Language Development Flashcards

A collection of vocabulary flashcards covering the components of language, brain lateralization, sensitive periods, and word acquisition strategies from the lecture notes.

Phonemes

The smallest units of sound in a language; for example, English has $45$ and Turkish has $28$.

Morphemes

The smallest units of meaning in a language, which can be individual words like 'dog' or parts of words like the plural 's' in 'dogs'.

Syntax

The permissible combinations of words from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) that determine sentence meaning.

Pragmatics

The understanding of how language is typically used in a specific cultural context, including emotional tone and reading between the lines.

Species-specific

A trait unique to humans, such as the natural acquisition of language as part of normal development.

Species-universal

A trait shared across all human children with typical development, such as the ability to learn language.

Broca’s area

A region in the left hemisphere of the brain responsible for the production of speech.

Wernicke’s area

A region in the left hemisphere of the brain responsible for the interpretation of language.

Sensitive period

A window for language acquisition proposed to last until around age $5$ to puberty, during which language learning is most successful.

Genie

A case study of a girl isolated from $18$ months until age $13$ who failed to develop full linguistic competence, illustrating the effects of linguistic deprivation.

Infant-directed speech (IDS)

A distinctive mode of speech used by adults toward infants, characterized by greater pitch variability, slower pace, and word repetition.

Prosody

The rhythm and intonation patterns unique to each language that give them distinct sound profiles.

Categorical perception

The perception of speech sounds, such as phonemes /b/ and /p/, as belonging to discrete categories.

Perceptual narrowing

A developmental process where infants, around $10$ to $12$ months of age, lose the ability to discriminate between non-native speech sounds.

Word segmentation

The process of identifying where spoken words start and end in fluent speech, which infants begin in the second half of the first year.

Intersubjectivity

A mutual understanding shared between interaction partners during communication.

Joint attention

The act of attending to the same object together and knowing that both parties are attending to the same thing.

Vocabulary spurt

An acceleration in the rate of word learning that typically occurs after a child reaches a vocabulary of about $50$ words at $18$ months.

Mutual exclusivity

An assumption by children that a given entity will have only one name.

Whole object assumption

Children's expectation that a novel word refers to a whole object rather than a part, property, or action of that object.

Shape bias

A tendency where children extend a novel noun to other objects of the same shape, regardless of differences in size, color, or texture.

Cross-situational word learning

The process of narrowing down word meanings by observing which objects are consistently present whenever a specific word is spoken.

Syntactic bootstrapping

A strategy where children use the grammatical structure of a sentence to figure out the meaning of a new word.

Telegraphic speech

A child's two-word utterances at the end of their second year that leave out nonessential elements, similar to a telegram.

Overregularization

Speech errors where children apply regular grammatical rules to irregular words, such as saying 'growed' instead of 'grew'.