CH 7 NOTES- Intro to Dev. Psych

VOCAB:

Perceptual scaffolding: the way in which a familiar word serves as an anchor for learning new words that come immediately before or after it

Babbling: a form of vocalizing, beginning at around 7 months, in which infants utter strings of syllables that combine a consonant sound and a vowel sound

Broca’s aphasia: a condition in which speech is either absent or severely disrupted

Wernicke’s aphasia: patients often produce long sentences that include unnecessary words and even nonsense words


Cochlear implant: a device that transforms sounds into electrical impulses that directly stimulate the auditory nerve, bypassing the malfunctioning inner ear that ordinarily processes sound

Phonological development: the process of learning to segment speech into meaningful units of sound

Semantic development: the process of learning meanings of words and combinations of words

Grammar: the rules of a given language for the sequencing of words in a sentence and the ordering of parts of words

Pragmatic development: the process of learning the conventions that govern the use of language in particular social contexts

Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning in the words of a language

Fast mapping: the way in which children quickly form an idea of the meaning of an unfamiliar word they hear in a familiar and highly structured social interaction

Metaphor: use of a word in a way that draws a comparison between the thing the word usually refers to and some other, unrelated thing

Syntactic bootstrapping: use of knowledge of grammar to figure out the meaning of new words

Grammatical morphemes: words and parts of words that create meaning by showing the relationships between other elements within the sentence

Conversational acts: actions that achieve goals through language

Protoimperatives: early conversational acts whose purpose is to get another person to do something

Protodeclaratives: early conversational acts whose purpose is to establish joint attention and sustain a dialogue

Chronology: in language development, a simple story structure used by young children, in which they present a sequence of concrete events

Cultural modeling: culturally specific ways of telling stories

Language acquisition device (LAD): Chomsky’s term for an innate language-processing capacity that is programmed to recognize the universal rules that underlie any particular language that a child might hear

Formats: recurrent socially patterned activities in which adult and child do things together

  • Ex: peekaboo

Language acquisition support system (LASS): Bruner’s term for the patterned behaviors and formatted events within which children acquire language. It’s the environmental complement to the innate, biologically constituted LAD.

Collective monologues: communications in which young children each voice their own thoughts without attending to what the others are saying

True dialogue: a communication in which each person’s utterances take into account the utterances of others

Inner speech: According to Vygotsky, the internalization of egocentric speech that occurs during early childhood and allows individuals to mentally plan activities and solve problems

  • basically internal mental “talk” that we all engage in as we think about our experiences, plan our daily activities, and solve problems

SUMMARY:

  • Noam Chomsky- language learning is not something that the child does; it is something that happens to the child in an appropriate environment

    • Language is innate and develops through a universal process of maturation

  • Children with down syndrome are able to hold a conversation, but their vocab is relatively restricted, and their talk is grammatically simple

    • Normal language development requires normal cognitive function

  • Children with Williams syndrome are intellectually impaired, yet their language is much less impaired than their cognitive abilities would suggest

  • 2 keys that give children entrance to the world of language:

  1. Normal human biological structures and processes

  2. Active participation in a language-using community

  • Language is a cultural tool, a symbolic system of enormous scope and power. As such, it profoundly affects development by mediating human activities, relationships, and thinking. Children are born predisposed to attend to language and to communicate. They move rapidly from cooing, babbling, and jargoning into the world of language.

  • When infants suffer left-hemisphere damage, the right hemisphere can take over language functions

  • Explanations of language acquisition-

    • Biological explanations of language acquisition argue that children are able to acquire language on the basis of limited input because the human brain is hardwired to learn a language that follows certain universal rules.

    • Social and cultural explanations emphasize the role of the sociocultural environment through, for example, formats (routine, patterned activities that adult and child do together) and interactions generally.

    • Constructivist and dynamic systems approaches focus on the ways emerging language abilities relate to development in other areas. From a Piagetian perspective, for example, as egocentrism wanes, collective monologues give way to true dialogue. From a dynamic systems perspective, language development is part of a web of interacting factors, including language input from parents.