Language development fragen und antworten PDF

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Definition of Language Language is the systematic and conventional use of sounds (or signs or written symbols) for the purpose of communication or self-expression (Crystal, 1995).

During children’s second year, children’s vocabulary changes the most. They begin to speak their first word and develop a vocabulary of 300 words during that year, while their frequency and relevance of communicative acts increase.

The nature vs nurture argues if the development of language in children is thoroughly experiencedriven (nature) or if the mind has some innate structure in order to organize and interpret experience (nurture). The interactionist perspective claims that language development requires an innate structure, but with a greater emphasis on experience than the nativists claim.

The term Universal Grammar claims that all languages of the world share many structural characteristics.

The formalist view claims, that the nature of language and its acquisition have nothing to do with the fact that language is used to communicate.

Functionalism is the view, that both language itself and the process of language acquisition are shaped and supported by the communicative functions that language serves.

. Constructivist theory is an inclusive term that refers to any theory that holds that the child builds language knowledge out of language experience.

The Constructivist theory includes any theory in which the child builds language knowledge out of language experience. The behaviourist theory claims that language is built up through classical and operant conditioning. This theory proved itself inadequate in today’s research. Q&A2. Research methodology Q1. What is habituation? A1. Habituation is one of the most basic learning mechanisms, it is getting used to something (meaning that very low-level organisms have this form of learning). If a new stimulus is exposed, one reacts to it. Upon repeated exposure, response intensity decreases. (The introduction of a novel stimulus elicits intensive response again – this is dishabituation.) Q2. Describe the sucking rate procedure

A2. This is a habituation method, in which the sucking rate is the response. When children are exposed to a new stimulus, they start sucking with a high amplitude (on a machine that records sucking rate); but when they habituate to the stimulus, the sucking rate decreases. We can test, whether infants discriminate between two stimuli: we habituate to stimulus A, and if they dishabituate on the introduction of stimulus B, that means they treat them as different. Q3. Describe the head-turn preference paradigm A3. Another paradigm based on habituation. Children are habituated to a specific stimulus (training phase). Then children are asked to sit on the lap of their parents. Each item starts with the child looking into the middle (e.g. looking at a flashing light). Then an auditory stimulus comes from a speaker from one side (right or left). The child orient towards the source of the stimulus (look at the speaker). When the auditory stimulus is over, the child looks back. We measure the amount of time the child is looking towards the speaker. We assume that children the looking times differ based on whether the stimulus is the same as the habituated one, or different. Q4. Why is the intermodal preferential looking task intermodal? A4. Because infants have to match visual and auditory stimuli. Q5. What are event related potentials? A5. ERPs are neural correlates of processing. They are eventrelated, as they can be observed in connection with an event (e.g. appearance of a stimulus). ERPs are the sum of postsynaptic potentials. Q6. Example sentences of a grammaticality judgement task. A6. Grammatical: “This is a grammatical sentence.” Agrammatical: “This sentence not good.”

Biological development Pidgin is a language which is formed when people with different native languages come together and communicate with eachother by forming a grammatically simple language. A pidgin can evolve to a creole when it becomes a native language for children of the following generation. Through this process, the creole becomes more complex than the pidgin.

Broca and Wernicke aphasias both handicap one's communication abilities. People with a Broca aphasia have troubles producing speech and their talking lacks grammtical structure. People with a Wernicke aphasia have no trouble speaking, but their talking has no sense

The equipotentiality hypothesis assumes that both hemispheres of the brain have the potential to form language dominant side. The invariance hypothesis argues, that the left hemisphere is specialized for language acquisition from birth. Equipotentiality means that laterality emerges with development (and each hemisphere would be able to be responsible for language processes), whereas invariance suggests lateralization already at birth. Children learn languages much faster than adults. And a child can learn a second language faster the earlier it is surrounded by it.

Another argument is, that children with less or no language contact, have more difficulties learning and speaking a language. late sign language acquisition: early learners of sign achieve greater proficiency than do late learners. Q6. The difference between ape and human sign language. A6. Apes rather imitate, and do not increase in length of utterance as children. The do not take turns, and don’t wait for responses. Modules make it easier to learn specific skills, because of innate structures. A disadvantage is, that modules lead to less flexibility of the brain. Children learn languages differently than adults do. They cannot remember as much as adults and therefore they process language in small chunks, while adults store larger chunks of language. Analysing only small parts makes language learning easier for children. Communicative development "Speech acts" is a term from the philosophy of language. It refers to the use or behaviour of talking, like commanding or declaring.

