E. Mavis Hetherington,
University of Virginia
Ross D. Parke,
University of California
Mark Schmuckler,
University of Toronto at Scarborough
Below are this chapter's featured key terms. The textbook's full glossary is also available for online searching.
| babbling | An infant's production of strings of consonant-vowel combinations.
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| bilingual education | Teaching children two languages at the same time.
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| categorical speech perception | The tendency to perceive a range of sounds that belong to the same phonemic group as the same.
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| communicative competence | The ability to convey thoughts, feelings, and intentions in an organized, culturally patterned way that sustains and regulates human interactions.
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| cooing | A very young infant's production of vowel-like sounds.
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| creole language | A language spoken by children of first-generation, pidgin-language speakers; a language that, in contrast with pidgin, is highly developed and rule governed.
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| critical period | A specific period in children's development when they are sensitive to a particular environmental stimulus that does not have the same effect on them when encountered before or after this period.
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| discourse | Socially based conversation.
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| expansion | A technique adults use in speaking to young children in which they imitate and expand or add to a child's statement.
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| fast-mapping | A technique in which a child learns to link a new word with a concept that he or she already understands.
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| grammar | The structure of a language, made up of morphology and syntax.
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| holophrase | A single word that appears to represent a complete thought.
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| infant-directed speech | A simplified style of speech parents use with young children, in which sentences are short, simple, and often repetitive; the speaker enunciates especially clearly, slowly, and in a higher-pitched voice and often ends with a rising intonation. Also called motherese.
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| joint visual attention | The ability to follow another person's attentional focus or gaze of direction.
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| language | A communication system in which words and their written symbols combine in various, regulated ways to produce an infinite number of messages.
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| language acquisition device (LAD) | Chomsky's proposed mental structure in the human nervous system that incorporates an innate concept of language.
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| language acquisition support system (LASS) | According to Bruner, a collection of strategies and tactics that environmental influences-initially, a child's parents or primary caregivers-provide the language-learning child.
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| metalinguistic awareness | The understanding that language is a system of communicating with others that is bound by rules.
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| morpheme | Any of a language's smallest units of meaning, such as a prefix, a suffix, or a root word.
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| morphology | The study of a language's smallest units of meaning, or morphemes.
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| naming explosion | The rapid increase in vocabulary that the child typically shows at about the age of one and a half.
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| negative evidence | According to Pinker, corrective feedback that parents may give to young language-learning children.
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| overextension | The use, by a young child, of a single word to cover many different things.
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| overregularization | The mistaken application of a principle of regular change to a word that changes irregularly.
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| patterned speech | A form of pseudospeech in which the child utters strings of phonemes that sound very much like real speech but are not.
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| phoneme | Any of the basic units of a language's phonetic system; phonemes are the smallest sound units that affect meaning.
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| phonology | The system of sounds that a particular language uses.
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| pragmatics | A set of rules that specify appropriate language for particular social contexts.
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| productive language | The production of speech.
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| Proto-declarative | A gesture that an infant uses to make some sort of statement about an object.
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| Proto-imperative | A gesture that an infant or a young child may use to get someone to do something she wants.
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| recast | A technique adults use in speaking to young children in which they render a child's incomplete sentence in a more complex grammatical form.
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| receptive language | Understanding the speech of others.
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| semantics | The study of word meanings and word combinations, as in phrases, clauses, and sentences.
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| speech acts | One- or two-word utterances that clearly refer to situations or to sequences of events.
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| syntax | The subdivision of grammar that prescribes how words are to be combined into phrases, clauses, and sentences.
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| telegraphic speech | Two-word utterances that include only the words that are essential to convey the speaker's intent.
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| underextension | The use, by a young child, of a single word in a restricted and individualistic way.
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2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education