Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language. In other words,it is how human beings gain the ability to be aware of language,to understand it,and to produce and use words and sentences to communicate.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning,rather than making any literal sense. Categorized as formulaic language,an idiomatic expression's meaning is different from the literal meanings of each word inside it. Idioms occur frequently in all languages;in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions. Some well known idioms in English are spill the beans,it's raining cats and dogs,and break a leg.
Dyirbal is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in northeast Queensland by the Dyirbal people. In 2016,the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that there were 8 speakers of the language. It is a member of the small Dyirbalic branch of the Pama–Nyungan family. It possesses many outstanding features that have made it well known among linguists.
In general linguistics,a labile verb is a verb that undergoes causative alternation;that is,it can be used both transitively and intransitively,with the requirement that the direct object of its transitive use corresponds to the subject of its intransitive use,as in "I ring the bell" and "The bell rings." Labile verbs are a prominent feature of English,and also occur in many other languages. When causatively alternating verbs are used transitively they are called causatives since,in the transitive use of the verb,the subject is causing the action denoted by the intransitive version. When causatively alternating verbs are used intransitively,they are referred to as anticausatives or inchoatives because the intransitive variant describes a situation in which the theme participant undergoes a change of state,becoming,for example,"rung".
Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child or infant. It is also called caretaker speech,infant-directed speech (IDS),child-directed speech (CDS),child-directed language (CDL),caregiver register,parentese,or motherese.
Echolalia is the unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person;when repeated by the same person,it is called palilalia. In its profound form it is automatic and effortless. It is one of the echophenomena,closely related to echopraxia,the automatic repetition of movements made by another person;both are "subsets of imitative behavior" whereby sounds or actions are imitated "without explicit awareness". Echolalia may be an immediate reaction to a stimulus or may be delayed.
In cognitive psychology,fast mapping is the term used for the hypothesized mental process whereby a new concept is learned based only on minimal exposure to a given unit of information. Fast mapping is thought by some researchers to be particularly important during language acquisition in young children,and may serve to explain the prodigious rate at which children gain vocabulary. In order to successfully use the fast mapping process,a child must possess the ability to use "referent selection" and "referent retention" of a novel word. There is evidence that this can be done by children as young as two years old,even with the constraints of minimal time and several distractors. Previous research in fast mapping has also shown that children are able to retain a newly learned word for a substantial amount of time after they are subjected to the word for the first time. Further research by Markson and Bloom (1997),showed that children can remember a novel word a week after it was presented to them even with only one exposure to the novel word. While children have also displayed the ability to have equal recall for other types of information,such as novel facts,their ability to extend the information seems to be unique to novel words. This suggests that fast mapping is a specified mechanism for word learning. The process was first formally articulated and the term 'fast mapping' coined Susan Carey and Elsa Bartlett in 1978.
A dummy pronoun,also known as an expletive pronoun,is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such,it is an example of exophora.
Language development in humans is a process which starts early in life. Infants start without knowing a language,yet by 10 months,babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begins in utero when the fetus starts to recognize the sounds and speech patterns of its mother's voice and differentiate them from other sounds after birth.
Semantic bootstrapping is a linguistic theory of child language acquisition which proposes that children can acquire the syntax of a language by first learning and recognizing semantic elements and building upon,or bootstrapping from,that knowledge. This theory proposes that children,when acquiring words,will recognize that words label conceptual categories,such as objects or actions. Children will then use these semantic categories as a cue to the syntactic categories,such as nouns and verbs. Having identified particular words as belonging to a syntactic category,they will then look for other correlated properties of those categories,which will allow them to identify how nouns and verbs are expressed in their language. Additionally,children will use perceived conceptual relations,such as Agent of an event,to identify grammatical relations,such as Subject of a sentence. This knowledge,in turn,allows the learner to look for other correlated properties of those grammatical relations.
