Normal Speech & Language Development: Cognitive, Social, and Communicative Foundations

Vocabulary flashcards covering the cognitive, perceptual, motor, social, and communicative foundations of early language acquisition based on Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of the Owens textbook curriculum.

Sensation

The ability to register sensory information, with all senses functioning at birth.

Habituation

A process where a sensory input (stimulus) no longer elicits a significant response, enabling an infant to attend to novel stimuli without competition from older stimuli.

Perception

The process of using sensory information and previous knowledge to organize and interpret the input received by the senses.

Motor Control

Muscle movement along with the sensory feedback that informs the brain of the extent of that movement.

Reflexes

Automatic, involuntary motor patterns that characterize neonatal behavior, most of which disappear or become modified by $6$ months of age.

Cognition

The mental activities involved in the comprehension of perceived information, including the processes of thought, learning, and problem solving.

Organization (Cognitive)

The ability to store and represent knowledge systematically.

Schema

The basic unit of cognitive organization or concept linked to related stored information in complex webs termed mental maps.

Assimilation

when incoming perceptual data fits into an existing category or concept, allowing the information to be stored.

Accommodation

when perceptual data does not fit an existing category, resulting in the creation of a new concept or the modification of an old concept.

Signal

An object or action that elicits a response based on repeated exposure, such as the sight of a bottle signaling feeding time.

Symbol

A mental or linguistic representation of an entity or concept, such as an adult word standing for an object.

Bonding

The basic link of trust between infant and caregiver that develops from repeated completions of the need-cry-action-satisfaction cycle, particularly during the first $6$ months of life.

attachment

A secondary cycle initiated when parental limits are set (Child Behavior $\rightarrow$ Parent Limit $\rightarrow$ Frustration/Shame $\rightarrow$ Adult Restates Intention), which fosters trust in adult authority when natural shame is mitigated.

Attachment

A person-specific relationship dominated by affectionate interchanges that grows out of early bonding cycles of trust.

Pre-intentional Stage

An early communicative stage (generally birth to $6$ months) where infant behaviors are reflexive and undifferentiated, characterized by attentional and contingency interactions.

Attentional Interactions

Early infant behaviors in which the child attends to and discriminates sensory stimuli within the environment.

Contingency Interactions

Infant behaviors that produce predictable responses and result in sustained, reciprocal interactions with the caregiver.

Protoconversations

Interactional exchanges between an infant and caregiver that contain the fundamental structural elements of emerging conversation, such as initiation, playful dialogue, turn-taking, and disengagement.

Quasi-Resonant Nuclei (QRN)

Vowel-like sounds containing brief consonant-like elements produced by infants during cooing or gooing when phonation is normal but motor control is insufficient for true consonant production.

Fully Resonant Nuclei (FRN)

Single-syllable vocalizations consisting of consonant-vowel or vowel-consonant constructions that emerge during babbling around $5$ months of age.

Intentionality Stage

A stage of early communication emerging around $7$ to $12$ months wherein a child clearly encodes a message for someone else using deliberate gestures and vocalizations.

Protoimperatives

Early prelinguistic gestures used by an infant to signal requests for objects, participation, or adult action.

Protodeclaratives

Early prelinguistic gestures used by an infant to show objects, engage socially, or maintain joint attention with a partner.

Reduplicated Babbling

A type of babbling emerging around $6$ to $7$ months characterized by long strings of repeated consonant-vowel combinations (e.g., "mamama", "dadada").

Variegated Babbling

A type of babbling emerging around $8$ months in which adjacent syllables are not identical (e.g., "mababadadama").

Jargon

Strings of unintelligible vocalizations that mirror the prosodic, pitch, and intonational contours of adult speech.

Phonetically Consistent Forms (PCFs)

Consistent vocal patterns that demonstrate sound-meaning relationships used by an infant prior to the production of true adult words.

Locutionary Stage

The communicative stage beginning around $12$ months in which a child uses meaningful, symbolic words to convey communicative intentions.

Reference Principle

A receptive word-learning assumption that words stand for and represent their referents.

Extendability Principle

A receptive word-learning assumption that a single word or symbol can be used to refer to more than one specific exemplar of a category.

Whole-Object Principle

A receptive word-learning assumption that a novel label refers to the complete entity rather than to one of its parts or attributes.

True First Word

A child utterance produced around $12$ months that shares a phonetic relationship with an adult word, is used consistently, and occurs in the presence of the referent.

Evocative Utterance

An expressive language strategy where a child names an entity or event as a statement, typically prompting evaluative feedback from a caregiver.

Hypothesis Testing

An expressive language strategy where a child produces a word with rising intonation to seek adult confirmation regarding its label.

Interrogative Utterance

An expressive strategy where a child directly requests information or labels by asking questions such as "what?", "what that?", or "wassat?".

Selective Imitation

An expressive learning strategy in which a toddler repeats all or part of an adult utterance that is slightly above their current expressive ability, accounting for roughly $20\%$ of toddler speech.

Child-Directed Speech (CDS)

Systematic adaptations made by caregivers to their speech (formerly termed motherese or parentese) characterized by simplified syntax, higher pitch, exaggerated intonation, and short utterances to support infant attention and language acquisition.

Expansion (Recasting)

A caregiver verbal response that maintains the child's word order while adding grammatical markers and syntax to model a more mature linguistic form.

Extension

A caregiver verbal response that provides additional semantic meaning and related information to the child's preceding utterance.

Scripts (Event-Based Knowledge)

Mental representations formed by a child based on familiar, repeated daily routines that outline the sequence of predictable events and interactional exchanges.