Developmental Psych Ch 6
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37 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 symbols | systems for representing our thoughts, feelings and knowledge for communicating them to other people |
| language comprehension | understanding what others say (or sign or write) |
| language production | speaking (or writing/signing) to others |
| generativity | refers to the idea that through the use of the finite set of words in our vocabulary we can put together an infinite number of sentences and express an infinite number of ideas |
| phenomes | the elementary units of meaningful sound used to produce language |
| phenological development | the acquisition of knowledge about the sound system of a language |
| morphemes | the smallest units of meaning in a language, composed of one or more phenomes |
| semantic development | the learning of the system for expressing meaning in a language, including word learning |
| syntax | rules in a language that specify how words form from different categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc) can be combined |
| syntactic development | the learning of the syntax of a language |
| pragmatic development | the acquisition of knowledge about how language is used |
| metalinguistic knowledge | an understanding of the properties and function of language - that is an understanding of language as a language |
| critical period for language | the time during which language develops readily and after which (sometimes between age 5 and puberty) language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful |
| infant-directed talk (IDT) | the distinctive mode of speech that adults adopt when talking to babies and very young children |
| bilingualism | the ability to use two languages |
| prosody | the characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, intonational patterns and so forth with which a language is spoken |
| categorical perception | the perception of speech sounds as belonging to discrete categories |
| voice onset time (VOT) | the length of time between when air passes through the lips and when the vocal cords start vibrating |
| distributional properties | the phenomenon that in any language certain sounds are more likely to appear together than are others |
| reference | in a language and speech, the associating of words and meaning |
| style | the strategies that young children enlist in beginning to speak |
| referential (analytical) style | speech strategy that analyzes the speech stream into individual phonetic elements and words, the first utterances of children who adopt this style tend to use isolated, often monosyllabic words |
| expressive (holistic) style | speech strategy that gives more attention to the overall sound of language - its rhythmic and intonational patterns - than to the phonetic elements of which it is composed |
| wait-and-see style | speech strategy that typically involves a late start in speaking, but a large vocabulary once speaking begins |
| holophrastic period | the period when children begin using words in their small productive vocab one word at a time |
| overextension | the use of a given word in a broader context than is appropriate |
| fast mapping | the process of rapidly learning a new word simply from hearing the contrastive use of familiar and the unfamiliar word |
| pragmatic cues | aspects of the social context used for word learning |
| syntactic bootstrapping | the strategy of using the grammatical structure of whole sentences to figure out meaning |
| telegraphic speech | the term describing children's first sentences that are generally two-word utterances |
| overregularization | speech errors in which children treat irregular forms of words as if they were regular |
| collective monologue | conversation between children that involves a series of non sequiturs, the context of each child's turn having little or nothing to do with what the other child has just said |
| narratives | descriptions of past events that have the basic structure of a story |
| universal grammar | a set of highly abstract, unconscious rules that are common to all languages |
| modularity hypothesis | the idea that the human brain contains an innate, self contained language module that is separate from other aspects of cognitive functioning |
| connectionism | a type of information processing approach that emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units |
| dual representation | the idea that a symbolic artifact must be represented mentally in two ways at the same time - both as a real object and as a symbol for something other than itself |
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