| language | A communication system in which words and their written symbols combine in various, regulated ways to produce an infinite number of messages.
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| communicative competence | The ability to convey thoughts, feelings, and intentions in an organized, culturally patterned way that sustains and regulates human interactions.
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| productive language | The production of speech.
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| receptive language | Understanding the speech of others.
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| phonology | The system of sounds that a particular language uses.
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| phoneme | Any of the basic units of a language's phonetic system; phonemes are the smallest sound units that affect meaning.
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| semantics | The study of word meanings and word combinations, as in phrases, clauses, and sentences.
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| grammar | The structure of a language; made up of morphology and syntax.
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| morphology | The study of a language's smallest units of meaning, such as a prefix, a suffix, or a root word.
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| syntax | The subdivision of grammar that prescribes how words are to be combined into phrases, clauses, and sentences.
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| pragmatics | A set of rules that specify appropriate language for particular social contexts.
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| language acquisition device (LAD) | Chomsky's proposed mental structure in the human nervous system that incorporates an innate concept of language.
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| creole language | A language spoken by first-generation, pidgin-language speakers; a language that in contrast with pidgin, is highly developed and rule governed.
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| critical period | A specific period in children's development when they are sensitive to a particular environmental stimulus that does not have the same effect on them when encountered before or after this period.
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| language acquisition support system (LASS) | According to Bruner, a collection of strategies and tactics that environmental influences-intially, a child's parents or primary caretakers-provide the language-learning child.
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| infant-directed speech | A simplified style of speech parents use with young children, in which sentences are short simple, and often repetitive; the speaker enunciates especially clearly, slowly, and in a higher-pitched voice and often ends with a rising intonation. Also called motherese.
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| expansion | A technique adults use in speaking to young children in which they might imitate and expand or add to a child's statement.
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| recast | A technique adults use in speaking to young children in which they render a child's incomplete sentence in a more complex grammatical form.
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| negative evidence | According to pinker, corrective feedback that parents may give to young language-learning children.
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| protodeclarative | A gesture that an infant uses to make some sort of statement about an object.
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| protoimperative | A gesture that either an infant or a young child may use to get someone to do something she or he wants.
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| categorical speech perception | the tendency to perceive a range of sounds that belong to the same phonemic group as the same.
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| cooing | A very young infant's production of vowel-like sounds.
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| babbling | An infant's production of strings of consonant-vowel combinations.
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| patterned speech | A form of pseudospeech in which the child utters strings of phonemes that sound very much like real speech but are not.
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| naming explosion | The rapid increase in vocabulary that the child typically shows at about the age of 1 1/2.
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| overextension | The use, by a young child, of a single word to cover many different things.
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| underextension | The use, by a young child, of a single word in a restricted and individualistic way.
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| holophrase | A single word that appears to represent a complete thought.
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| telegraphic speech | Two-word utterances that include only the words that are essential to convey the speaker's intent.
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| overregularization | the mistaken application of a principle of regular change to a word that changes irregularly.
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| speech acts | One- or two- word utterances that clearly refer to situations or to sequences of events.
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| discourse | Socially based conversations.
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| metalinguistic awareness | The understanding that language is a system of communicating with others that is bound by rules.
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| bilingual education | Teaching children two languages at the same time.
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