Speech, Language, and Communication

A complete set of vocabulary flashcards covering key terms and definitions from Chapter 1: An Introduction to Language Acquisition.

Communication

The process of exchanging information, ideas, thoughts, feelings, needs, or desires through verbal, written, gesture, pantomime, drawing, or sign language modes.

Communicative Competence

The ability to communicate a message successfully and to understand the concepts being communicated.

Linguistic Competence

A language user's underlying knowledge about the system of rules, involving the acquisition and use of morphology, phonology, syntax, and semantics.

Paralinguistic Cues

Nonverbal cues superimposed on speech—such as intonation, stress or emphasis, speed or rate of delivery, and pause or hesitation—that signal attitude or emotion.

Speech

A verbal means of communication consisting of articulation, voice, and fluency.

Articulation

The movement of the articulators (the tongue, lips, and soft palate or velum) to produce speech sounds that form words.

Movable Articulators

The speech structures consisting of the lips, tongue, and velum (soft palate) that move to form speech sounds.

Voice

The component of speech involving the use of the vocal folds and breath support to produce sounds.

Fluency

The rhythm of speech.

Phonemes

The smallest units of sound in a language that create or signal a difference in meaning.

Language

A shared code that represents concepts conveyed through the use of arbitrary symbols and rules that govern those symbols.

Receptive Language

The auditory comprehension or encoding ability to understand spoken language, words, sentences, stories, conversation, and concepts such as size, color, time, emotions, and directions.

Expressive Language

The decoding ability to convey and share thoughts, ideas, and feelings through the production of words and sentences, retelling events or stories, and engaging in conversation.

Generative Language

The property of language where knowledge of rules permits speakers to generate an almost infinite number of meaningful sentences from a finite number of words and rules.

Components of Language

The model proposed by Bloom and Lahey (1978) categorizing language into three overlapping domains: Form (phonology, morphology, syntax), Content (semantics), and Use (pragmatics).

Syntax

The component of language that involves the rules for combining words to form meaningful sentences and specifies sentence organization and word relationships.

Morphology

The component of language describing the structure or organization of words.

Morpheme

The smallest grammatical unit that is indivisible without violating the meaning or producing meaningless units.

Free Morphemes

Independent morphemes that can stand alone to form words or parts of words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions.

Bound Morphemes

Grammatical markers that cannot function independently and must attach to free morphemes or other bound morphemes, including prefixes and suffixes.

Inflectional Morphemes

Bound morphemes that modify verb tense (e.g., -ed) or indicate noun number (e.g., -s) or possession ('s).

Phonology

The aspect of language concerned with the rules governing the combination and sequencing of speech sounds in word formation.

Allophones

Individual sound members within a phoneme family that differ slightly in pronunciation but do not change the word's meaning.

Distributional Rules

Phonological rules describing which phonemes can be employed in various positions within words in a language.

Morphophonology

The study of the interaction between phonemes and morphemes, reflecting the effect of one phoneme on another when morphemes combine.

Semantics

The language component concerned with how meaning is conveyed by words, sentences, narratives, and conversations.

World Knowledge

An individual's autobiographical and experiential understanding and memory of particular events.

Word Knowledge

Verbal memory containing word and symbol definitions that forms an individual's lexicon or mental dictionary.

Pragmatics

The system of rules governing the use of language in social interactions and context.

Discourse

Language used beyond individual isolated sentences to convey a message, encompassing conversational organization, narratives, and jokes.

Language Difference

A variation in dialect or language features relative to another speaker's language that does not imply a disorder or deficiency.