English Language Language Acquisition Key Terms
- Created by: Shauni
- Created on: 15-03-13 11:16
Ideolect:
An individual's own 'linguistic fingerprint'.
Register:
A variety of language appropriate to a particular purpose and context.
Phoneme:
The smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.
Phonetics:
The study of sounds used in speech, including how they are produced.
Lexis:
The vocabulary of a language.
Semantics:
The study of meaning.
Syntax:
The way words are arranged to make sentences.
Morphology:
The area of language study that deals with the formation of words from smaller units called morphemes.
Phonology:
The study of the sound systems of language and how they communicate meaning.
Discourse:
A stretch of communication.
Pragmatics:
The factors that influence the choices that speakers make in their use of language- why we chose to say one thing rather than another.
Language Acquisition Device (LAD):
The human brain's inbuilt capacity to acquire language.
Universal Grammar:
The explanation that all world languages share the principles of grammar despite surface differences in lexis and phonology. Sometimes called linguistic universals.
Phonemic Expansion:
The variety of sounds produced increases.
Phonemic Contraction:
The variety of sounds is reduced to the sounds of the main language used.
Consonant:
A speech sound that is produced when the vocal tract is either blocked or so restricted that there is audible friction.
Vowel:
A sound made without closure or audible friction.
Dipththong:
A vowel in which there is a perceptible change in quality during a syllable.
Proto-word:
An invented word that has a consistent meaning.
Holophrase:
A single word expressing a whole idea.
Vocative:
A form (especially a noun) used to address a person.
Content Word:
A type of word that has an independent 'dictionary' meaning, also called a lexical word.
Function Word:
A word whose role is largely or wholly to express a grammatical relationship.
Social Interactionists:
Those who believe that child language develops through interaction with carers.
Positive Reinforcement:
When a behaviour is rewarded, including verbal praise to encourage this behaviour to be repeated.
Negative Reinforcement:
When an undesireable behaviour is unrewarded with the intention that it will not be repeated.
Behaviourists:
Those who believe that language is acquired through imitation and reinforcement.
Overextension:
A feature of a child's language where the word used to label something is 'stretched' to include things that aren't normally part of that word's meaning.
Underextension:
A feature of a child's language where the word used to label is 'reduced' to include only part of its normal meaning.
Hyponomy:
The hierarchical structure that exists between lexical items.
Hypernym:
A subordinate, i.e. a word that is more generic or general and can have more specific words under it.
Hyponym:
A more specific word within a category or under a hypernym.
Inflectional Morphology:
The alteration of words to make new grammatical forms.
Derivational Morphology:
The creation of new words by adding prefixes or suffixes.
Mean Length Utterance (MLU):
A measure of children's ability to produce stretches of language; the number of morphemes is divided by the total number of utterances to find the average length. A higher MLU is taken to indicate a higher level of language proficiency.
Copula Verb:
A verb used to join or 'couple' a subject to a complement.
Deixis:
Lexical items that 'point' towards something and place words in context.
Free Morpheme:
One that can stand alone as an independent word, e.g. apple.
Bound Morpheme:
One that cannot stand alone as an independent word, but must be attached to another morpheme/word (affixes, such as the plural '-s', are always bound, as is the comparative adjective inflection '-er').
Cognitive Theorists:
Those who believe that language acquisition is part of a wider development of understanding.
Virtuous Error:
Syntactic errors made by young children in which the non-standard utterance reveals some understanding, though incomplete, of standard syntax.
Overgeneralisation:
A learner's extension of a word meaning or grammatical rule beyond its normal use.
Stative Verb:
Verb that describes a state; stative verbs are not usually used in the progressive aspect, which is used for incomplete actions in progress.
Dynamic Verb:
A type of verb that expresses activities and changes of state, allowing such forms as the progressive.
Egocentric Speech:
The running discourse style of speech used by children where no listener is directly addressed and the talk is focused on the child's activities.
Child-Directed Speech (CDS):
Any of various speech patterns used by parents or care givers when communicating with young children, particularly infants, usually involving simplified vocabulary, melodic pitch, repetitive questioning, and a slow or deliberate tempo.
Expansion:
The development of a child's utterance into a longer, more meaningful form.
Recast:
The commenting on, extending and replacing of a child's utterance.
Language Acquisition Support System (LASS):
This refers to the child's interaction with the adults around them and how this interaction supports language development.
Object Permanence:
The awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible.
Scaffolding:
The process of transferring a skill from adult to child and then withdrawing support once the skill has been mastered.
Nativists:
Those who believe that humans have an inbuilt capacity to acquire language.
Cohesion:
The way in which a text appears logical and well constructed.
Grapheme:
A written symbol, letter or combination of letters that is used to represent a phoneme.
Synonyms:
Words with very similar semantic value.
Typography:
The study of the graphic features of the printed page.
Phonics:
A system of teaching reading and spelling that stresses basic symbol-sound relationships and their use in decoding words; a system used especially in the early stages of reading.
Cueing:
The strategies used to help decode written texts successfully.
Miscue:
Errors made by children when reading.
Cursive Handwriting:
Handwriting in which the characters are joined in rounded and flowing strokes.
Convergence:
A process of linguistic change in which people adjust their dialect, accent or speech style to those of others, often occurring to express solidarity and understanding.
Sociolect:
A defined use of language as a result of membership in a social group.
Orthography:
The study of the use of letters and the rules of spelling in language.
Emergent Writing:
Children's early scribble writting, a stage of their literacy development.
Ascender:
The typographical feature where a portion of the letter goes above the usual height for letters in any font.
Descender:
Where part of a letter goes below the baseline of a font.
Digraph:
A graphic unit in which two symbols combine, or any sequence of two letters produced as a single sound, e.g. 'sh'
Homophone:
A lexical item that has the same pronunciation as another.
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