Child Psychology 2011 Exam 2

Front 1

Language Development I & II #9-16

Describe the development of language during the first year of infancy. What drives this development?

Back 1

Phonological development, sematic development, grammer, and pragmatic development together represent the basic domains of language acquisition.

The change from babbling to pronouncing words that occurs late in the first year, children give up their indiscriminate play with sounds and begin to vocalize the particular sounds and sound sequences that make up the words in the language of their community.

Front 2

Describe a language-rich environment for an infant or toddler, and discuss whether this type of environment aids in language growth.

Back 2

Normal social enviroment is essential to the process of language acquisition.

Children are not only exposed to models of how language is used and understood; they are also provided with opportunities to communicate with others, opportunities that motivate them to be better communicators, using language to express and share ideas effectively.

Front 3

What kinds of words are typical of infants’ first words? What are overextensions and underextensions and why do infants sometimes commit these errors as they begin to learn language?

Back 3

As young children's vocabularies grow, there is a rapid increase in the proportion of verbs and adjectives they contain, and by age 2, NOUNs usually account for less than half of children's vocabs.

Toddlers' growing vocabularies include a variety of relational words that are used to communivate about changes in the state or location of an object (ex: Gone and here).

One of the most useful relational word is "NO" which serve such important communicative functions as "rejection, protest, and denial."

Additional words also includes: successes (There! Hooray!) and Failures (Uh-oh)

The appearance of these words seems to support the idea that children this age become sensitive to social expectations and begin to set standards for themselves.

Overextensions: Error of mislabeling in which children use a word to refer to a broader group of objects than the word usually refers to (ex: Calling other male strangers DADDY)

Underextension: Children use words in a narrower way than they are usually meant (ex: using the word "bottle" referring to his/her bottle, other bottles are not label "bottle.")

WHY commit errors?
Children overextended due to limited vocabulary.
Children use reasonable substitute!
They comprehend more than they can produce.

Front 4

What evidence do we have that comprehension (receptive language) precedes production (expressive language) in language acquisition?

Back 4

Language acquisition is influenced by both innate abilities and enviromental stimulation.

Infants are born "ready" to learn any language, and then stop making distinctions that are not useful in their native language.

Qualities of speech to young infants appear to be useful for infant's language acquisition.

Language development over the course of infancy and toddlerhood is aided by cognitive and social development, early on children comprehend more than they can produce.

Front 5

What is fast mapping? How do principles like mutual exclusivity, whole object bias, and joint attention help children learn new words during their vocabulary spurt?

Back 5

Fast Mapping: Rapidly learning a new word after just one exposure.

Mutual Exclusivity: Assuming one label per object in word.

Whole Object assumption: Expect a new word to refer to a whole object, rather than an attribute or action.

Joint attention: Use social cue (ex: what child and adult are attending to) to help figure out meaning of new words. (Ex: Look! It's a MODI!)

Front 6

What is known about young children’s conception of word order and grammar usage during their acquisition of language?

Back 6

A watershed of language development is reached toward the end of infancy, when children begin to produce utterances consisting of two or more words.

They also create different meanings by varying the order of words.

The rule of grammer play a critical role in interpreting the meaning of sentences.

Young children also demonstrate their knowledge of grammer through the errors they make when they strings words together. Children are revealing their knowledge of the general rule for forming past tense with regular verbs by misapplying it to irregular verbs.

Front 7

What does research suggest about whether bilingual children are harmed by learning more than one language at a time? How and why is age important in the timing of learning a second language? What is the neurological evidence that supports the idea that earlier is better when it comes to learning a second language?

Back 7

Page 245:
According to the study, it is not until children are about 3 years old that hey become capable of differentiating between two separate languages.

Taken as a whole, these data appears to lay to rest the idea that there is anything harmful about children acquiring two languages simultaneously. Indeed bilingual children reap surprising rewards. The constant need to grapple with two active language systems-inhibiting one while using the other-may carry over to other area of intellectual functioning.

Bilingual children however seem to master such tasks at earlier ages than children learning a single language.

Front 8

What is meant by “pragmatics” of language? What sorts of skills are important in children’s (and adults’) ability to have a conversation?

Back 8

Young language learners are famous for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time simply because they have not yet mastered "pragmatics," which include social and cultural conventions of language use in particular contexts.

One important aspect of pragmatics is the use of language as "conversational acts" which is actions to achieve goals performed through language and gesture.

Further explanations on page 258!