Language Development Test 3

Front 1

Selective Language Impairment

Back 1

language impairment in the absence of obvious cognitive deficits

Front 2

Williams syndrome

Back 2

good language skills in the presence of severe cognitive impairments

Front 3

What do SLI and Williams syndrome tell us

Back 3

Evidence for modularity (cognition vs. language)

Front 4

Down Syndrome

Back 4

genetic condition (extra chromosome) causing physical & intellectual developmentally delays

Front 5

language impairment in Down Syndrome

Back 5

late canonical babbling, phonological development slow, intelligibility problems remain; late appearance of first words (~24 mo), lexicon lags behind mental age but comprehension on par; MLU rises slowly & plateaus, morphological marks used spradically; grammar impaired but pragmatics intact

Front 6

Autism

Back 6

delays cognitive and language skills, spectrum disorder typically with IQ 50-70, 4X more frequent in males

Front 7

language impairment in autism

Back 7

50% never develop expressive language; early mutism & non-recognition of speech, little interest in communication; early lack of preference for IDS, responsiveness to own name; echolalia (lack of comprehension?); syntactic development delayed but normal, vocabulary lacking mental state words, few questions, impaired perception & production of prosody, pragmatics

Front 8

high functioning autism

Back 8

normal to high IQ; impaired social awareness, theory of mind; excellent memory, impaired comprehension, often exhibit savant abilities

Front 9

Sally puts a marble in basket & leaves, Anne moves the marble to a box. Where will DS subjects say Sally will look? ND? Autistic?

Back 9

ND & DS - the basket, autistic - the box (even though autistic kids have higher IQ than DS

Front 10

absence of joint attention at 18 mos is predictive of

Back 10

autism - may lead to mapping errors due to failure to monitor gaze

Front 11

Describe Baron-Cohen et al (1997) study of object labelling with autistic children

Back 11

matched kids with autism to children with cognitive impairments; tested mapping of novel word to novel object; control pretest asked to identify 2 familiar objects drawn from a set of 4 (for comprehension), test labelling 2 novel objects from set of 4 by drawing out of bag with 2 new objects and 2 from pretest-> discrepant condition (experimenter waits until child looks at own toy, then looks at hers and says the word) vs. Follow in condition (looks at the child's toy &says the word)-> autistic children made more errors in discrepant condition, choosing object they were looking at themselves

Front 12

differences in Down syndrome & autism language development are evidence for what

Back 12

dissociation between language structure and language use

Front 13

language acquisition in the blind

Back 13

more difficulty with sound distinctions aided by visual info like place of articulation, babbling onset same, vocalize less in adult presence, first words same age, same types of gestures but low rate

Front 14

What similarities and differences did Iverson et al (2000) longitudinal study (14-28mos) in gesture use of blind & sighted toddlers?

Back 14

same types of gestures: poiting, conventional, reach/request; sighted had high rate of gesture early on, blind low rate throughout, sighted pointed, blind use flat palms out more, blind use more gestures for close objects & more touching of object

Front 15

word learning in the blind

Back 15

first words acquired at same age as sighted, can't use eye gaze to infer meaning (less joint attention) so less incidental learning and fewer contextual cues to meaning, more words for sound-associated objects and fewer for objects seen but not touched, fewer overgeneralizations, more undergeneralization; infrequent error-prone use of deictic terms like this and that, prolonged errors in pronoun use because adults avoid them, delay in auxiliary verb use

Front 16

What did Landau * Gleitman find regarding sight-related words in blind children

Back 16

comprehending see -> proper responses e.g. Turning back toward speaker for "let me see your back", look means apprehend or explore with hands rather than touch vs. Sighted blindfolded kids still turn eyes toward; produce look and see correctly e.g. Look for command, but not see (maybe from syntactic frames), errors in deictic terms (this that)

Front 17

primary determinant of language outcome in deaf children

Back 17

language environment

Front 18

Prelingual deafness:

Back 18

loss of hearing prior to language acquisition

Front 19

distribution of sign language vs. Oralist environment for deaf children

Back 19

~10% deaf children with deaf parent, 90% deaf children (hearing parents)

