- "Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate."
Investigation of how children learn to communicate, including milestones in receptive and expressive language.
Phonetics and Phonology: The study of the sounds and sound patterns in language.
Developmental Milestones: A description of what developmental achievements should be met at certain ages during childhood.
Syntax: The rules governing sentence structure.
Semantics: The study of word meanings and how words relate to each other in sentences.
Pragmatics: The study of language use in context, including discourse and social interaction.
Bilingualism and Multilingualism: The acquisition and development of languages when a person is raised in a multilingual environment from early childhood.
Language Acquisition in Infants: How children begin to learn language from infancy, including pre-linguistic communication, babbling, and first words.
Language Disorders: An overview of speech and language impairments and developmental language disorders such as stuttering, voice disorders, and dyslexia.
Language Variation and Dialects: The differences between different languages, dialects, and registers of a language based on cultural, social, and geographic factors.
Cognitive Development in Language: How language relates to cognitive and intellectual development, including attention, memory, and problem-solving.
Assessment and Intervention: The assessment and treatment of language difficulties, including interventions such as speech therapy or counseling.
Neurocognitive Bases of Language: The neural basis of language processing, including how the brain processes and represents linguistic information.
Language in Context: The role of social and cultural factors in language development, including the influence of family, society, and education on language acquisition.
Language in Society: The relationship between language and social identity, including issues related to language policy and language rights.
Language and Technology: How technology is changing the way we use language and learn languages, including the use of apps, online learning, and social media.
Phonology: The study of sounds in language and their patterns. Infants begin to differentiate among sounds at 6-8 weeks, learn to produce sounds around 2-3 months, and master most sounds by age 8.
Morphology: The study of the smallest meaningful units of language. Toddlers learn about adding -s to make plurals and -ed to make past tense.
Syntax: The study of the rules that govern how words are combined to form sentences. Children first learn to combine words around 2 years old.
Semantics: The study of the meaning of words and sentences. Toddlers begin to learn words for common objects and actions.
Pragmatics: The study of the appropriate use of language in different social contexts. Children learn to adjust their language depending on their relationship with the listener.
Discourse: The study of how sentences are connected to form a larger unit of language, such as a paragraph or story. Children learn to organize ideas and communicate them in different genres.
Bilingualism/multilingualism: The study of how children learn and use two or more languages. Children who grow up bilingual tend to have better cognitive and linguistic skills.
Literacy: The study of reading and writing abilities. Children learn to read and write in a step-by-step process and need exposure to rich language experiences.
Narrative Development: The ability to tell a story with a clear beginning, middle, and end. It develops around 3-5 years of age.
Social Communication: The ability to use language to interact with others in conversations, play, and other settings. Children learn turn-taking, taking turns, listening, and comprehending message cues.
- "The capacity to use language successfully requires one to acquire a range of tools including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary."
- "Human language capacity is represented in the brain."
- "Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences, which is based on a syntactic principle called recursion."
- "These three mechanisms are: relativization, complementation, and coordination."
- "Speech perception always precedes speech production, and the gradually evolving system by which a child learns a language is built up one step at a time."
- "The distinction between individual phonemes is the initial step in language acquisition."
- "Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whether that be spoken language or signed language."
- "It refers to an infant's simultaneous acquisition of two native languages."
- "First-language acquisition deals with the acquisition of the native language, while second-language acquisition involves acquiring additional languages."
- "In addition to speech, reading, and writing a language with an entirely different script compounds the complexities of true foreign language literacy."
- "Linguists who are interested in child language acquisition have for many years questioned how language is acquired."
- "The question of how these structures are acquired, then, is more properly understood as the question of how a learner takes the surface forms in the input and converts them into abstract linguistic rules and representations."
- "Language acquisition involves structures, rules, and representation."
- "Language can be vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign."
- "Language acquisition involves acquiring phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary."
- "Even though human language capacity is finite, one can say and understand an infinite number of sentences."
- "These three mechanisms are: relativization, complementation, and coordination."
- "Speech perception always precedes speech production in first-language acquisition."
- "Language acquisition is one of the quintessential human traits."