Second Language Acquisition: beginning the learning of another language after a first language has been acquired.
Simultaneous Language Acquisition: two languages learned at the same time.
Foreign Language: a language which is not the native language of large numbers of people in a particular country or region, is not used as a medium of instruction in schools and is not widely used as a medium of communication in government, media, etc. It is typically taught as school subjects for the purpose of communicating with foreigners or for reading printed materials in the language.
Second Language: a language that plays a major role in a particular country or region though it may not be the first language of many people who use it. For example, the learning of English by immigrants in the US, or the learning of English in Nigeria, India, Singapore, and the Philippines.
Multilingualism: the use of three or more languages by an individual or by a group of speakers such as the inhabitants of a particular region or a nation.
Aptitude: the natural ability to learn a language, not including intelligence, motivation, interest, etc. It is the combination of various abilities, such as oral mimicry ability, phonemic coding ability, grammatical sensitivity, and the ability to infer language rules.
Stimulus (Stimuli): something that produces a change or reaction in an individual or organism.
High Amplitude Sucking (HAS): a technique used to study infant perceptual abilities, which typically involves recording an infant’s sucking rate as a measure of its attention to various stimuli.
Auditory Discrimination: the ability to hear and recognize the different sounds in a language. In particular, the ability to recognize the different phonemes, and the different stress and intonation patterns.
Reduplicated babbling: babbling in which consonant-vowel combinations are repeated, such as “ba-ba-ba.”
Nonreduplicated babbling: babbling in which young children vary the consonant-vowel sequences used such as “ba-da-ga.”
Holophrastic stage: a stage of development in which children use a single word to substitute for the thought conveyed in a full sentence.
Assimilation: a phonological process in which a sound is produced in a similar manner to a neighboring sound. E.g. “z” which is voiced, instead of voiceless “s”, before a voiced vowel.
Substitution of sounds: a phonological process in which the speaker mispronounces by replacing one sound with another. E.g. Pronouncing “t” instead of “s”.
Consonant cluster: sequence of two or more consonants. E.g. /dr/ in drunk, and /str/ strong.
Overextension: a child’s use of a word for objects or items that share a feature or property. E.g. using “dog” to refer to all animals with four legs.
Underextension: a child’s use of a word with a narrower meaning than in the adult’s language. E.g. using “dog” to refer only to the family’s pet.
Morpheme: smallest meaning-bearing unit of language. E.g. word units, like “dog,” and grammatical inflections, like the plural “-s.”
Mean length of utterance (MLU): a measurement used to calculate the development of children's grammar by dividing the number of morphemes by a number of total utterances.
Input: the language to which an individual is exposed in the environment.
U-shaped Development: a developmental process in which learners correctly use the structure initially, but later on, with more learning, use it incorrectly, and then finally use the structure correctly once again.
Nativism: a theoretical approach emphasizing the innate, possibly genetic, contributions to any behavior.
Empiricism: theoretical view that emphasizes the role of the environment and experience over that of innate ideas or capacities.
Child-directed Speech (CDS)/Caregiver talk: special speech register used by adults and older children when speaking to younger children and infants. Characteristics include exaggerated intonation and considerable repetition.
CHILDES: online corpus that has grown to include numerous Internet-accessible transcripts of dialogues between children and adults and older children.
Object permanence: the understanding that an infant gains during the latter part of the first year that objects continue to exist even though they may no longer be visible.
Symbolic Play: the ability of children to use objects, actions, or ideas to represent other objects, actions, or ideas as play.
Metalinguistic Awareness: the ability to reflect on language as an object.
Transfer: influence of the L1 in using the L2, or vice versa.
Interference: influence of L1 in the L2 when it leads to an error, or vice versa.
Interlocutor: any person with whom someone is speaking.
Formulaic Sequences: phrases that learners learn and use as a whole unit, without analyzing into individual units. E.g. “How are you?” used as a single unit.
Interlanguage: a type of language, neither L1 nor L2, produced by second and foreign-language learners who are in the process of learning a language. E.g. I opened car give UNTAC.
Overgeneralization: the overuse of a rule or structure in contexts in which it is not appropriate. E.g. I hurted my arm.
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