Front 20

acquisition of sign language for children exposed to sign from birth

Back 20

major milestones reach earlier but same timing for referential words, same stages in same order (babbling, single-sign, multisign, + morphology, + syntax), same types of processes (overregularization, pronoun reversal errors)

Front 21

oral language in deaf

Back 21

uses lip reading but is only partial cue to sounds, phonological development abnormal, lexical development delayed w/ more variable outcomes, syntactic development delayed w' plateaus, ~15-50% produce intelligible speech

Front 22

cochlear implant

Back 22

electronic device that provides electrical stimulation directly to the nerve fibers

Front 23

Tye-Murray found what regarded cochlear implants in children

Back 23

acquire language more effectively than kids with same hearing loss using hearing aids -> better vocab growth, incidental learning & suprasegmental features

Front 24

limitations of cochlear implants

Back 24

degraded acoustic input, early auditory deprivation, poor reception of music, noisy environments & running speech hard to understand -> requires intensive training; benefits influenced by communication system used before implant, age of implantation & duration of deafness, desire to communicate orally, pre- or post-lingual deafening, speech processing strategy in implant itself

Front 25

Pidgin

Back 25

simplified language developed for communication by speakers of different languages, oft. In trade/slave situations, learned as 2nd language

Front 26

Creole

Back 26

pidgins natively acquired by children increase in grammatical complexity & regularization, becomes full-fledged language

Front 27

Nicaraguan Sign Language

Back 27

creation of vocational school provided opportunity for interaction - not instructed in sign, developed from informal home gesture systems: first gen made it & regularized it, next gen learned & changed it to full-blown complex language: generations differ in spatial grammar

Front 28

What did Senghas & Coppola, 2001 find regarding Nicaraguan sign language?

Back 28

Spatial agreement study: when sign a noun & its adjective or verb & object you sign them in same spatial location -> task was to view video and sign story to deaf peer -> early-exposed students from gen 2 more modulations than early-exposed from gen 1, no difference between later-exposed gen2 and gen1 -> young children change the language

Front 29

ways to study language development from behavior genetic approach

Back 29

Look at variation in rate of development, study contribution of heredity to variation -> twin studies to parse environment vs. Genetics

Front 30

what have twin studies revealed about language development

Back 30

25-60% of variance attributable to genetics - genetics more closely tied to variation in grammatical abilities than vocab; environmental studies show more influenceof env't on vocab than grammar

Front 31

evidence for genetic contributions to LD

Back 31

twin study genetics for grammar, language impairment runs in family (e.g. KE family)

Front 32

KE family

Back 32

inability to construct syntactic rules for tense, number, gender; poor speech articulation; general orofacial dyspraxia; slightly lower ; intelligrance than unaffected family members; FOXP2 gene implicated

Front 33

FOXP2 gene

Back 33

found in KE family -> affects expression of unknown # of other genes, involved in development of brain & lungs in many species, affects song learning in songbirds -> not a SPEECH gene

Front 34

Characteristics of SLI

Back 34

late onset of talking; delay & deficient use of grammatical morphology; delay of grammatical morphology relative to syntax (unusual ansynchrony)

Front 35

Possible linguistic causes of SLI?

Back 35

difficulty/delay in underlying linguistic mechanism - learning implicit rules for marking; deficit in processing brief/rapidly changing sounds (trouble reporting order of rapid sounds -> function words are brief & reduced, speech is rapid); poor phonological memory (poor nonsense word repetition)

Front 36

Possible nonlinguistic causes of SLI?

Back 36

slow information processing + limited phonological memory; genetic factors (but, some people with SLI do not have family incidence) ... May be different for phonological vs. Grammatical SLI

Front 37

What is neurolinguistics?

Back 37

study of the relation between the brain & language functioning, asks where, if there are modules for different parts of language processing, what about brain allows language acquisition.

Front 38

What is aphasia?

Back 38

disruption of language processing caused by brain lesion.

Front 39

Types of aphasia

Back 39

Broca's aphasia, Wernicke's -

Front 40

Broca's aphasia

Back 40

damage to Broca's area near motor areas controlling lips and tongue – disfluent speech, lacks grammatical structure

Front 41

Wernicke's aphasia

Back 41

Wernicke's area near auditory areas – fluent speech, many neologisms & poor comprehension

Front 42

What is a split brain patient?

