Lang Dev & Assess for Practice FINAL

SLP 251 CSUSM FALL 2026

By 3 years old a child should be ____ intelligible

75%

About ___ % of kindergarteners w/ SLI still have SLI in 4th grade

50%

T/F: Language disorders are the most prevalent type of communication impairment affecting children

TRUE

Children who are pretending they are reading or writing are exhibiting what skill?

Emergent literacy

T/F: A speech disorder includes a difficulty w/ morphemes

TRUE

What classifies late talkers?

50 or fewer words by age 2

By graduation from high school, vocabulary is about ____ words

60,000

Initial reading stage (K-1) =

decoding

Interactions that attempt to convey meaning before the onset of language are:

protoconversations

Children from low SES have a ____ word gap by age 5

30 million

What is spreading activation?

The activation of specific entries spreads across the network according to connection strength

Mental Lexicon

The volume of words a person understands (receptive) and uses (expressive)

T/F: Speech has advantages over other methods of human communication like gestures

TRUE

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that carries MEANING

Cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts

Zone of proximal development theory

the gap between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance from someone with more knowledge or expertise

The 3 domains of language

1. Form

2. Content

3. Use

The 5 components of Language

1. Phonology

2. Morphology

3. Semantics

4. Syntax

5. Pragmatics

T/F: Language depends on speech, but speech does not depend on language

FALSE, there are other forms of language such as writing, ASL, etc & speech DOES depend on language

What are the 4 systems in speech?

1. Respiration

2. Phonation

3. Resonance

4. Articulation

Auditory perception

How the brain processes sounds in the environment

Speech perception

How the brain processes spoken words

What does IPA stand for?

International Phonetic Alphabet

T/F: Only speech may be considered language

FALSE

What is language?

A complex & dynamic system of conventional symbols that is used in various modes for thought & communication

A tool

Semanticity

The aspect of language that allows people to represent the world to others

The Critical Period

Refers to the years of early language acquisition from birth to about puberty

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning

Naturalist Setting/Context

Researchers do NOT manipulate variables in the environment (just watch)

Behaviorist Theory

B.F Skinner believed: All learning is result of operant conditioning

Behaviors that are reinforced = strengthened

Behaviors punished = suppressed

A nurture - Inspired Theory

Nurture-inspired Theory

Children have no innate knowledge for language learning

Modularity Theory

Fodar emphasizes organization of cognition within brain in series of modules that can operate independently to perform certain functions and interact with each other to produce combination of functions

Universal Grammar

Noam Chomsky’s theory: The system of grammatical rules & constraints consistent in ALL world languages

Bootstrapping Theories

The theory that individuals accomplish a goal by themselves without much or any help

Universal Grammar, Modularity Theory, and Bootstrapping Theories are all examples of ________ theories

Nature-inspired theories

Language acquisition device

An innate module that language acquisition depends on according to Chomsky

Competition Model

MacWhinney believed: repeated language input strengthened representation

Evidence Based Practice

There is observable evidence to document the effectiveness of a particular treatment, procedure, or assessment

Linguistic competence

The knowledge a child has about language

Linguistic performance

A child’s ability to actually produce language

T/F: Consonants are acquired after vowels & some consonants are mastered at younger ages than others

TRUE

Phonemic inventory

All sounds that are typically produced in a specific language

Inflectional morphemes

A type of morpheme that does NOT change syntactic class or semantic meaning of words

ex: plural -s → cat - cats

T/F: Negative sentences make declarative statements

TRUE

Minimal pairs

Words that differ by only one phoneme

ex: cat - bat

Phonological awareness

The ability to attend to phonological unites of speech or the awareness of individual phonemes in a language

Child directed speech

The talk directed to children by others (what they hear from others)

Children’s linguistic experience through CDS contributes to language acquisition

Joint attention

Having two or more people focused on the same object, event, activity with mutual awareness

Phonics

The relationship between letters & sounds

Derivational morpheme

Added to root words (free morphemes) & usually change meaning of word

ex: happy → unhappy

Prosody

pattern or stress in a language (pitch, rhythm, intonation, loudness)

Dialect

A language difference where natural variations of a language evolve within specific cultural or geographic boundaries

ex: African American English

Preposition

A words used to link nouns, pronouns, or phrases to other words within a sentence

Acts to connect people, objects, time, and location of a sentence

Learning from input hypothesis

Grammatical properties of children’s language use deepens on exposure to properties in child directed speech (CDS)

