Chapter Ten : Language Flashcards
our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning
language
in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit
phoneme
in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or part of a word (prefix or suffix)
morpheme
in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others
grammar
the set of rules by which we derive meaning form morphemes, words, and sentences in a given language; also, he study of meaning
semantics
the rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences in a given language
syntax
beginning at about four months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language
babbling stage
thestage in speech development, from about age one to two, during which a child speaks mostly in single words
one-word stage
beginning about age two, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly two-word statements
two-word stage
early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram - “go car” - using mostly nouns and verbs and omitting auxiliary words
telegraphic speech
introduced the idea of an inborn universal grammar - all human languages have the same grammatical building blocks
Noam Chomsky
Benjamin Lee Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think
linguistic determinism
