The child's language environment plays an important role in the process of language acquisition. What kinds of input have been shown to be facilitative? What minimal input is believed to be essential for acquisition?
What will be an ideal response?
Just hearing others converse is not sufficient to promote acquisition. Children whose only exposure to a language is through television, for example, fail to acquire the language. What the evidence does indicate is necessary is some minimal exposure to language through one-on-one conversation with a significant adult. Hearing children of profoundly deaf parents show a normal course of acquisition if they spend five to 10 hours per week in the company of a hearing/speaking adult. The quantity of speech exposed to (over some minimum) is not the critical variable. Opportunity to experience language in the context of jointly attending to an object or event with an adult is predictive of language proficiency. Some characteristics of the language input itself have also been found to influence proficiency, e.g., motherese. Although it is not essential for adults to speak in motherese, it can facilitate the learning process. Motherese does not involve speaking at the child's level, but adjusting input to be slightly more complex than the child's own speech. Adult language that expands, recasts, or otherwise extends the child's speech also has a facilitative effect, particularly on the learning of syntactical principles.
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One similarity between checklists and ratings scales is that they are both
a. reactive. b. retrospective. c. lengthy. d. preliminary.
When older adults are asked to recall and date events from their past, there is evidence of enhanced recall for events that happened between late childhood and early adolescence
Indicate whether the statement is true or false
Regarding handedness, which of the following statements is FALSE?
a. A small minority of lefties owe their hand preferences to birth traumas, such as prematurity, low birth weight, and breech birth. b. Left-handed persons have a significantly lower incidence of allergies and learning disorders than right-handed persons. c. People with inconsistent handedness may be at risk for more immune-related diseases than persons who are consistently left-handed. d. Collectivist cultures where left-handedness is viewed as especially negative have about half the proportion of left-handed persons as individualist cultures.
Reliability and validity of observation techniques can be improved by ALL BUT WHICH of the following?
a. training observers. b. defining behaviors objectively. c. allowing observers to define the unit of analysis. d. developing a specific scoring system.