Back 42

severed corpus callosum

Front 43

Techniques used to study brain during language processing in normal people

Back 43

WADA test, fMRI, ERP, NIRS

Front 44

Pros & cons of NIRS

Back 44

Ok spatial and temporal resolution, bad for babies

Front 45

Pros & cons of ERP

Back 45

Great temporal resolution, poor spatial resolution, requires many trials because signals are small

Front 46

Pros & cons of fMRI

Back 46

Great spatial resolution (“where”), poor temporal, bad for baby studies

Front 47

Event-related potentials (ERPs)

Back 47

Measuring electrical activity in response to particular stimulus events

Front 48

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Back 48

Measuring oxygenation in the blood (via magnetic field)

Front 49

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)

Back 49

Measuring oxygenation in the blood (via infrared light)

Front 50

What have neuroimaging studies shown about language and the brain in infants?

Back 50

left hemisphere bias for forward & backward speech, even in newborns; similar pattern of electrical response as adults for phoneme discrimination – categorical perception with less activity

Front 51

Equipotentiality hypothesis

Back 51

LH is not specialized for language at birth, but language shifts there during maturation

Front 52

  Invariance hypothesis

Back 52

LH is specialized for language from birth

Front 53

Damage to RH leads to

Back 53

problems with intonation, emotional tone, understanding jokes, sarcasm, figurative language, indirect language (all pragmatic functions)

Front 54

Damage to LH leads to

Back 54

demonstration of RH's limited syntactic abilities

Front 55

What are critical features of human languages?

Back 55

referential, combinatorial & creative, intentional

Front 56

What features of human language are shared with other animal communication systems?

Back 56

developmental patterns – bird song development has sensitive period; reference in vervet calls, chimps but not creativity & intentionalits; cognitive & social prerequisites

Front 57

What cognitive ans cial prerequisites for language are shared by other animals

Back 57

statistical learning for adjacent & nonadjacent dependencies in cotton-top tamarins; chimps understand that others have goals, intentions & knowledge

Front 58

General outcome of attempt to teach non-human primates language

Back 58

chimps can learn sign but MLU does not increase, less spontaneous, no turn-taking, long utterances repetitive

Front 59

Evidence for the equipotentiality hypothesis

Back 59

childhood aphasia – better/faster recovery than adults from LH damage & RH damage before language acquisition causes delays; degree of lateralization increases with age/experience

Front 60

Evidence for the invariance hypothesis

Back 60

Anatomy – certain structures larger on left from birth; imagine – evidence of early LH specialization; aphasia – more likely to follow LH than RH damage in children

Front 61

critical period hypothesis

Back 61

biologically determined period during which language acquisition must occur; Some environmental input is necessary for normal development but biology determines when organism is responsive to that input

Front 62

what would the relationships between language abilities and age look like if there is a critical period?

Back 62

regularity in milestones regardless of environmental circumstances, unable to regain skill if blocked in development, drop-off in acquisition abilities over a critic time-span, not merely a linear decline of acquisition with age!

Front 63

Evidence for a critical period in language

Back 63

developmental milestones analogous to other biologically based behaviors, universal regularity in milestones, recovery from aphasia in kids more frequent than adults, wild children either don't speak or acquire vocabulary but not morphosyntax skills, late learners of ASL have worse mastery of grammar despite many many years of use – no problem with vocab or basic word order

Front 64

What would the relationships between language abilities and age look like if there is an age-related decline in acquisition ability?

Back 64

Linear inverse correlation between age and success of acquisition, with no discontinuity across what would be the “critical period”

Front 65

Why is there a decline in language acquisition ability?

Back 65

language faculty, biological factors, different input, social-psychological factors, cognitive factors

Front 66

Less is More hypothesis (Newport)

Back 66

a cognitive explanation for decline in LA: children can store & analyze only small chunks of input – limitations may lead to better learning if it's easier to figure out structure if analyze small chunks

Front 67

evidence for Less is More

Back 67

late learners produce frozen forms “you wanna one” - children make different errors (of omission – he go)

Front 68

What aspects of language seem to be most affected by AOA?

Back 68

foreign accent, grammar, morphosyntax; vocabulary & basic word order fine

Front 69

What are pidgins vs. Creoles?

Back 69

Pidgin: simplified language developed for communication by speakers of different languages learned by adults as 2nd language; Creole is what happens when children natively acquire pidgin – increased grammatical complexity and regularization – becomes new language

Front 70

What is interesting about Nicaraguan Sign Language & how it has developed?

Back 70

Modern language creation – school NOT taught in sign language!; first generation of children at school for deaf developed system, next generation developed it into a complex language with grammar e.g. Early-exposed use more spatial modulations (movement morphemes) – late-learners from both generations look the same

Front 71

Behavior genetic approach

Back 71

Look at variation in rate of language development, Study contribution of heredity to variation - e.g. Twin studies

Front 72

What aspects of language seem to be more affected by genetics?

Back 72

Variation in grammatical abilities mo related to genetics than vocabulary - vocab influenced by environment

Front 73

Specific language impairment (SLI)

Back 73

language impairment in absence of other impairments – both in production & comprehension, runs in families; delay & deficit in use of grammatical morphology, delay of grammatical morphology with respect to syntax

Front 74

Possible causes of SLI?

Back 74

1) Difficulty or delay in underlying linguistic mechanism for learning implicit rules re: marking tense & number; 2) Deficit in processing brief or rapidly changing auditory stimuli ; 3) Poor phonological memory; 4) nonlinguistic cogintive problems – slow information processing + phonological memory problem; 5) genetics (but some have no family incidence)

Front 75

What's a double dissociation?

Back 75

demonstration that two experimental manipulations each have different effects on two dependent variables – tells us there are different underlying systems

Front 76

Williams Syndrome

Back 76

missing genetic material on chromosome 7, low IQ but outgoing & talkative; can't solve standard cognitive problems, big problem with visuospatial abilities, language skills far above mental age (though below chronological age) – can give definitions, impressive vocab, can generate words in a category

Front 77

Why is it interesting to compare SLI and Williams syndrome?

Back 77

possible modularity of nonverbal and verbal cognition - the genetic double dissociation is striking…. The genes of one group of children [SLI] impair their grammar while sparing their intelligence; the genes of another group of children [WS] impair their intelligence while sparing their grammar

Front 78

Language development in Williams syndrom

Back 78

delayed, word spurt before categorization, deficits in morph-syntactic knowledge -> may rely on rote memory

Front 79

How do children with Down Syndrome and Autism differ in their language abilities?

Back 79

DS has impaired grammar but intact pragmatics & communicative language; autistic has deficits in Theory of Mind, prosody & pragmaticseven in high-functioning people

Front 80

prelingually deaf

Back 80

born with severe hearing loss or loss of hearing before have acquired langauge

Front 81

otitis media

Back 81

periodic fluid buildup in middle ear or middle ear infections - causes temporary hearing impairment -> puts children at risk for language delay , but appear to catch up by age 5

Front 82

sign language

Back 82

manual language used in the deaf community

Front 83

language environments of prelingually deaf children

Back 83

10% exposed to sign language from birth b/c of deaf parent, 90% depends on parents - some used oralist method

Front 84

oralist netgid

Back 84

deaf children coached in producing speech and trained in reading lips - based in mistaken belief that acquiring sign language would interfere with acquisition of spoken language

Front 85

total communication

Back 85

an approach to deaf education - goal is mastery ofspoken English but oral language is combined with signing system

Front 86

American Sign Language

Back 86

has a lexicon, lexical items have sublexical components such as hand shape and place of articulation, has a grammar; has some iconic signs but these are conventionalized

Front 87

developmental stages in ASL

Back 87

manual babbling; snigle-sign productions; multisign combinations; more morphological development & more complex syntax

Front 88

evidence of similar processes underlying acquisition of sign

Back 88

ovverregulariazation errors, resistence to corrections, pronoun reversal errors at same age as children who speak, don't make errors typical of late learners even when learning from hearing parents who make those mistakes

