- "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 of acquiring a language, including its phonology, syntax, and semantics, from infancy through childhood and beyond.
Phonetics and Phonology: These two fields deal with the sounds of language, including how they are produced, perceived, and represented in linguistic systems.
Morphology: This field examines the internal structure of words and how they combine to form sentences.
Syntax: This field is concerned with how words are organized into sentences and the rules that govern their order and placement.
Semantics: The study of the meaning of words and how they relate to one another within sentences.
Pragmatics: The use of language in practical situations, such as in social interactions, and how context affects meaning.
Communication Disorders: The study of language and communication disorders, including conditions such as stuttering, language delay or disorder, and aphasia.
Language and Culture: The relationship between language and culture, including the ways in which cultural factors influence language use and development.
Language across the Lifespan: How language development and use changes over time, from infancy through old age.
Second Language Acquisition: The study of how individuals learn a second language, including the role of input, output, and instruction in the process.
Neurolinguistics: The study of how the brain processes and produces language, including the effects of brain damage on language function.
Psycholinguistics: The relationship between language and cognitive processes such as perception, memory, attention, and reasoning.
Bilingualism and Multilingualism: The study of individuals who speak more than one language and how language acquisition and use differs from monolingual individuals.
Language and Education: The impact of language on education and the role of education in language development, including language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual classrooms.
Critical Period Hypothesis: The idea that there is a period during childhood that is optimal for language acquisition and after which language learning becomes more difficult.
Language and Technology: The study of how technology can be used to aid language acquisition, including computer-assisted language learning, online tools, and digital resources for language learning.
Pre-linguistic communication: It is the earliest stage of language development that an infant goes through. It includes cooing, crying, gesturing, and babbling.
Early language development: During this stage, children start to produce their first recognizable words and begin to understand basic language.
Receptive language: This type of language development refers to the comprehension of language. Children learn to understand words and sentences before they can produce them.
Expressive language: This type of language development refers to the ability to produce language. Children learn to express themselves through words and sentences.
Pragmatics: Pragmatics refers to the understanding and use of language in social situations. It includes nonverbal communication, conversational turn-taking, and understanding the context of communication.
Phonology: Phonology is the study of sounds in language. Children learn to distinguish different sounds and produce them correctly.
Morphology: Morphology refers to the study of word structure. Children learn to recognize patterns of language and create new words by adding prefixes or suffixes.
Syntax: Syntax is the study of sentence structure. Children learn to form grammatically correct sentences by applying rules of syntax.
Semantics: Semantics is the study of meaning in language. Children learn to understand the meanings of words and how they relate to each other in sentences.
Metalinguistics: Metalinguistics refers to the ability to reflect on and analyze language. Children learn to understand and use language rules, and to recognize errors in their own speech and others'.
- "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."