to the rules of language governing the internal organization of words; allows us to add precision to language and transform small basic words into a word family

syntax

component of form; refers to the rules of language governing the internal organization of sentences; allows us to turn simple statements into complex sentences and statements

semantics

component of content; refers to the rules of language governing the meaning of individual words and word combinations

pragmatics

component of use; pertains to the rules governing language use for social purposes; synonym for social communication; governs linguistic, extralinguistic, and paralinguistic aspects of communication

5 remarkable features of language

acquisition rate, universality, species specificity, semanticity, & productivity

remarkable features of language: acquisition rate

the speed at which a child learns new vocabulary and progresses through developmental stages; children acquire the complexities of language at a seemingly miraculous rate

critical/sensitive period

period from birth to about puberty that has a window of opportunity in which language develops most rapidly and with the greatest ease

remarkable features of language: universality

language is ubiquitous among the communities of the world; suggests all persons around the world apply the same cognitive infrastructure to the task of learning language; suggests language is the product of a special human instinct

remarkable features of language: species specificity

language is strictly a human capacity; the hierarchical complexity of human language far exceeds the capabilities of even the most sophisticated of nonhuman primates

remarkable features of language: semanticity

aka displacement; the concept that human language allows people to represent events that are decontextualized, or removed from the present, to share what happened in the past or will happen in the future

remarkable features of language: productivity

principle of combination, specifically that of a small number of discrete units into seemingly infinite novel creations; phenomenon where a human could at any time utter a sentence that has never been uttered before

language difference

general term that describes the variability among language uses

dialects

natural variations of a language that evolve within specific cultural or geographical boundaries that affect form, content, and use

code switching

phenomenon where bilingual children often show language differences not seen in children raised monolingually (ex. switch between both english and spanish in a sentence)

simultaneous bilingualism

children acquire two languages concurrently (at the same time)

sequectial bilingualism

children develop one language initially and later develop a second

language disorder

a communication impairment that causes persistent difficulties in learning, understanding, or using spoken, written, or signed language

two common causes of secondary language impairments (where it is caused by something else) are

intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

specific language impairment (SLI)

the most common type of communication impairment affecting children (around 7-10% of children); a heritable language impairment causing the child to exhibit depressed language abilities

intellectual disability

a condition of arrested or incomplete development of the mind, which is especially characterized by by impairment of skills manifested during the developmental period

autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

umbrella term describing a variety of developmental conditions characterized by significant difficulties in social relationships and communication with others as well as restricted and repetitive behaviors; around 1 in 68 children have this

language impairment can also occur due to damage or injury to the mechanisms of the brain involved with language functions; brain injuries can occur _______

in utero (before birth), perinatally (during the birthing process), or after birth (called acquired brain injuries

traumatic brain injury (TBI)

brain damage resulting from blunt physical trauma to the head; about 500,000 children up to age 14 experience this annually in the U.S.

the brains of young children ___ readily heal following a brain injury (this is a common misconception)

do not

phonological development

involves acquiring the rules of language that govern the sound structure of syllables and words

minimal pairs

words that differ by only one phoneme, such as “low” and “row”

phonotactic rules

acceptable orders of sounds in syllables and words and the places where specific phonemes can and cannot occur (ex. /t/ and /s/ is illegal in the initial position of a word but legal at the end (e.g., “pots”))

3 key building blocks of phonological development

using cues to segment streams of speech; developing a phonemic inventory; becoming phonologically aware

prosodic cues (using cues to segment speech streams)

infants draw on these cues to help parse speech streams; when using these, infants draw on their familiarity with word and syllable stress patterns, or the rhythm of language (ex. strong-weak stress pattern)

phonotactic cues (using cues to segment speech streams)

infants draw on these cues to help parse speech streams; when using these, infants draw on the probability that certain sounds will occur both in general and in specific positions of words and syllables (ex. infants recognize the /gz/ sound can’t appear in the beginning but can at the end (e.g., dogs))

phonological knowledge (phonemic inventory)

the child’s acquisition of internal representations of the phonemes composing his or her native language

phonological production/expression (phonemic inventory)

the child’s expression of their native language’s phonemes to produce syllables and words; in general, children’s phonological knowledge and production are sufficiently well developed by age 3-4 to provide for fully intelligible speech

phonological awareness

an individual’s ability to attend to the phonological units of speech through implicit or explicit analysis

when examining someone’s phonological awareness, we can look at several oral tasks such as:

syllable counting, rhyme detection, initial sound identification, initial sound elision (ex. say “boat” w/o the /b/), phoneme counting

the latter three are the most challenging; an individual is said to have full phonological awareness when they can achieve up to task 5, which means they can attend explicitly to the individual phonemes in a word

morphological development

children’s internalization of the rules of language that govern word structures

morphological development includes acquiring two types of morphemes:

grammatical/inflectional and derivational

grammatical morphemes

include the plural -s, possessive ‘s, past tense -ed, present progressive -ing, and more; at about 2 years, children begin to use the first-appearing one, which is the present progressive -ing

free morphemes

can stand alone; include words with clear semantic referents (like “dream” or “dog”) and those that serve primarily grammatical purposes (like “his” “the” “that”)

bound morphemes

must be bound to or attached to other morphemes; includes prefixes and suffixes

obligatory context

occurs when a mature grammar specifies the use of a grammatical marker (ex. a girl saying “the girl toy") omits the obligatory morpheme (possessive ‘s); when a child includes a grammatical morpheme in 75% of or more of obligatory contexts, they are said to have mastered the morpheme

derivational morphemes

change a word’s syntactic class and semantic meaning (ex. turning “like” to “dislike”)

derivational relations

shared by the corpus of words derived from a common root word (e.g., friend, friendless, friendliness, befriend, etc.)