Development of Language and Symbol Use

Vocabulary practice flashcards focusing on language development, speech perception, grammar acquisition, theoretical frameworks, and symbolic development from Chapter 6.

Symbols

Systems of representing our thoughts, feelings, and knowledge, and for communicating them to other people.

Language Comprehension

The ability to understand what other people say (or sign or write); required to develop language skills.

Language Production

The act of speaking (or signing or writing) to communicate with others.

Generative

A characteristic of a language system in which a finite set of words can be combined to generate an infinite number of sentences.

Phonemes

The smallest units of meaningful sound in a language.

Morphemes

The smallest units of meaning in a language, composed of one or more phonemes.

Syntax

The rules specifying how words from different categories (such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives) can be combined into sentences.

Pragmatics

Knowledge about how language is used to communicate in various social contexts.

Dialect

A particular form of a language, often based in a specific geographic region or social group.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

An innate, biological system proposed by Noam Chomsky containing universal grammar that prepares human infants to learn language.

Universal Grammar

A proposed set of highly abstract, unconscious, hard-wired rules common to all human languages.

Brain-Language Lateralization

The hemispheric specialization of the brain for language processing, predominantly localized in the left hemisphere for $90\%$ of right-handers and lifelong signers.

Sensitive Period

The early developmental time window from infancy until around age $5$ during which language learning occurs most readily and successfully.

Infant-Directed Speech (IDS)

A distinctive mode of speech adopted by adults when talking to infants and young children, marked by higher pitch variability, slower tempo, shorter utterances, more repetition, and more questions.

Prosody

The characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, and intonational patterns with which a language is spoken.

Categorical Perception

The perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete, distinct categories along an acoustic continuum.

Voice Onset Time (VOT)

The length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating.

Word Segmentation

The process of discovering where words begin and end in fluent, continuous speech.

Distributional Properties

The phenomenon that, in any given language, certain sounds and sound patterns are significantly more likely to appear together than are others.

Babbling

The repetitive production of syllables consisting of a consonant followed by a vowel (such as "pa," "ba," or "mamama") produced as sounds or manual hand movements during early language development.

Intersubjectivity

The mutual understanding and shared psychological state that communicative partners establish during social interaction.

Joint Attention

A communicative process in which social partners intentionally focus together on an external object or referent in the environment.

Overextension

An early language error involving an overly broad interpretation and application of the meaning of a word.

Underextension

An early language error involving an overly narrow interpretation and use of the meaning of a word.

Mutual Exclusivity

A word-learning constraint where children assume that each given object will have only one label or name.

Whole-Object Assumption

A child's expectation or bias that a newly heard novel label refers to an entire object rather than to its individual parts, properties, or actions.

Syntactic Bootstrapping

The strategy of using the grammatical structure of an entire sentence to deduce or infer the meaning of a novel word.

Cross-Situational Word Learning

Determining word meanings across multiple situations by tracking statistical correlations between spoken labels and environmental meanings across different scenes.

Telegraphic Speech

Short, concise utterances that omit non-essential words, typically consisting of two-word combinations formed by the end of the second year.

Overregularization

Speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they followed regular grammatical rules (e.g., adding regular suffixes to irregular verbs or nouns).

The Wug Test

A classic experimental procedure designed by Jean Berko Gleason that demonstrates children's acquisition of regular morphological rules by requiring them to apply grammatical inflections to novel nonsense words.

Private Speech

Self-directed speech that children use to guide their thoughts and regulate their actions, emphasized by Lev Vygotsky.

Collective Monologues

Conversations among young children characterized by a series of non-sequiturs, where each child's turn has little or nothing to do with what the other child just said.

Narratives

Descriptions of past events that follow the basic structural organization of a story, typically produced by children around age $5$.

Dual Representation

The cognitive ability to mentally represent a symbolic artifact simultaneously as a real, physical object in itself and as a symbol for something other than itself.

Scale-Model Task

An experimental task developed by Judy DeLoache testing dual representation, where a child must use a miniature scale model of a room to locate a hidden toy in the actual full-sized room.

Tadpole Drawings

A universal early style of human figure drawing created by young children, consisting of a prominent circular head with arms and legs attached directly to it, omitting a separate body torso.