In the perlocutionary phase (0-10 mths) children communicate unintentionally through their behavior. In the illocutionary children (10-12 mths) become aware that their behavior can be used to communicate with others. They will actively seek for the attention of the caregiver through their behaviour. In the ocutionary phase (+12 mths) children use language to refer to something. Proto-imperative is a behavior used by children to serve as an imperative. For example, repeatedly looking somebody in the eyes and pointing on their wants. A3. The concepts relate to the illocutionary phase: signals are still aspecific. Proto-imperatives are self-referent orders. Children direct the attention to themselves and their own desires. That is: I cry because something is missing (and the caregiver has to find out that Teddy is missing). Protodeclaratives are exocentric. They draw attention to the object of desire. That is: Look, Teddy is there (and I obviously want it). Joint attention relates to the capacity to share one’s experiences with others. A4. Joint attention when the adult and the child is focusing their attention to the same target (object/action/characteristic). Children being better in joint attention between 10-11 month of age had larger vocabularies at 18 as well as 24 month of age. Grice's maximes are rules to follow the cooperative principle of conversations. Quantity: Provide just as much information as required Quality: Be truthfully. Relation: Be relevant. Manner: Be perspicuous/clear

Preschool children's interaction with each other can not be described as conversations, but rather as collective monologues. Although children take turns while speaking, their talking has nothing to do

with what was said earlier. This egocentrism comes from the lack of taking somebody else's perspective, claims Piaget. A6. According to Piaget, children are egocentric, and are restricted to their own perspectives. We young children talk to each other, there is not much connection between the conversational turns. So, there is no real dialogue, rather a set of collective monologues. Still, children learn the framework of communication: they practice turn taking. An elaborative style is characterized by questions that help the child say something that moves the narrative forward. In contrast, a repetitive style is characterized by questions that seek the same information repeatedly. A7. Scaffolding means that adults support children in communicating their narratives. Elaborative scaffolding is, when parents focus on missing information, and ask children to add details. Repetitive scaffolding is, when the adult is focusing on the information they have already heard. Phonetical Development Consonants distinction: Place of articulation: where the vocal tract is closed (e. g. lips, ridge behind front teeth) Manner of articulation: how the vocal tract is closed (e. g. where the airflow stops) Voicing: refers to the time the vocal cords start vibrating relative to the release of air (e. g. difference between 'p' and 'b')

Formation of the lips (rounded 'o', not rounded 'e') Tongue position (back, front) Tongue height (high or low position)

Reflexive Crying and Vegetative Sounds: through crying, burping, sneezing infant’s vocal cords vibrate and the airflow through the vocal apparatus is stopped and started. Cooing and Laughter: At the age of 6 to 8 weeks infants start cooing, which are a vowel sounds that signal happiness. Babies produce their first laughteraround the age of 16 weeks. Vocal Play: Babies between 16 to 30 weeks produce more and more vowel- and consonant-like sounds with increasing complexity. The long series of sounds that infants produce by the end of this stage is called marginal babbling.

Reduplicated babbling means repeating the same consonant and vowel combination, like 'dadada'. Non-reduplicated babbling can mean any combination of vowels and sounds. Prosody starts with non-reduplicated babbling

Results of infants hearing The specific language that infants hear, influences their speech segments and prosodic character of babbling. Infants listen to sounds and try to imitate them and adapt their speaking by listening to their outcomes. A5. E.g. Infants prefer to hear their native languages, prefer the sound of their mother, prefer hearing passage that they have been exposed to before birth. Categorical perception is the differentiation of an acoustic continuum to distinct phonemes. To measure the degree of distinction of these phonemes in adults, following study can be conducted: participants hear a variety of sound of an artificially produced acoustic continuum. Then they hear two different or identical and have to answer if the presented pair is identical or not. They will always hear one category, never something in between. A6. Categorical perception means that a continuous dimension is observed as categorical. The difference between /b/ and /p/ is that one is voiced the other is voiceless (see A1). The difference between /bat/ and /pat/ is that in the former, the vocal chords start to vibrate earlier (due to the voicing of /b/). The voice onset (start of the vibration) is a TIME-based variable, so it is continuous. With 0 as a voice onset time (VOT, voicing already from the beginning), we will hear /bat/. If we start increasing VOT, we will still hear /bat/ for a while, but then it will change to /pat/. We will NEVER hear something between b and p. Either one or the other. So the continuous temporal dimension is perceived as categorical. Infant-directed Speech is higher-pitched and the intonation is exaggerated. It is also slower and contains longer pauses, so that infants can process the speech more easily. Infant-directed Speech is the same in many cultures and babies are paying more attention to this kind of speech.

Children learn language effortlessly because they find important clues to language structure in the prosodic characteristics of the speech. Through the pauses made in speech children learn that certain parts of the sentence belong together, and others can be divided. E. g. “Here…you can try some… yummy ice cream.” A8. It is like lifting yourself up by the bootstraps (or Baron Münchhausen pulling himself out of the mud by his own hair). In psycholinguistics, it means that one aspect of language is used to disentangle language itself. If you hear the following: “Give me some szőlőlé”, you will immediately know that I am talking about some material, because the noun I used is uncountable (give me some… vs give me a…), so you just have to look around, and find the grape juice (Hungarian: szőlőlé) on the table. This way syntactic information helps you narrowing the possible meanings of the new word. 5: Lexical development Words are context bound when they are only used in specific situations, for example when children only call a bird when it is observed in its parents garden but not when it sees a bird on the street.

Under-extension occurs when a word has a broader meaning than the child thinks, e. g. only their pet is called dog but not other dogs.

