- "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."
The process through which individuals acquire language, including first and second language acquisition.
Nature vs. Nurture: The debate about whether language acquisition is primarily determined by innate abilities (nature) or environmental factors (nurture).
Universal Grammar: The theory that all humans are born with a set of grammatical rules that underlie all languages.
First Language Acquisition: The process by which children learn their native language(s) and how this process differs from second language acquisition.
Second Language Acquisition: The process by which individuals learn a second language, including the factors that affect success in this process.
Bilingualism and Multilingualism: The ability to use two or more languages fluently and the cognitive and social advantages and challenges of being bilingual/multilingual.
Language Socialization: The process by which individuals learn appropriate language use in social and cultural contexts.
Language and Identity: The impact of language on shaping personal and social identities.
Sociolinguistics: The study of language use in different social contexts, including regional, cultural, and social class variations.
Language Contact: The study of how languages influence each other when speakers of different languages come into contact.
Language Change: The natural evolution of language over time, including the factors that drive language change.
Language Documentation and Preservation: The process of documenting languages that are endangered and promoting their preservation.
Language Teaching and Learning: The theories and methods used to teach and learn languages in educational settings.
Cognitive Linguistics: The study of language as a cognitive process, including how language is processed in the brain and how it shapes thought and perception.
Neurolinguistics: The study of language processing in the brain, including the neural basis of language acquisition and use.
Psycholinguistics: The study of how people acquire, comprehend, and produce language, including how language is represented in the mind.
First Language Acquisition: This is the process of acquiring the first language a person learns as a child. It includes the ability to understand and produce grammar, vocabulary, and syntax of the language.
Second Language Acquisition: This is the process of acquiring a second language after the first language has been learned. It involves gaining proficiency in the language, including listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
Foreign Language Acquisition: This is the process of acquiring a language that is not commonly spoken in the learner's community. It involves understanding and producing the language to communicate with people from other cultures.
Simultaneous Bilingualism: This is the process of acquiring two languages at the same time from birth. It is also called dual-language acquisition and is typically observed in families where both parents speak a different language.
Sequential Bilingualism: This is the process of acquiring a second language after the first language has been learned. It is also called successive bilingualism and is typical of individuals who learn a second language in school.
Heritage Language Acquisition: This is the process of acquiring a language that is associated with one's family, culture, or ethnic group but is not the dominant language in the community. It involves gaining proficiency in the language to be able to communicate with relatives and maintain cultural identity.
Adult Language Acquisition: This is the process of acquiring a language as an adult, often for personal or professional reasons. It is a more deliberate and conscious process than child language acquisition and involves both formal and informal language learning.
Language Reacquisition: This is the process of re-acquiring a language that was previously learned but has been forgotten or not used for a long time. It involves refreshing one's memory of the language and practicing to regain proficiency.
- "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."