Language Acquisition
This theory states that children are born with the innate capacity for language hardwired into their brains.
Universal Grammar
This gorilla learned to sign more than a 1000 signs and understand 2000 words of spoken English.
Koko
This hypothesis argues that language shapes the world in which we live.
Sapir-Whorf Hypthesis
This describes how linguistic interactions are always operating on multiple levels and through multiple channels.
multimodality
This scholar argued for behaviorism -- that language is learned and not innate at birth.
B. F. Skinner
This design feature refers to one’s ability to speak about something that is removed from them in time and space.
Displacement
These are the attitudes, opinions and beliefs or theories that we all have about language.
Language Ideologies
This is the difference between linguistics and linguistic anthropology
linguistics studies mechanics of language, linguistic anthropology studies connection between language and culture
To know a language, one must understand this.
Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics & pragmatics
The honeybees can communicate this information about food sources relative to their hives.
location of food source relative to hive
This is the difference between a dialect and a language.
Aspects of language use such as regional or ethnic “accents” or “dialects,” for instance, “point to” the speaker’s origins and are therefore examples of this.
Indexicality
The story of Genie, the abused child found with no capacity for language, gives credence to this theory of language acquisition.
Critical Age Hypothesis
Herb Terrace argued that Nim did not master human language based on his inability to do this.
use grammar, use language symbolically
This is the major criticism of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
can understand things one doesn’t have a word for
He was the father of structural linguistics, the first linguist to explore the link between sound and meaning
de Saussure
Humans are born with the ability to make these sounds, though they lose this ability over time in as they become speakers of a particular language
All sounds possible in any language
This design feature refers to the ability of speakers to combine sounds in new and novel ways.
Productivity
This is an individual’s use of two or more language varieties in the same speech event or exchange.
Code-switching
This is what language is.
Symbolic and arbitrary, productive, learned, shared