Language Acquisition Flashcards
Language Acquisition
the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language.
Phonetics
The sounds of a language.
Phonology
The sound patterns of a language.
Morphology
Rules of word-formation.
Syntax
How words combine into phrases/sentences.
Semantics
How to derive meaning from a sentence.
Pragmatics
How to properly use language in context.
Lexical items
words, morphemes, idioms, etc
Word
a speech sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or a combination of morphemes.
Morphemes
the smallest grammatical unit of speech.
Idioms
Linguistic expressions whose overall meaning cannot be predicted from the meanings of the constituent parts.
Catena
Any single word or any combination of words that are linked together by dependencies.
Innateness Hypothesis
that our ability to acquire
(human) language is innate (genetically encoded).
Speed of acquisition
psycholinguistic variable referring to the age at which a word is typically learned.
uniformity of acquisition process
All children acquiring language go through the same stages in the same order.
