Development of Language Glossary Terms

AAE

African American English, also known as African American Vernacular English or Black American English.

Academic language

Language used in educational settings that focuses on descriptions, definitions, and narratives.

Actional verbs

Verbs that describe a dynamic action and have a volitionally acting agent.

Activation nodes

Processing units in parallel distributed processing models that resemble individual neurons in the brain.

Active sentence

A sentence in which the subject/agent is highlighted by first position placement.

Act-out task

A testing procedure where a child is asked to demonstrate an action.

Additive bilingualism

Acquisition of a second language while retaining one's original language.

Affix

A particle added to a word to alter its grammatical form or meaning.

Affricates

Sounds that are a combination of a stop and fricative.

African American English (AAE)

A family of varieties of English spoken by many African Americans, characterized by specific phonological, syntactic, and pragmatic rules and features.

Agent

The cause or initiator of an event, or the noun controlling the verb in a sentence.

Age of acquisition (AoA)

The age at which a language concept is learned.

Agglutinative

Characterizes languages that add separate inflectional suffixes in a predictable order.

Allomorph

Any one of the possible phonetic forms of a morpheme.

Alphabetic principle

The principle that letters of the alphabet represent the sounds of spoken language.1. Alveolar:Refers to any consonant made with the tongue near or touching the alveolar ridge, behind the upper front teeth.

American Sign Language (ASL)

A complete language, related historically to French, that is the primary manual language used by the Deaf community in the United States.

Amplification

The use of hearing aids to improve impaired hearing ability.

Analytic style

An early language acquisition strategy displayed by infants who have good comprehension and pay particular attention to individual words, rather than to phrases.

Anaphora

Referring back to previous discourse through the use of pronouns, definite articles, and other linguistic devices.

Anomia

Aphasic difficulty in retrieving content words.

Aphasia

Loss or impairment of language ability because of brain damage. Aphasic syndromes vary, depending on the site of the damage.

Applied behavior analysis (ABA)

A system based on the principles of learning theory that is designed to examine or change behavior in a measurable way; this typically includes interventions with clear objectives, based on an experimental design.

Apraxia of speech

See childhood apraxia of speech (CAS).

Arcuate fasciculus

A band of subcortical fibers connecting Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area in the left hemisphere of the human brain. See conduction aphasia.

Asperger syndrome

An autism spectrum disorder named for the Viennese physician who first described it. Affected individuals have normal IQs and may have exceptional talent in some domains, while at the same time lacking skills in pragmatics and social interaction.

Aspirated/unaspirated

A sound made with/without a puff of air. In English, initial voiceless stops (such as [p t k]) are typically aspirated.

Assimilation

A developmental or speech sound error that changes a sound in a word to make it more similar to an adjacent or nearby sound in that word or a neighboring word.

Attentional control

A person’s ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore in the environment or in a stimulus.

Attrition

In linguistics, loss of language skill over time, typically loss of minority home language due to influence of the majority language in schooling and everyday life.

Audiologist

A professional who has the training and equipment to test the auditory acuity of a subject.

Auditory brainstem responses (ABRs)

Tests, typically given by audiologists, to measure involuntary electrophysiological activity from the auditory nerve in response to sound.

Auditory processing disorder (APD)

A developmental disorder in which children experience difficulty processing/understanding features of the speech signal, such as rapidly changing acoustic cues.

Auditory verbal therapy

A therapy for children with hearing impairment that emphasizes the use of hearing (residual or that provided by hearing aids or cochlear implants) to listen to and use speech.

Augmentative or alternative communication (AAC)

Any of a number of ways, such as communication software or boards, designed to help individuals with disabilities to communicate.

Autism

A disorder that varies in symptoms and severity along a spectrum, usually diagnosed in childhood and probably neurological in origin, characterized by stereotypic behavior and a broad range of social, communicative, and intellectual deficiencies.1. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD):A broad term that refers to autism as well as other related developmental disorders that share some characteristics of autism.

Auxiliary verb

A verb that helps modify the tense, aspect, modality, voice, or emphasis of the main verb in a clause.

Avoidance

A strategy employed by some children as they acquire the phonology of their language, where they may avoid certain sounds or sound sequences while using others.

Baby talk

A speech register used with young children, also sometimes used to refer to the speech of young children.

Back-channel feedback

Verbal and nonverbal behaviors that indicate to the speaker continuing attention and satisfactory comprehension or the lack thereof.

Back vowel

A vowel made with the highest point of the tongue positioned in the back of the mouth, near the velum.

Basic-level category

The level of abstraction that is most generally appropriate in a given situation or for the given speaker.

Behavioral intervention

Guiding one's own or another's overt behavior through the use of techniques based on the principles of learning.

Bilabial

A sound produced with the two lips touching or very close together.

Bilingual

Involving two languages; a person who speaks two languages.

Bilingual bootstrapping

The ability to use knowledge from a first language to assist in learning a second or subsequent languages.

Binding principles

Rules of grammar that dictate the relation between words such as pronouns and their referents.

Biological capacity

Innate factors present in the organism by virtue of its genetic makeup.

Bootstrapping

The use of previously mastered language skills to acquire new language skills.

Bottom-up model

A model of processing where reading depends on accurate decoding of letter strings that make up words.

Bound morpheme

A morpheme that must always be attached to at least one other morpheme and cannot stand alone.

Broad Autism Phenotype (BAP)

A cluster of subclinical traits often seen in relatives of individuals with ASD.

Broca's area

An area of the left hemisphere in the frontal region of the brain associated with speech production.

Canonical form

A sequence of phonological features expressing the properties that a group of highly similar words have in common.

