Cognitively Speaking
This is the language you speak without worrying about mistakes or correctness
What is native language?
the biologically determined window, ending roughly around puberty, after which language acquisition occurs is less successful
What is critical period?
This is the place of articulation of [n] and [t].
What is alveolar?
This problem highlights that observing an object or event never uniquely determines how it should be described
What is the 'gavagai' problem (or the problem of referential uncertainty)?
If you can swap a sequence of words with 'it' or 'do so' and the sentence still works, you’ve just used this classic test to spot a constituent.
What is the substitution test?
____________ grammars involve rules to mold your language to some norm
What is prescriptive (grammars)?
This argument claims that because our experience underdetermines what we know, some innate, experience-independent factor must help explain our knowledge.
What is Poverty of the Stimulus?
If two sounds are NOT in complementary distribution in a language, they must be these.
What are phonemes?
If I am a _____ morpheme, my lexical entry should specify what category/part-of speech I merge with.
What is bound?
If I am a head, and I need a particular XP to be my sister, then that XP is my ____.
What is complement?
Deaf children who have no exposure to a sign language often create these structured gesture systems on their own.
What are homesign systems?
These tend to be uniform children acquiring different languages, perhaps suggesting that language acquisition is controlled by an underlying maturational timetable.
What are developmental milestones?
This phonological process occurs when a segment takes on some or all of the feature values of a nearby segment.
What is assimilation?
When a complex word can be understood in more than one way, because the final string could have been put together in multiple ways, we say the word exhibits this.
What is structural ambiguity?
If I'm a verb, and I want a PP sister headed by "of", I am revealing this property of mine.
What is subcategorization?
The design feature of language that allows us to communicate beyond the 'here and now'
What is displacement?
This bonobo learned to use a lexigram keyboard simply by observing his mother’s training sessions, and demonstrated remarkable skill by age 2½.
Who is Kanzi?
This effect captures the fact that listeners abruptly switch from hearing “ba” to “pa” at a sharp boundary, even though voice onset time varies continuously
What is categorical perception?
In this experimental paradigm, adults view soundless scenes of parent-child interactions to see which words they can learn from observation
What is the Human Simulation Paradigm?
If I was a language with English style VPs and TPs (in terms head complement order), but a Japanese style CP, I'd be violating this.
Final-Over-Final Constraint
Although dominant for visuospatial processing, damage to this hemisphere does not typically impair language ability in deaf signers.
What is right hemisphere?
Once thought to be a crucial driver of early language learning, this type of adult speech has been shown by cross cultural research NOT to be necessary.
What is child-directed speech?
This is the reason the usual process of voicing assimilation in English past tense (d → t after voiceless C) doesn't happen in cases of epenthesis (d → ed after other alveolar stops).
What is rule ordering/ rule interaction?
This rule captures the generalization that in English compounds like blackbird (a noun, not an adjective) and babysit (a verb, not a noun), the category of the whole word is determined by its rightmost element.
What is Right Hand Head Rule?
When an element appears to affect the sentence in two structural positions, we think this has occurred.
What is movement?