Chapters 1-5 normal lang dev

Language

A rule-governed symbolic system used to represent and share meaning; it is arbitrary, generative, and shared by a community.

Communication

A way people convey feelings, emotions, intent, or information through verbal, nonverbal, gestural, written, or signed means.

Arbitrariness

The form of a word is not inherently connected to its meaning.

Generativity/Productivity

Speakers can produce and understand an infinite number of novel utterances.

Behaviorism

Behavior changes in response to the consequences of prior behavior.

Cognitivism

Behavior cannot be understood without considering what happens in the mind of the person producing it.

Cognitive Science

An interdisciplinary field that emerged from the cognitive revolution.

Language Socialization

The process of learning to communicate in the way that adults in the community communicate.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

A proposed mechanism that takes environmental input and produces the ability to speak and understand a language.

Universal Grammar (UG)

The idea that innate language knowledge cannot be specific to any particular language.

Nativism

The view that knowledge cannot come from experience alone.

Interactionist View

The view that language development is strongly influenced by children's language-learning experiences.

Domain-General Mechanism

General learning abilities used to understand others' intentions and learn patterns in sounds.

Language

The conventional use of a system of sounds for communication and/or self-expression.

Communication

The broader process of conveying emotion, intent, or feeling between individuals through any means.

Continuity Hypothesis

The question of whether children's understanding of the world changes qualitatively during development.

Functionalist View

The view that language and language acquisition are shaped by the communicative functions language serves.

Social Interactionist Theory

The view that language is social and children acquire it because they want to communicate with others.

Connectionist Theory

The view that language consists of patterns among smaller elements of sound or meaning learned through repeated experience.

Chomskyan Revolution

A focus on the mental grammar underlying what speakers do and how language works in the mind.

Domain-Specific Mechanism

The idea that language acquisition may depend on a specialized mental module.

Formalist View

The view that language and its acquisition are unrelated to the fact that language is used for communication.

Normative Study

Large-scale studies providing information about when children develop sounds, vocabulary sizes, and sentence lengths.

Generativist Theory

UG contains innate universal language properties; experience activates this knowledge and sets language-specific parameters.

Usage-Based Theory

Language formulas and abstractions emerge from pattern learning and understanding speakers' intended meanings.

Behaviorist Theory

Language develops through positive reinforcement of successive approximations toward correct productions.

Pidgin

A language created by people without a common language, using vocabulary from contact languages with a simple grammar.

Creole

A pidgin that becomes a native language and develops a more complex grammar.

Nicaraguan Sign Language

An example showing that children can contribute to the creation and development of a new language.

Language Universal

The idea that language is universal to humans and humans have the capacity to learn language.

Broca's Area

A brain area involved in language expression; damage can cause difficulty producing speech or grammatical speech.

Wernicke's Area

A brain area involved in language comprehension; damage can cause incorrect or meaningless word use.

Intention Reading

Understanding that others have communicative intentions and determining what those intentions are.

Habituation Procedures

Procedures measuring infants' ability to discriminate stimuli by observing when they lose interest in repeated sounds.

Joint Attention

A child's ability to relate to another person about the same object or event.

Categorical Perception

Perceiving continuously varying stimuli as belonging to a limited number of categories.

Statistical Learning

Counting how frequently one stimulus is followed by another to detect patterns.

Phonological Memory

The capacity to remember newly encountered sound sequences.

Developmental Cascade

The idea that lower-order skills can affect the development of higher-order skills.

Vocal Tract

The structures whose functioning and development allow humans to produce speech.

Hemispheric Specialization

Different brain hemispheres have different specialized functions.

Prosody

The intonation contour of speech.

Childhood Aphasia

Children are more likely to experience nonfluent, Broca-type aphasia.

Heritability

The amount of variation in children's language skills that can be attributed to genetic differences.

Declarative Gesture

Gestures children use to communicate before they communicate with spoken words.

Rule Learning

The ability of babies to learn patterns or rules.

Central Executive Function

The working-memory component that allocates mental resources among competing demands.

Infant-Directed Speech

Speech with higher pitch, wider pitch range, longer pauses, and shorter phrases used with infants.

Neural Plasticity

The brain's ability to reorganize so that areas can take over functions they would not ordinarily perform.

Critical Period

A biologically determined period during which language acquisition must occur.

Age of Exposure

Earlier exposure to language is generally associated with a higher level of language proficiency.

Sensitive Period

A developmental period when the brain is especially responsive to certain experiences, although learning remains possible afterward.

Gene-Environment Interaction

The interaction of a child's genes and social experiences that shapes language learning.

Perceptual Narrowing

Language experience tunes infants' speech perception toward the sound contrasts of their language.

Maternal/Caregiver Responsivity

Caregivers build conversational sequences around infants' smiles, burps, and other sounds.

Stark stages

1. reflexive crying- birth

2. vegetative sounds-birth- 6 weeks

3. cooing- 6 weeks-8 weeks

4. vocal play -16-30 weeks

5. reduplicated babbling 6-9 months

6. nonreduplicated babbling 10-12 months

7. first word- 12-18 months