Language through the Lifespan Lecture Review

Flashcards covering key sociolinguistic categories, theories of age, child language acquisition stages, and youth linguistic practices as discussed in the lecture notes.

Idiolect

The unique and characteristic language use of an individual speaker.

Accent

Linguistic variation that refers specifically to aspects of pronunciation.

Dialect

Linguistic variation that refers to geographical differences across levels such as vocabulary, morphology, and syntax.

Sociolinguistic Variable

A set of alternative ways of saying the same thing, where the alternatives (variants) possess social significance.

Age-grading

Linguistic variation that is part of an individual's age at any given time, theorized to follow a $U$-shaped pattern that repeats generation after generation.

Historical Change

A pervasive and ongoing linguistic change in a speech community as it moves through time.

Real-time Studies

Diachronic longitudinal studies that track linguistic changes over time in specific individuals or cohorts.

Apparent-time Studies

Synchronic studies that observe linguistic patterns of different age groups at a single moment to extrapolate earlier forms of variation.

Chronological Age

The exact amount of time, or 'calendar age,' that has elapsed since an individual's birth.

Biological Age

Age defined by an individual's present position with respect to their potential life span.

Psychological Age

The behavioral capacities of individuals to use adaptive skills like memory and learning to regulate behavior.

Social Age

An individual's roles and habits based on the age-graded behavioral expectations of their particular society or culture.

Cohort

People within a delineated population who experience the same significant events within a given period of time.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

A hypothesis by Noam Chomsky that humans are genetically predisposed to learn language via an innate mechanism.

Productivity

The ability to put together familiar linguistic pieces in new ways to produce novel words and sentences.

Babbling

A stage of language acquisition occurring between $6$ and $8$ months characterized by repetitive consonant-vowel (CV) patterns.

Telegraphic Stage

A stage in child language acquisition (typically $24$ to $30$ months) consisting of sentence structures made of lexical rather than functional morphemes.

Critical Period Hypothesis

The theory that the first few years of life are the crucial window during which an individual can acquire a first language through adequate stimuli.

Theory of Mind (ToM)

The cognitive ability to attribute mental states—such as beliefs, desires, and intentions—to others and recognize that they guide behavior.

Childlore

Peer-specific repertoires such as games, riddles, rhymes, and jokes created and shared by children.

Familylect

A set of invented words or private phrases with meanings understood only within a family or small intimate group.

Bricolage

The process of appropriating and combining existing cultural elements in new ways to create a distinctive or subversive style.

Indexical Field

A constellation of ideologically related potential meanings associated with a linguistic variable, activated in situated use.

Language Attrition

The non-pathological decrease in proficiency of a previously acquired language, often due to migration or lack of contact with the speech community.

Cringe

A linguistic resource denoting vicarious embarrassment, used by youth as a digital speech act to perform social positioning and group distinction.