Linguistics Review

What is the most common defining feature "language" vs. "dialect"?

Mutual intelligibility

What are some features that complicate defining "language" and "dialect"?

Politics, culture, social factors, history, and religion

What are the three classifications for languages and what do each include?

Typological classification: identifying language universals

Genetic classification: identifying historical relationship/language family

Areal classification: identifying similarities based on geographic

What are the morphological typologies we discussed?

Isolating, agglutinating, fusional, and polysynthetic

How do language relationships reflect history?

Patterns of migration and colonization, educational and cultural values, and formation of new communities

What are two possible linguistic outcomes of language contact?

convergence and divergence

Explain the difference between a lingua franca and a pidgin.

A lingua franca is a common language for communication. Pidgin is a basic language with a few grammatical rules and minimal lexicon. There are no native speakers.

What is a creole?

Rules and lexicon of a pidgin expand exponentially within generations

What are the two methods of studying child language acquisition?

Naturalistic approach and experimental approach

What is the first stage of a child's phonetic development?

Babbling

What are the two errors children make in meaning development?

Overextension and underextension

What are the factors that make child language learning possible?

Experience, caregiver speech, feedback, "universal grammar"

Define simultaneous and sequential bilingual:

Simultaneous bilingual is children who learn multiple languages as L1s and sequential bilingual is when children learn languages after an L1 has already been learned

What is the interlanguage?

Systematic mental organization language (aka grammar)____

What is the Similarity Differential Rate Hypothesis?

The features in the L2 that are more dissimilar than the L1 will be acquired faster._

What are the three main factors that influence SLA?

Age, individual difference, and affective factors (motivation, self-efficacy)

What are some of the similarities and differences between child and adult language learning?

Child: Babbling, blank slate, learning to ignore, immediate environment, adaptable and malleable

Similarities: input, creativity, and output

Adult: no babbling, linguistic metaknowledge, learning to notice, decontextualized environment, socio-psychological influences, output

What is the difference between psycholingusitics and neurolinguistics?

Psycholinguistics studies how language is processed in the mind and neurolinguistics examines the neural processes in the brain that support language.

What is predictive processing?

It is a theory that our brains are processing information by making predictions about our environment and minimizing prediction errors.

What are the two areas of the brain primarily responsible for speech production and language comprehension?

broca's area (in the frontal lobe, where most of speech production is done) and wernicke's area (primarily in the temporal lobe, responsible for the majority of language comprehension) of the brain.

damage to this area leads to broken speech (broca's aphasia), wernicke's aphasia: difficulty monitoring language and putting them into comprehensible sentences