Exam 4: Language Development

Placing more emphasis on the context and content of children´s utterances, rather than just on their form, is known as:

Who argued that language was acquired by the same mechanisms of conditioning and reinforcement that were thought at the time to govern all other aspects of animal and human behavior?

Children learn a general rule, but apply it incorrectly by using it in all instances. Their performance starts at a good level, but then becomes worse, before improving again; a process called:

The stage of single-word speech production is known as the ______________ stage.

Correcting children´s grammatical errors makes:

Who argued that we are born with a fixed set of switches (parameters), the positions of which are set by exposure to particular languages?

For all the child knows, it could be that the word "dog" is supposed to pick out just the dog´s feet, or the whole category of animals, or its color, smell, or the way it is moving, and so on. This is best known as:

When a child uses a word in a broader way than the adult usage (e.g., the word ball is used for apples, grapes, eggs, anything round), which of the following occurs?

Which of the following conveys the idea of a child acquiring simple words by a parent pointing at a dog and saying "dog," and the child then simply attaching the name to the object?

If a child hears the word "cat" in the presence of a cat, he or she will assume that all similar things will also be called "cat." This is a result of which of the following constraints?

Which of the following approaches demonstrates that knowledge about categories can be acquired on a statistical basis alone, and syntactic categories can be acquired without explicit knowledge of syntactic rules or semantic information?

If adults hear a particular syntactic structure, they are more likely to use that structure in production in the immediate future; a phenomenon known as:

Children use semantic information about which sorts of verbs can and cannot participate in certain verb-argument structures. For example, verbs that convey information about motion in a specified direction can only occur in intransitive constructions. This idea is called the:

Early multi-word speech that consists primarily of content words, with many of the function words absent, is commonly said to be:

Simplified languages that were created for communication between speakers of different languages that were forced into prolonged contact are called:

We do not segment speech so that a word begins with a sequence like "mp" because this is not a legitimate string of sounds at the start of English words. The type of information that concerns the way in which sounds co-occur in a language is called:

By the age of 18-24 months, the child has a vocabulary of about:

Which of the following hypotheses states that mothers in some way tailor the amount of simplification they provide, depending on how much the child appears to need?

Children do not start speaking at birth because:

The pragmatic principle that simply says that different words have different meanings is the: