language

Aphasia

A neurological impairment of language affecting comprehension and/or production.

Broca's Area

The region in the left frontal lobe of the brain involved in the production of speech.

Wernicke's Area

The region in the left temporal lobe involved in language comprehension.

Psycholinguistics

The study of the psychological and neurobiological factors in language acquisition, comprehension, and production.

Phonetics and Phonology

The study of speech sounds and how they are processed in the brain.

Morphology

The study of the structure and formation of words.

Syntax

The study concerning how words are combined to form sentences.

Semantics

The study of meaning in language.

Pragmatics

The branch of linguistics that studies the context and intended meaning in communication.

Universal Grammar

Chomsky's theory suggesting humans possess an innate ability to acquire language and recognize grammatical structures.

Behaviorism

The theory that language development is learned through reinforcement and conditioning, as proposed by B.F. Skinner.

Language Acquisition

The process by which infants learn to understand and communicate using language.

Habituation Method

A research method used to measure infants' responses to repeated stimuli.

Discrimination

The ability to differentiate between distinct sounds or phonemes.

Wug Test

A linguistic experiment demonstrating children's ability to apply grammatical rules to unfamiliar words.

Inflection

A modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense or number.

Voiced Consonants

Consonants produced with some vibration of the vocal cords.

Voiceless Consonants

Consonants produced without vibration of the vocal cords.

Generative Grammar

A theory suggesting that language allows for the generation of an infinite number of sentences.

Language Evolution

The process through which languages develop and change over time.