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Variation is a characteristic of language: there is more than one way of saying the same thing in a given language. Variation can exist in domains such as pronunciation (e.g., more than one way of pronouncing the same phoneme or the same word), lexicon (e.g., multiple words with the same meaning), grammar (e.g., different syntactic constructions expressing the same grammatical function), and ...
Developmental linguistics is the study of the development of linguistic ability in an individual, particularly the acquisition of language in childhood.It involves research into the different stages in language acquisition, language retention, and language loss in both first and second languages, in addition to the area of bilingualism.
Then, in mixed-language marriages, children would speak the "higher-status" language, yielding the language/Y-chromosome correlation seen today. Assimilation is the process whereby a speech-community becomes bilingual and gradually shifts allegiance to the second language.
Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or of languages in general, over time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics : historical linguistics , sociolinguistics , and evolutionary linguistics .
The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a claim from language acquisition research proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s. [1] The LAD concept is a purported instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the ...
Phonological development refers to how children learn to organize sounds into meaning or language during their stages of growth. Sound is at the beginning of language learning. Children have to learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream they are exposed to into units – eventually meaningful units – in order to ...
It is often assumed that young children learn languages more easily than adolescents and adults. [2] [5] However, the reverse is true; older learners are faster.For example, a study of 17,000 British students showed that those who started learning French aged 11 performed better than those who started learning it aged 8. [6]
Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky.The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be.