Readings

• A psycholinguist is: a person who studies the structure and development of children's language
• The 5 kinds of knowledge that underline the growth of linguistic profiency: phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics
• Phonology: basic units of sound or phonemes that are used in language and the rules for combinding these sounds
• Morphology: specifies how words are formed from sounds
• Semantics: meanings expressed in words and sentences
• Morphemes are the smallest meaningful language units and the 2 types are free and bound
• Free morphemes can stand alone as a word whereas bound need to be added to free to change their meaning
• Syntax: The arrangement of words and phrases in a sentence or larger text; the structure of a language
• Pragmatics of a language: knowledge of how language might be used to communicate effectively
• A social linguistic language has culturally specific rules for how language should be structured or used in social context
• Linguistic universals are opposite from the empiricists; they believe language is biologically programmed
• Speech sounds stimulate the left hemisphere of the brain
• Pidgin: A language that is a mixture of two or more languages
• Creole: A language that is a mixture of two or more languages and has evolved from pidgin to become grammatically complex and a "true" language
• Children with pidgin speaking parents will not continue to speak it. They instead transform it to creole; this is all according to the nativist perspective only
• Expansion: grammatically correct and enriched version of the child's ungrammatical statement
• Recast: a different form of expansion in which an adult responds to a child's ungrammatical statement with a non-repetitive and grammatically correct statement
• Referential style: toddlers use language to label objects and think that words are for naming objects
• Expressive style: toddlers use language to call attention to their own and others feelings and use it to regulate social interactions; less common than referential style
• Fast mapping process: Process of linking a word with its referent after hearing the word once or twice; And quickly acquiring and retaining a word after hearing it apply to his reference on a small number of occasions
• Overextension is when a child uses a specific word to refer to a broader set of objects while underextension is the opposite
• Processing constraints: cognitive biases that lead toddlers to favor certain interpretations of words over others
• Object scope constraint: The assumption that words refer to whole objects rather than two parts of the object or two object attributes
• Taxonomic constraint:The assumption that words label categories of similar objects that share common perceptual features
• Lexical contrast constraint:The assumption that words label categories of similar objects that share common perceptual features
• Syntatical bootstrapping: children make inferences about the meaning of words by analyzing the way words are used in sentences
• Illocutionary intent: the underlying meaning of a statement that does not always correspond to the literal meaning of the word; at 3, jits will start understanding