Over-extension occurs when a word has a narrower meaning than the child thinks, e. g. all animals are called dogs.

Word spurt refers to the abrupt increase of vocabulary learning around the second year of life.

Referential langugage style contains merely nominals, while an expressive language style contains merely personal or social words.

Statistical learning is the learning of language based on their statistical regularities: That is, I can learn that the letter R is followed by T many times (rt), but rarely followed by W (rw).

Lexical constraint are principles of the lexicon that children consider when learning new words. That explains how children learn the meaning of new words. A6. Lexical constraints help identify the referent of a new word (help children find out what new words refer to). E.g. Mutual exclusivity means that one category should only have one label, and one label should only refer to one category. If I ask you to “give me the scansos”, you will not give me the apple, because you know that’s an apple, but you will give me the thing you have never seen before. Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory arguing that children are learning the meaning of words through recognizing grammatical categories and structures in their language. A7. If I say “the rabbit and the duck are gorping”, you won’t know what ‘gorping’ is, but you know it is a verb that does not take an object (intransitive verb). 6. Grammar development

Language productivity refers to the fact that it is possible to generate an infinite number of sentences with the use of language. Words of lexical category carry the meaning of a sentence (nouns, verbs, adjectives), whereas words of functional category serve a grammatical purpose (auxiliary words, prepositions...).

departmental PART- free morphem DE-MENT-AL - bound morphem

Relational meaning describes the relation of words. This knowledge starts with children speaking two-word expressions, like yummy ice-cream.

Telegraphic speech is the missing of functional words and morphemes that children produce at a certain stage of language development. three steps of wh-question formation. 1. Constructions with external question marker 2. Constructions with auxiliaries—but no subject auxiliary inversion 3. Subject-auxiliary inversion in wh- questions 1. Add a wh-word (What you said?) 2. Add an auxiliary (What you did say?) 3. Invert subject-verb order (What did you say?)

The mean length of utterance is an indicator of language development that is more reliable than the age of children.

7. Reading Language with consonantal scripts (e. g. Hebrew) are written with consonants, not vowels. The written units in syllabic scripts (e. g. Japanese) represent syllables and ideographic scripts (e. g. Chinese) represent morphemes. The Dual Route Model is the most influential model of isolated word reading. It explains how one gets from the written word to the phonological representation (spoken word). The lexical route in reading occurs when skilled readers recognize the semantic meaning of the visual representation of a word and therefore recall the correct pronunciation.

The sub-lexical route occurs when the word has no meaning, but the reader is able to pronounce it through grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Unknown words (and pseudowords) are not stored in our heads (orthographic lexicon). So we have to use the sublexical route. The unknown word is first parsed into graphemes (graphemic parser, each grapheme stands for a single phoneme), then the graphemes are matched with the corresponding phonemes, and finally the phonemes are merged into a single articulatory program. Pseudohomophones are nonwords that sound like words when they are pronounced. They are less easy to reject as existing words than other nonwords. That is the pseudohormophone effect.

People with surface dyslexia can read words only by using the sub-lexical route. They have troubles in reading irregular words but can understand them.

People with phonological dyslexia can read words only by using the lexical route. They can read irregular words as good as regular words but have troubles reading nonwords.

Phonological awareness is knowing the spelling of each letter, syllable and word and being able to work with the sounds of spoken language. It is among the best predictors of reading

8. bilingualism Simultaneous bilingualism happens when children grow up listening and acquiring two languages at the same time. In the case of sequential bilingualism children are exposed to two languages at different times (in different environments). Phonological differentiation is the ability to differentiate between different languages. This is an ability that infants usually loose by the age of two months. Infants of bilingual environments however can differentiate between their exposed languages after more than four months. Phonological differentiation is the distinction between the phonological systems of the languages in bilingualism. The nature of phonological differentiation is not clear though. Do bilinguals possess two independent phonological systems (for each language), or the phonological processes of two languages compose a single system? Language transfer errors are mistakes that language learners (children and adults) make because of the influence of the already known language. People with instrumental motivation learn a second language as a means for an end, e. g. for better employment chances. People with integrative motivation learn a second language to become part of a target language community. Code switching refers to the use of two languages at the same conversation of bilingual speakers. Tag switches involve putting a word /phrase in one language at the beginning /end of a sentence that is otherwise entirely in the other language. Intrasentential switches occur within a sentence while intersentential switches occur between sentences. Code switching is the deliberate choice between languages. That is, a bilingual knows which language to use in one context, and which one in another. Researchers believe that code switching is an essential tool for bilinguals, and it relies on advanced levels of executive functioning. That is, bilinguals should be more advanced on executive functions than monolinguals. 9. Atypical development Studying impaired language development helps to create suitable methods for children with impaired language to optimize their language learning process and is useful for a higher scientific understanding of different aspects that contribute to the ability to speak a language. People with Down syndrome have a delayed language development, lower grammatical and vocabulary complexity of their speech compared to typical adults. Communicative development and pragmatic development appear to be strengths of children with Down syndrome. People with William-syndrome have a similar IQ like people w...