Linguistics Vocabulary Flashcards
The Innateness Hypothesis
Language is inherent in humans. Rules for grammar exist even before linguistic input is received. The aspect of the innateness hypothesis in which outside grammar rules for children are minimal at best is referred to as the poverty of the stimulus.
The Holophrastic Stage
The holophrastic stage in language acquisition is the stage when children utter only one word at a time.
Prosodic Bootstrapping
Prosodic Bootstrapping refers to the way in which both children and adults will rely on stressed syllables to suggest the presence of new words in a sequence.
Overextension
The concept that children will apply a learned word to more contexts than is appropriate. For example, Micah uses the proper noun “Tucker” to refer to any four-legged mammal because he cannot yet distinguish between cats and dogs, etc.
Underextension
This concept refers to when a child uses a learned word too restrictively. For example, if a child refers to their pet canary as a bird, but does not associate the word “bird” with all avian.
Mean Length of Utterance
MLU is the average length of utterances a child is producing at a particular point. This is a more reliable measurement for a child’s language development than chronological age.
Telegraphic Stage
The stage in which mostly content-words are uttered, and auxiliaries, function words, and verbal inflection may be missing. Similarities between text messages and old-fashioned telegraphs can be seen in the utterances.
Semantic Bootstrapping
The idea that children first use the meaning (semantics) of a word to figure out its category (noun, verb, etc.)
Codeswitching
Using aspects of bilingualism in a single sentence.
The Unitary System Hypothesis
This hypothesis states that a child initially only constructs one lexicon and one system of grammar.
The Separate Systems Hypothesis
This hypothesis asserts that a child will build a distinct lexicon and grammar for each language learned.
Metalinguistic Awareness
A conscious awareness ‘about’ language rather than ‘of’ language.
Bilingual Child: “I speak Hebrew and English”
Monolingual Child: “What’s English?”
The Fundamental Difference Hypothesis
This hypothesis asserts that second language acquisition by adults is done differently than second language acquisition by a child.
Babbling Stage
When a child begins to utter sounds that do not exist in his/her linguistic environment.
Fundamental Frequency
This term refers to the sounds we make in relation to the variations of the air pressure.
Intensity
Refers to the loudness of a sound.
Spectrogram
Also referred to as ‘voiceprints,’ a spectrogram is a pattern produced through a computer program which reduces speech signals into frequency components.
Formants
Dark bands on a spectrogram that denote vowels.
Categorical Perception
Categorical Perception refers to the way in which native speakers classify phonemes together even when they each have distinct sound differences due to coarticulation.
Top-down Processing
Involves processing language first at a higher level (semantics) and down toward basic phonology.
Bottom-up Processing
Involves processing language starting with the most basic phonological pieces and ending with semantics.
Semantic Priming
Involves grouping words in memory through similarities in meaning. For example, a person hearing “doctor” will be more likely to hear “nurse” soon after.
Morphological Priming
Involves grouping words through morphemes in multimorphemic words. For example, the word “sheepdog” is likely to prime “wool” through the semantic root morpheme “sheep.”
Garden Path Sentences
Sentences that, due to their ambiguous nature, force a reader or listener to backtrack to determine the appropriate meaning.
Spoonerisms
Phrases which have speech errors in which morphemes or even phonemes may be switched between words. For example: “I bot a gite!”
Cortex
The surface of the brain.
Corpus Callosum
The fibrous connection between hemispheres of the brain.
Contralateral Brain Function
The way in which the right side of the body is controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain, and the left side of the body by the right hemisphere of the brain.
Phrenology
The practice of examining “bumps” on the skull to determine personality traits, intellectual capacity, etc.
Aphasia
The neurological term for any language disorder that results from acquired brain damage caused by disease or trauma.
Lateralization
The term to refer to localization of a function to a single hemisphere of the brain.
Broca’s Aphasia
Characterized by labored speech, certain word-finding difficulties, and difficulties in forming sentences with syntactical rules.Language is often agrammatic, meaning that it frequently lacks articles, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, and other function words.
Wernicke’s Aphasia
Characterized by speech that, while fluent and adherent to the rules of syntax with good intonation, nevertheless is semantically incoherent. They may make numerable lexical errors (word substitutions) and use nonsense words.
Ipsilateral
“Same-side” of the brain.
Critical-age Hypothesis
This hypothesis asserts that language is biologically based and has a window (birth to early childhood) when language acquisition is most easily achieved.
Stemming
A process in computational linguistics in which affixes are stripped from root morphemes and stored in an electronic dictionary for later application.
Parser
A computer program that attempts to replicate the structural knowledge that speakers possess.
Concordance
Shows the frequency of specific words in a database or document, along with contextual information.
Petroglyphs
Petroglyphs are most likely aesthetic expressions rather than pictorial communications.
Pictograms
Pictograms, “picture writings,” are direct images of objects.
Emoticons
Emoticons are pictographic symbols which convey specific meanings independent of any language.
Ideograms
Ideograms are pictograms that are less direct representations.
Logography
Word writing.
Logograms
Logograms are individual representations of entire words.
Syllabary
A syllabic writing system in which individual sounds are given symbols to form words with.
Phonographic Symbols
Graphic signs that no longer resemble visually the words they represent.
Rebus
A rebus is a representation of words by pictures of objects whose names sound like the word. For example, a picture of an eye might refer to the body part or the pronoun “I.”
Digraph
Some language combine two letters together to represent a single sound called a digraph.
Diacritic Marks
Diacritic marks are added to alphabetical symbols to show stresses and vowel inflections. Examples are the German umlaut, and the Spanish tilde.
Asemic
“meaningless” writing.