Front 89

oral language development in deaf children

Back 89

less communicative but increases & more likely to direct others' behavior than ask questions; do not develop canonical babbling with clear syllables but can have phonological awareness butlimited which may hurt literacy; vocabulary development is delayed & slow; syntactic development delayed and endpoint falls short of normal competence

Front 90

home sign

Back 90

deaf children in hearing families spontaneously use gestures to communicate - invented words with grammatical categories but not full language with morphology & complete syntax

Front 91

cochlear implant

Back 91

directly stimulates auditory nerve - deaf children who get them between 3 and 5 start developing langauge at same rate as other children but outcomes are variable

Front 92

evidence that suggests language deveopment is not the next step after gestures in a continuous course of development

Back 92

1) pronoun confusion similar in sign & spoken language; 2) similarity of signs to prelinguistic pointing gestures doesn't help their acquisition as signs

Front 93

language development in blind children

Back 93

sometimes fail to appropriately generalize meanings of words (e.g. Object labels for particular referents), frequently rely on rote-memorized speech for conversation, grammatical development unaffected)

Front 94

language development in Down Syndrome

Back 94

delayed relative to mental anc chronological age, conversationally competent but most don't reach adult level linguistic ocmpetence

Front 95

language development in Williams syndrome

Back 95

language skills far exceed nonlinguistics mental abilities, language acquisition is delayed & follows different course - have word spurt before learn to label objects

Front 96

language development in autism

Back 96

language delay and deviance - many essentially nonverbal, some show mophosyntactic impairment like SLI, high-functioning autistic can have normal vocab & grammar development but use language strangely for coomunication

Front 97

spcific language impairment (SLI)

Back 97

more trouble acquiring grammatical morphology than syntax or vocabulary but these may also be delayed, exacerbated but not caused by environment, evidence for genetic basis, deficits in nonlinguistic cognition, innate grammar & phonological percepption & memory

Front 98

visual information is more important for forming ____ than for forming grammatical categories and rules

Back 98

conceptual categories

Front 99

extended optional infinitive hypothesis

Back 99

idea that all children go through a stage in which verbs are produced without inflection - in SLI this stage is longer than normal

Front 100

developmental dysphasia

Back 100

condition where child's reading ability is lower than expected based on IQ

Front 101

echolalic speech

Back 101

speech that repeats part of what the previous speaker said - characteristic of autism

Front 102

chatterbox syndrome

Back 102

disorder with severe mental retardation but remarkable linguistic abilities

Front 103

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Back 103

Strong version: without language, we lack concepts; Weak version: language shapes concepts (linguistic determinism vs. linguistic relativity)

Front 104

What does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis predict?

Back 104

adults should show
differences in cognition as a function of native language, cognitive differences between children should only emerge after/during LA

Front 105

What is an absolute vs. relative reference system?

Back 105

absolute : based
on cardinal directions like top, south etc) or relative
(to self) frame of reference - English typically uses relative reference

Front 106

Spatial relations study testing the hypothesis of linguistic relativity (Levinson)

Back 106

Task: If shown a display on a table and then table is
rotated, do they recreate the display in the same
absolute direction or relative to themselves? Results: subjects arranged the animals in a way
consistent with linguistic system of their language

Front 107

Study that somewhat contradicts Levinson's spatial relations study
(Li & Gleitman)

Back 107

animals-in-a-row task, with
English speakers only in three conditions
– Indoors (featureless room with one window) -
blinds up or down
– Outdoors (grassy area on campus, with trees,
buildings surrounding) - Results: English speakers tested in indoors
condition had more relative responses (esp
with blinds down); tested in outdoors
condition had more absolute responses; context influences

Front 108

Bilingual education

Back 108

Education in which the curriculum is taught in two languages.

Front 109

Code switching

Back 109

Changing from one type of language use to another, such as switching from a formal to an informal register when talking to people who differ in status. The term is also used to describe the switching between two languages that is characteristic of bilingual language use.

Front 110

immersion program

Back 110

A program that teaches children a second language by providing not only language instruction but also regular classes in that second language. It is a form of bilingual education.

Front 111

Instrumental motivation

Back 111

Interest in learning a second language for utilitarian purposes such as job advancement.

Front 112

Integrative motivation

Back 112

Interest in learning a second language for the purpose of associating with members of the culture in which that language is spoken.

