Terminology

• Nature is something innate, biological in use that helps us acquire language.
• Nurture is the impact of the environment, caregivers and the world around us to teach us language.
• Pre-speech: stages of development before a first word is produced.
• The Motherese Hypothesis: the idea that properties of caretaker speech play a casual role in language acquisition.
• Broomfield, 1933: "Learning to speak is the greatest intellectual feat any of us is ever required to perform."
• Reflexive cry: series of one second pulses with a falling intonation.
• Basic biological noises: burping, hiccupping, coughing, sneezing, and breathing.
• Variegated babbling: babbling with less fixed patterns.
• Scribble talk: prosodic patterns are acquired.
• Telegraphic speech: "Daddy here" - "Daddy is here"
• Receptive vocabulary: lexemes a child can understand.
• Productive vocabulary: lexemes a child can say.
• Holophrasis: The ability to speak in complete sentences.
• Primary hypothesis: a child's first assumption based on existing knowledge.
• Over-extension: a broader use of a lexeme.
• Under-extension: a narrower use of a lexeme.
• Proto words: an invented word that has a consistent meaning for a child.
• 1 word stage: lexemes resemble the target, but might not be produced in a standard manner.
• Two word stage: syntactic constructions; first bound morphemes.
• Telegraphic speech: a stage in children's language development where utterances are created without function words e.g. "no sit here".
• Content words: nouns, main verbs, adjectives and adverbs.
• Function words: words that contribute to syntactic meaning and organise the word order, like determiners.
• Word spurt: highly productive phase of acquiring lexis triggered by a child's newfound ability to construct interrogative clauses, it is largely due to a child's syntactic ability to construct the interrogative mood.