Language vs. Everything Else
The rule-governed, shared symbolic code used to convey meaning.
Language
Signals carry meaning; they refer to things in the world.
Semanticity
The sound system of a language (you studied this in phonetics)
Phonology
Two words that differ by a single sound, like "ship" and "sheep."
Minimal Pair
The general rule that children understand words before they can say them.
Comprehension precedes production
The hemisphere that houses language for the large majority of people.
Left hemisphere
The motor act of producing sounds with the lungs, larynx, and mouth.
Speech
There is no natural connection between a word's sounds and its meaning.
Arbitrariness
The system governing word order and sentence structure.
Syntax
The smallest unit of meaning in a language.
A morpheme
A child says "goed" or "mouses." The name for this error.
Overregularization
Damage here produces slow, effortful, telegraphic speech with relatively intact comprehension.
Broca's area
The broadest of the three terms; it includes pointing, eye contact, and a shrug.
Communication
The ability to talk about things that are not here and not now.
Displacement
The system of meaning: vocabulary and the relationships between words.
Semantics
A morpheme that can stand alone as a word, like "agree."
Free morpheme
What a speaker knows about their language, as opposed to what they actually produce.
Competence versus performance
Damage here produces fluent but empty speech with poor comprehension.
Wernicke's area
Crystal's term for a person who studies how language works
Linguist
Meaningless units (sounds) combine into meaningful units (words). Also called the two-level structure of language.
Duality of Patterning
The system governing how language is used socially: turn-taking, staying on topic, adjusting to the listener.
Pragmatics
The type of morpheme that marks tense, number, or possession without changing the word's part of speech (for example, -ed, -s, -ing).
Inflectional morpheme
The ability to think about language itself as an object, such as counting syllables or judging which word is longer.
Metalinguistic awareness
The fiber bundle connecting Broca's and Wernicke's areas; damage causes an isolated inability to repeat.
The arcuate faciculus
Crystal's term for using what linguistics has discovered to solve real-world problems, including speech-language therapy.
Applied Linguistics
Language is learned from a community rather than inborn; a child who hears no language does not learn one.
Cultural transmission
The system governing the smallest units of meaning and how they combine into words.
Morphology
The type of morpheme that creates a new word or changes its part of speech (for example, un-, -ness, -er).
A derivational morpheme
A window during which a skill is learned most easily, but can still be learned later with more effort and less complete results.
Sensitive Period
The gene mutated in the KE family; it is linked to speech and language but is neither human-specific nor language-specific.
FOXP2