Language

Morphemes

The smallest unit of sound that contains meaning (e.g., "table" = 1, "tables" = 2).

Phonemes

The smallest unit of sound (e.g., /d/, /o/, /g/).

Syntax

Grammar; the rules that govern how words are put together to form sentences.

Semantics

Early stage of speech containing all phonemes (universal); later narrows to native language.

Segmentation Problem

The difficulty of determining where one word ends and the next begins in a stream of speech.

Universal Phoneme Sensitivity

The ability of infants to distinguish between all human speech sounds (lost by 1 year).

Social Learning Theory

Language is learned through imitation and reinforcement.

Innate Mechanism Theory

Humans are born with a Language Acquisition Device

• humans are born with a "hard-wired" ability—rooted in universal grammar—to understand language rules and structures

• why kids say runned instead of ran when theyve never heard adults say? internal rules rather than just imitating

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The idea that the language we speak shapes how we perceive the world.

Overextensions vs. Underextensions

Overextension: Calling every four-legged animal a "dog."

Underextension: Thinking the word "dog" only applies to your specific pet at home.

The Segmentation Rule

Infants who are better at segmenting speech (picking out individual words from a sentence) generally have larger vocabularies later in childhood.