Front 113

language differentiation

Back 113

The task of children growing up exposed to two (or more) languages to figure out that they are hearing two different languages rather than one language that is some combination of both.

Front 114

language transfer

Back 114

Influences of the native language on second language learning.

Front 115

metalinguistic awareness

Back 115

The conscious awareness of how language works.

Front 116

sequential bilingualism

Back 116

Bilingualism that results from a person's learning a second language after acquisition of the first language is well under way.

Front 117

simultaneous bilingualism

Back 117

Bilingualism that results from a person's being exposed from birth or shortly after birth to two languages.

Front 118

Glossary

Front 119

Chapter 10

Front 120

American Sign Language (ASL)

Back 120

The manual language used by the deaf in the United States and the Englishspeaking provinces of Canada. It is not a system of pantomime; rather, it shares the same structural features as other natural languages.

Front 121

Autism

Back 121

A disorder, with an onset before the age of 30 months, that involves severe social and communicative impairment and may or may not be accompanied by mental retardation.

Front 122

chatterbox syndrome

Back 122

A disorder characterized by severe mental retardation but remarkable linguistic abilities.

Front 123

cochlear implant

Back 123

A device surgically implanted in the cochlea that allows a deaf individual to perceive sound by enabling sound to bypass damaged cells in the ear and directly stimulate the auditory nerve. Sound is picked up by an external microphone worn behind the ear, processed, and converted into electrical impulses, which are transmitted to an electrode array implanted in the cochlea.

Front 124

developmental dysphasia

Back 124

A delay in language development in the absence of any clear sensory or cognitive disorder; also referred to as specific language impairment.

Front 125

dissociability (of language and cognition)

Back 125

The independence of one function from the other, which would imply that each function relies on a separate underlying mental capacity.

Front 126

extended optional infinitive hypothesis

Back 126

The notion that all children go through a stage in which verbs are produced without inflection, that is, they optionally appear in their infinite form without the endings that mark person, tense, and aspect, and that in children with specific language impairment, this stage lasts longer than normal.

Front 127

familial concentration

Back 127

The rate of occurrence of a particular characteristic (such as specific language impairment) within a family. High familial concentration suggests a genetic basis.

Front 128

grammatical morphology

Back 128

The structure of words that results from combining word roots with endings that mark grammatical relations, such as the -s at the end of verbs to mark agreement with a third-person subject (he runs) or the -ed at the end of verbs to mark the past tense. Grammatical morphology is also known as inflectional morphology.

Front 129

dominant language switch hypothesis

Back 129

The hypothesis that children tend to learn a second language more completely than adults do because children, more than adults, tend to switch to the second language as their dominant language and use it more.

Front 130

dichotic listening task

Back 130

An experimental procedure in which two auditory stimuli are presented simultaneously (one to each ear). The purpose is to infer which cerebral hemisphere is responsible for processing the stimuli on the basis of which stimulus the listener perceives.

Front 131

language bioprogram hypothesis

Back 131

The hypothesis proposed by Bickerton that humans possess a biologically based, innate linguistic capacity that includes a skeletal grammar. By hypothesis, this capacity underlies both children's language acquisition and the process of creolization and accounts for similarities between child language and creoles.

Front 132

lesion method

Back 132

The method of investigating the functions performed by different areas of the brain by correlating impaired function with the location of damage to the brain.

Front 133

near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)

Back 133

A method of brain imaging, also known as optical topography, that measures activity in different regions of the brain by using the degree to which light passes between points on the scalp as an indicator of blood oxygenation and thus neural activity.

Front 134

plasticity

Back 134

The ability of parts of the brain to take over functions they normally would not serve. There is much more plasticity in the child's brain than in the adult's.

Front 135

right-ear advantage

Back 135

The relatively greater probability that stimuli presented to the right ear in a dichotic listening test will be perceived by the listener. Typically, there is a rightear advantage for linguistic stimuli, which suggests that the left cerebral hemisphere is primarily responsible for processing linguistic stimuli.

Front 136

sensitive period

Back 136

A term sometimes used instead of critical period to indicate that the ability to acquire language may be greatest during a particular period of development but that later language acquisition is not impossible.