4380 Exam 2 Ch 4 Keyterms

Front 1

basic level category

Back 1

the level of abstraction that is most generally appropriate in a given situation or for the given speaker: e.g. dog, rather than animal or collie

Front 2

classical concept

Back 2

a concept that can be characterized by unchanging criteria: For instance, a triangle can be defined as a three sided figure.

Front 3

color term

Back 3

any word that refers to a color, e.g. magenta

Front 4

compound word

Back 4

a word composed of two or more free morphemes (e.g. blackboard, merry-go-round)

Front 5

core group

Back 5

a small subset of the vocabulary of a child, used very frequently

Front 6

deictic terms

Back 6

from the Greek deiktikos (able to show); words that are used as linguistic pointers (e.g. here, there) also call deixis.

Front 7

derived word

Back 7

a complex word made from a base morpheme to which various affixes have been assed: e.g. unhappiness is derived from happy by the addition of the affixes un- and -ness

Front 8

fast mapping

Back 8

children's ability to form an initial hypothesis about a word's meaning very quickly, after hearing it only once or twice; in depth learning requires multiple exposures to the word in many different contexts, however.

Front 9

focal colors

Back 9

among colors, those that are the most typical, the reddest reds and bluest blues.

Front 10

folk etymology

Back 10

an explanation of a word's origing that is not based on the actual historical record, but rather on common sense or custom: e.g. "It's called Friday because that's the day you eat fried fish"

Front 11

free-word association

Back 11

a word association in which the sub ject responds freely with the first word that comes to mind

Front 12

irony

Back 12

using words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning: e.g. "It's so clean in here," said of a messy dorm room

Front 13

metalinguistic awareness

Back 13

knowledge about language: e.g. an understanding of what a word is and a consciousness of the sounds of language. the ability to think about language.

Front 14

metaphor

Back 14

figure of speech in which one thing is called by the name of another to indicate the similarities between them: e.g. "This room is a pig pen"

Front 15

novel name-nameless category principle

Back 15

a strategy followed by yound language learners, who assume that if they hear a new word in the presence of an object whose name they do not know, the word refers to that object.

Front 16

onset and rime

Back 16

Onset refers to the initial consonant or group of consonants in a syllable, and rime refers to the remainder of the syllable.

Front 17

ontological categories

Back 17

concepts about how the world is organized that yound children have before they begin to learn language

Front 18

ostension

Back 18

pointing to referent; a technique used by mothers in teaching basic level categories e.g. that's your shoe.

Front 19

overextension

Back 19

used here to refer to a child's use of a word in a broader context than is permissible in the adult language: e.g. an infant may call all men Daddy. parents who call tigers kitty are also producing this.

Front 20

phoneme

Back 20

a speech sound that can signal a difference of meaning: two similar speech sounds p and b represent diff phonemes in English because there are pairs of words with diff meanings that have the same phonetic form, execept that one contains b where the other contains p: e.g. pet and bet

Front 21

phonological awareness

Back 21

a form of metalinguistic knowledge that includes the ability to recognize the sounds of language and to talk about them. one of the basic skills that underlies literacy.

Front 22

preferential looking paradigm

Back 22

an experimental design used with prelinguistic infants that tracks their eye movements when they are presented with verbal stimuli

Front 23

principle of contrast

Back 23

children's assumption that no two words have the same meaning. Hence they assume that a new word will ot refer to something for which they already have a name

Front 24

principle of mutual exclusitivity

Back 24

a cognitive bias shown by yound children, who typically avoid labeling anything at more than one level of generality; hence, they may refer to their pet as a dog, but not also as an animal

Front 25

principles

Back 25

rules or maxims. Basic tenets of a theory

Front 26

probabilistic concept

Back 26

a concept that is characterized by a variab le set of criteria, unlike a classical concept. For instance bird is a probabilistic concept, because no criterion defines it exclusively: a creature need not fly or have a beak or feathers to qualify as a bird.

Front 27

productivity

Back 27

refereing to the regular forms of a language that are used in the formation of new words, regular plural endings, for instance.

Front 28

prototypes

Back 28

an instance of a category that best exemplifies it: e.g., a robin is a prototypeical member of the category bird, because it has all of the important defining features.

Front 29

referent

Back 29

the actual things to which a particular word alludes-an actual cat, for instance-as opposed to the meaning of the word, which is a mental construct.

Front 30

sarcasm

Back 30

a use of language meant to wound others or convey contempt, often accomplished by the use of exaggerated intonation patterns and ironic devices (e.g. saying thank you SO MUCH to the person who say on your hat and crushed it.

Front 31

semantic development

Back 31

the acquisition of words and their many meanings and the development of that knowledge into a complex hierarchical network of associated meanings.

Front 32

semantic feature

Back 32

one of the criteria by which a concept is defined and distinguished from other concepts. For instance, + male and + relative are two features of the concept brother.

Front 33

semantic network

Back 33

a word and all of the words that are related to it through various hierarchies of meaning.

Front 34

semantic transparency

Back 34

obvious meaning. one of the principles children use in making new words: "plant man" for gardener, for instance

Front 35

set task

Back 35

a verbal task in which the respondent is required to produce particular types of items; for instance, to name in a short period of time as many items of clothing as possible or words beginning with a particular letter.

Front 36

shape bias

Back 36

a constraint on early word learning that leads the child to assume that a new word refers to the shape of an object rather than to its color, texture, or other properties

Front 37

simplicity

Back 37

one of the principles children follow in creating new words. They extend forms they already know to cover new situations, creating words like bicycler for one who rides a bicycle

Front 38

syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift

Back 38

the change-word association patterns seen when children reach the age of about seven; where previously they responded with a word that typically follows in conversations (eat: dinner), after the shift takes place they respond, like adults, with the same part of speech (eat: drink)

Front 39

taxonomic principle

Back 39

the assumption that a new word can be extended to members of the same category

Front 40

underextension

Back 40

use or understanding of a word that does not include its full range: assuming, for instance that dog refers only to collies

Front 41

word assoiciations

Back 41

words that come to mind as a result of hearing other words