Updated Myers' Psychology for the AP® Course, 3E - Module 36

language

our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.

phoneme

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit.

morpheme

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix).

grammar

in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others. Semantics is the language's set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds, and syntax is its set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences.

babbling stage

beginning around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.

one-word stage

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

two-word stage

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements.

telegraphic speech

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram—"go car"—using mostly nouns and verbs.

aphasia

impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding).

Broca's area

helps control language expression—an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.

Wernicke's area

a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.

linguistic determinism

the strong form of Whorf's hypothesis—that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us.

linguistic influence

the weaker form of "linguistic relativity"—the idea that language affects thought (thus our thinking and world view is "relative to" our cultural language).