Language Structure Flashcards
Bilingualism
Substantial fluency in two languages.
Competence
In linguistics, a person’s abstract knowledge of a language.
Critical period
A period early in life when children are best prepared to learn a cognitive skill such as language.
Grammar
A set of rules that prescribe all the acceptable utterances of a language. A grammar consists of syntax, semantics, and phonology.
Language universals
Properties of natural languages, providing constrains on possible grammars.
Linguistic determinism
The claim that language determines or strongly influences the way that a person thinks, including how the person perceives the world.
Linguistic intuitions
Judgments by speakers of a language about the acceptability of utterances or about the relations between utterances.
Modularity
The proposal that language is a component (a linguistic module) separate from the rest of cognition, including the proposal that language comprehension has an initial phase in which only syntactic considerations are brought to bear.
Natural languages
Languages that humans can acquire.
Parameter setting
The proposal that the settings of 100 or so parameters account for the differences among natural languages and that language acquisition by children involves learning those settings.
Performance
In linguistics, the actual application of linguistic competence in speaking or listening.
Phonology
The study of the sound structure of languages.
Phrase structure
The hierarchical organisation of a sentence into a set of phrases, sometimes represented as a tree structure.
Productivity
Refers to the fact that natural languages have an infinite number of possible sentences.
Regularity
The fact that sentences are systematically structured in many ways.