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Fundamentals of Language, Speech, and Communication

• Linguistic action is grounded in a complex system of language, speech, and communication rules. Linguistics (Sprachwissenschaft) is the scientific discipline that studies these rules and the speech material used to translate them into audible speech.

• Adult native speakers utilize pronunciation and grammatical rules automatically and unconsciously without needing to explicitly think about or explain them:

  • Pronunciation variations, such as the difference between the /ch/ sound in Buch and Bücher.

  • Morphological plural formations, such as Hund (pronounced /hunt/) becoming Hunde rather than Hünder (by contrast to Mund $\rightarrow$ Münder), or Haus becoming Häuser while Maus becomes Mäuse.

  • Irregular past tense forms, such as gehen becoming ging rather than following patterns like stehen $\rightarrow$ stand.

• Children act as rule hunters (Regeljäger, Penner, 2005, p. 19): they actively seek and extract implicit underlying structural patterns from their surrounding language environment during