Categorical perception

An innate auditory skill where physical distinctions among sounds are imperceptible within sounds classified as a single phoneme but change rapidly across a physical threshold that leads to perception of a different phoneme.1. Center-embedded relative clause:A relative clause that modifies a main-clause subject and is positioned in the center of a main clause.

Cerebral palsy

A congenital motor disability that can affect an individual's ability to produce oral language.

CDS (child-directed speech)

The special speech register used when talking to children, including short sentences, greater repetition and questioning, and higher and more variable intonation than that of speech addressed to adults.

CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts)

Part of CHILDES that contains rules for preparing transcripts of language for computer analysis.

CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System)

A major web-based resource for language development researchers, containing rules for transcription, computer programs for analyzing language, and a database of language transcripts.

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS)

A developmental disorder in which control of volitional movements required for accurate speech perception is impaired.

Circumlocution

A behavior seen in individuals with word finding difficulty, in which the speaker "goes around" the word they are searching for.

CLAN

Acronym for the computerized Child Language Analysis software programs that are part of the CHILDES system.

Classical concept

A concept that can be characterized by unchanging criteria.

Classical conditioning

A form of associative learning in which previously neutral stimuli come to elicit similar responses through repeated pairing with other stimuli.

Cleft lip/palate

A congenital disability that impairs control of the oral air pressure necessary for the articulation of many speech sounds.

Clinical method

A research design in which the investigator asks open-ended questions of the child.

Closed-class word

One of a small group of words with a grammatical role that does not admit new members.

Cluster reduction

An early pronunciation strategy in which children simplify consonant clusters in words.

Cochlear implant (CI)

A device surgically implanted in the inner ear to stimulate the auditory nerve of a person who is deaf.

Code-switching

The practice of speakers alternating between two or more languages, dialects, or registers in conversation.

Cognitive shifting

The mental process of redirecting one's focus of attention from one task, stimulus, or activity to another.

Cohesive device

A way to link the content of different parts of a conversation through the use of pronouns, ellipsis, connectives, anaphora, and other conversational strategies.

Collocation

The predictable pairing of a particular word with another word or words in a language.1. Common Core State Standards:An educational initiative that describes what K–12 students throughout the United States should know in a variety of skill areas at each grade level.

Common underlying proficiency

A skill that provides support for numerous other skills, such as memory or attentional support to language learning.

Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (CSBS)

An assessment tool that appraises the communicative competence of children who are 6 to 24 months old, or who function at levels that are typically seen at ages between 6 and 24 months.

Communicative competence

Linguistic competence plus knowledge of the social rules for language use. The speaker has phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic knowledge and the additional pragmatic knowledge necessary to use language appropriately in social situations.

Communicative functions

The purposes for which language, vocalizations, and gestures are used in conveying various kinds of information to other people.

Communicative pointing

One of the roots of language in the gestural and usage-based theoretical approach to language development.

Communicative temptation tasks

Tasks designed to elicit communication efforts from an infant.

Comp

A functional syntactic category; the category of complementizers (e.g., that, if, whether) — words that are used to embed a clause inside of another clause.

Competence

Linguists’ term for the inner knowledge one has of language and all of its linguistic rules and structures. Synonym:communicative competence.

Competition model

A model of language development based on PDP networks that assumes that various cues in the language environment compete with one another. The most available and reliable cues will be learned first. Developed by Bates and MacWhinney.

Compound word

A word composed of two or more free morphemes; it may contain bound morphemes in addition to the free morphemes.

Comprehensible input

Language input that is understandable by the learner.

Comprehension

The understanding of language. Comprehension typically precedes production, and is governed by a different set of constraints.

Conduction aphasia

An aphasic syndrome characterized by inability to repeat, typically resulting from damage to the arcuate fasciculus.

Congenital

Present at birth, but not necessarily genetic in origin.

Connectionist models

Models of language or other mental processes that are meant to represent the neural architecture and activity of the human brain.

Consonant

Any speech sound made by constricting the vocal tract enough to impede or substantially reduce airflow through the mouth.

Consonant clusters

Two or more consonants that occur together in a word, without intervening vowels.

Contingent comments

Comments made by one conversational partner that follow the topic of the other speaker.

Contractible/uncontractible

Environments that either permit or disallow contraction. In English, the verb to be is contractible in most environments (e.g., he’s running), but is illegal in others (e.g., Is he running?; Yes, he is; one cannot say, *Yes, he’s).

Contrast

A principle employed by many children in word learning:They assume that words contrast in meaning; no two words have the same meaning. See also phonological contrast.

Contrastive analysis

In second language instruction, a way to predict an individual’s likely problems in L2 learning by identifying ways in which the speaker’s two languages differ from each other.

Controlling interactional style

A way of talking to infants that is intrusive, constantly redirecting the child’s attention, in contrast to a responsive style.

Coordinations

Grammatical combinations that can involve two or more words, phrases, or sentences connected by conjunctions (e.g., “Sue and her mother ate and drank.”).

Copula

In English, the verb “to be” when it is the main verb of a clause (e.g., “Today is sunny”); while English only has one such copular verb, other languages may have more. For instance, Spanish has both ser and estar as its copular verbs.

Critical period

Biologically, a sensitive period for the acquisition of a skill. Once a critical period has passed, acquisition may be slower or unnatural. The critical period for learning language was historically presumed to be prior to puberty, although this assumption is open to doubt, particularly in second language acquisition.

Crosslinguistic transfer

Influence from one of a speaker’s languages to another; such transfer can either help or hinder the learner, depending how similar the two languages are.

Cross-sectional research

A research design that explores age-related changes in language by studying groups of children who differ in age or grade. It is contrasted with longitudinal research, in which a single child or small group may be followed over time.

Cue availability

The degree to which a linguistic concept is evident in language input to the child.