Melissa Dunne
Chapter 2 Review
09/11/2016
1. List two-three factors that influence semantic development. For each, specify how a specific factor might affect a child’s semantic development.
Semantic development describes how someone learns and retains (or stores) the meanings of words. Three factors that influence semantic development are gender, language impairment, and language exposure.
First, girls seem to be at an advantage when it comes to semantic development. Not only do they have larger vocabularies, but they tend to pick up new words more readily than boys. These differences are most prominent before the ages of 6 or 7 (afterward, they decrease or even disappear). Researchers hypothesize that these differences are due to the interplay …show more content…
How do phonotactic rules impact a child’s phonological development?
From an early age, infants begin using phonotactic cues to parse streams of speech. They also become attuned to the probability that certain sounds will occur in general and in specific places of syllables and words. A child will use his/her knowledge of these probabilities to segment a potential word boundary following a sequence. Knowing phonotactic probabilities—and improbabilities—enables an infant to segment novel, or new, words from an unbroken speech stream.
Phonotactic rules allow children to understand legal (or acceptable) orders of sounds in words and syllables and recognize places where specific phonemes can and cannot occur. For instance, English-learning children soon realize that /l/ + /h/ is not an acceptable combination of sounds. They also realize that the sound combinations /t/ + /s/ and /g/ + /z/ are only permissible at the end of a word. Thus, a child may recognize that a word cannot begin with /t/ + /s/ but know that words ending with this combination of sounds are perfectly acceptable (e.g., “cats” or “dots”). S/he may also realize that this sound signifies a word boundary/the end of a …show more content…
To acquire these skills, children must develop an understanding of conversational schema. This schema provides a specific, internalized representation of the organizational structure of conversations. On a macrostructural level, a conversational schema consists of three parts. First, a topic is initiated and established. Then, participants take turns to either continue discussing the current topic or change topics entirely. Lastly, participants end the conversation by engaging in resolution and closure. However, children must also acquire microstructural schemata, including knowing how to respond appropriately to topic shifts, understanding how to negotiate breakdowns in conversation, and knowing how much information to provide based on the degree of shared background information among participants. Children must also be able to identify an already-established conversation’s frame of reference and appropriately insert themselves into this conversation. Developing a conversational schema begins soon after birth as infants begin to engage in extended periods of joint attention with their caregivers. These protoconversations help children develop nascent and early conversational schema that will be continually refined as they acquire conversational
Chapter 2 Review
09/11/2016
1. List two-three factors that influence semantic development. For each, specify how a specific factor might affect a child’s semantic development.
Semantic development describes how someone learns and retains (or stores) the meanings of words. Three factors that influence semantic development are gender, language impairment, and language exposure.
First, girls seem to be at an advantage when it comes to semantic development. Not only do they have larger vocabularies, but they tend to pick up new words more readily than boys. These differences are most prominent before the ages of 6 or 7 (afterward, they decrease or even disappear). Researchers hypothesize that these differences are due to the interplay …show more content…
How do phonotactic rules impact a child’s phonological development?
From an early age, infants begin using phonotactic cues to parse streams of speech. They also become attuned to the probability that certain sounds will occur in general and in specific places of syllables and words. A child will use his/her knowledge of these probabilities to segment a potential word boundary following a sequence. Knowing phonotactic probabilities—and improbabilities—enables an infant to segment novel, or new, words from an unbroken speech stream.
Phonotactic rules allow children to understand legal (or acceptable) orders of sounds in words and syllables and recognize places where specific phonemes can and cannot occur. For instance, English-learning children soon realize that /l/ + /h/ is not an acceptable combination of sounds. They also realize that the sound combinations /t/ + /s/ and /g/ + /z/ are only permissible at the end of a word. Thus, a child may recognize that a word cannot begin with /t/ + /s/ but know that words ending with this combination of sounds are perfectly acceptable (e.g., “cats” or “dots”). S/he may also realize that this sound signifies a word boundary/the end of a …show more content…
To acquire these skills, children must develop an understanding of conversational schema. This schema provides a specific, internalized representation of the organizational structure of conversations. On a macrostructural level, a conversational schema consists of three parts. First, a topic is initiated and established. Then, participants take turns to either continue discussing the current topic or change topics entirely. Lastly, participants end the conversation by engaging in resolution and closure. However, children must also acquire microstructural schemata, including knowing how to respond appropriately to topic shifts, understanding how to negotiate breakdowns in conversation, and knowing how much information to provide based on the degree of shared background information among participants. Children must also be able to identify an already-established conversation’s frame of reference and appropriately insert themselves into this conversation. Developing a conversational schema begins soon after birth as infants begin to engage in extended periods of joint attention with their caregivers. These protoconversations help children develop nascent and early conversational schema that will be continually refined as they acquire conversational