Infant directed speech (IDS)

The speech adults use to interact with infants

Synonymous w/ mothers/fatherese

Overextension

Children use words in an overly general manner (overgeneralization)

Underextension

Toddlers use words to refer to only a subset of possible referents

Fast mapping

When toddlers can pick up words after only a few incidental exposures

Extended mapping

A refined understanding of a word that’s had repeated exposure

T/F: Fast mapping occurs after slow mapping

FALSE; slow mapping occurs after FM where children refine representations

T/F: The “-ing” is the 1st grammatical morpheme acquired by (native) English-learning children according to Brown’s chart

TRUE; at 19 - 28 months

Customary age of production

Age by which 50% of children can produce a sound in an adult-like way

Age of mastery

Age by which 90% of children produce sound in an adult-like manner

False belief

These tasks assess whether children demonstrate understanding that another’s beliefs can differ from their own

MLU

Mean length utterance is calculated by dividing total # of morphemes in a language sample by total # of utterances

Expressive language

The language that infants produce spontaneously, not imitating another’s verbalizations

What stage of babbling do infants/toddlers begin to use diphthongs?

Advanced forms (9-18 months)

At which stage of babbling do infants begin “cooing” and “gooing”?

Control of phonation (1-4 months)

In which stage of babbling will you begin to hear marginal babbling?

Expansion (3-8 months)

Marginal babbling

An early type of babbling containing short strings of consonant-like and vowel-like sounds

Non reduplicated babbling

AKA variegated babbling where there are non repeated consonant vowel combinations

ex: ma, da, goo, ga

Receptive language

The language children can comprehend

Overlap

When toddlers overextend a word in certain circumstances & underextend in others

Allophones

2 or more variants of the same phoneme in a language

ex: pen vs spin (“puh” vs “pih”)

At what stage does canonical babbling occur?

Stage 4 - Basic canonical syllables (5-10 months)

Canonical babbling

When infants produce more than 2 consonant vowel syllables in a sequence

Referential gestures

These gestures have a precise referent & meaning that is stable across contexts

Deictic gestures

Their meaning depends on the context

ex: pointing

Contextualized language

Relies on context and language to construct meaning, grounded in “here & now”

Preschoolers acquire ____ words yearly

860

_____ _______ skills acquired in infancy & toddlerhood can promote early (pre) literacy abilities

Oral language

Grammaticality judgement tasks

Child must decide whether sentence is syntactically acceptable (well-formedness judgment) & researchers use this to investigate syntactic development

Allomorph

A variant of a morpheme that changes its pronunciation but not its meaning

ex: plural -s → cats, kids

Metalinguistic ability

The ability to view language as an object of attention

Decontextualized language

Relies on language itself in construction of meaning & begins to emerge in the preschool period

Deictic terms, opposites, and locational prepositions are examples of _______ ______

Relational terms

Slow mapping

When children gradually refine representations of a word

T/F: Most children cannot construct true narratives with a problem & resolution until about 4 years

TRUE

T/F: Preschoolers from low SES backgrounds do not benefit from attending classes w/ children from mixed SES backgrounds

FALSE

T/F: Gliding & stopping are 2 phonological processes that may persist beyond age 5

TRUE

Emergent literacy

Earliest period of learning about reading & writing where exposure to reading/writing happens

Print awareness

A child’s understanding that printed words carry meanings

Which stage of reading typically occurs after age 8 where a child can start to learn information from text?

“Reading to learn”

Digraph

When 2 graphemes make one phoneme

ex: ‘sh’ - sheet, ‘ch’ - chip

Homophone

Words that SOUND the SAME but have different meanings & often different spellings (heterographs)

ex: Blue, blew & to, two, too

Homograph

Words SPELLED the SAME but have different meanings & different pronunciation (heteronyms/heterophones)

ex: ring (a phone call vs a piece of jewelry, bow (on a present vs action after performing on stage)

Hyperbole

An exaggeration for emphasis or effect

ex: I ate a mile high ice cream cone

Idiom

An expression containing a literal & figurative meaning

ex: She spilled the beans

Which stage of reading typically occurs at the secondary level where multiple perspectives are considered?

Multiple viewpoints

Metaphor

A comparison in which one thing is said to be another

ex: You are such a Goldilocks

T/F: Reading fluency includes punctuation, expression, rate & accuracy

TRUE