Bootstrapping is a term used in language acquisition in the field of linguistics. It refers to the idea that humans are born innately equipped with a mental faculty that forms the basis of language. It is this language faculty that allows children to effortlessly acquire language. As a process,bootstrapping can be divided into different domains,according to whether it involves semantic bootstrapping,syntactic bootstrapping,prosodic bootstrapping,or pragmatic bootstrapping.
Lila Ruth Gleitman was an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics,focusing on children's learning of their first language.
In linguistics,functional morphemes,also sometimes referred to as functors,are building blocks for language acquisition. A functional morpheme is a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word,rather than supplying the root meaning. Functional morpheme are generally considered a closed class,which means that new functional morphemes cannot normally be created.
Syntactic bootstrapping is a theory in developmental psycholinguistics and language acquisition which proposes that children learn word meanings by recognizing syntactic categories and the structure of their language. It is proposed that children have innate knowledge of the links between syntactic and semantic categories and can use these observations to make inferences about word meaning. Learning words in one's native language can be challenging because the extralinguistic context of use does not give specific enough information about word meanings. Therefore,in addition to extralinguistic cues,conclusions about syntactic categories are made which then lead to inferences about a word's meaning. This theory aims to explain the acquisition of lexical categories such as verbs,nouns,etc. and functional categories such as case markers,determiners,etc.
Errors in early word use or developmental errors are mistakes that children commonly commit when first learning language. Language acquisition is an impressive cognitive achievement attained by humans. In the first few years of life,children already demonstrate general knowledge and understanding of basic patterns in their language. They can extend words they hear to novel situations and apply grammatical rules in novel contexts. Although children possess an impressive ability to acquire and comprehend language early in life,they make many errors and mistakes as they enhance their knowledge and understanding of language. Three prominent errors in early word use are overgeneralization,overextension,and underextension.
A late talker is a toddler experiencing late language emergence (LLE),which can also be an early or secondary sign of an autism spectrum disorder,or other developmental disorders,such as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder,attention deficit hyperactivity disorder,intellectual disability,learning disability,social communication disorder,or specific language impairment. Lack of language development,comprehension skills,and challenges with literacy skills are potential risks as late talkers age. Outlook for late talkers with or without intervention is generally favorable. Toddlers have a high probability of catching up to typical toddlers if early language interventions are put in place. Language interventions include general language stimulation,focused language stimulation and milieu teaching.
Prosodic bootstrapping in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that learners of a primary language (L1) use prosodic features such as pitch,tempo,rhythm,amplitude,and other auditory aspects from the speech signal as a cue to identify other properties of grammar,such as syntactic structure. Acoustically signaled prosodic units in the stream of speech may provide critical perceptual cues by which infants initially discover syntactic phrases in their language. Although these features by themselves are not enough to help infants learn the entire syntax of their native language,they provide various cues about different grammatical properties of the language,such as identifying the ordering of heads and complements in the language using stress prominence,indicating the location of phrase boundaries,and word boundaries. It is argued that prosody of a language plays an initial role in the acquisition of the first language helping children to uncover the syntax of the language,mainly due to the fact that children are sensitive to prosodic cues at a very young age.
Patricia J. Brooks is an American developmental psychologist. She is the director of the Language Learning Laboratory at the College of Staten Island of City University of New York and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center where she serves as the Deputy Executive Officer of the PhD program in Psychology. Brooks is also the faculty advisor of the Graduate Student Teaching Association (GSTA) of Division 2 of the American Psychological Association,the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP).
Susan Ellis Weismer is a language and communication scientist known for her work on language development in children with specific language impairment and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She is the Oros Family Chair and Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Wisconsin–Madison,where she is a Principal Investigator and Director of the Language Processes Lab. She has also served as the Associate Dean for Research,College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Susan Curtiss is an American linguist. She is Professor Emerita at the University of California,Los Angeles. Curtiss's main fields of research are psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Her 1976 UCLA PhD dissertation centered on the study of the grammatical development of Genie,a famous feral child. Her subsequent work has been on grammatical development in children with SLI;maturational constraints on first-language development;hemispheric specialization for language and language acquisition;and the cognitive modularity of grammar.
