The natural, unconscious process of language development in humans.
What is language acquisition?
100
The feature that says "words have meaning."
What is Semanticity?
100
A field of linguistics studying the inventory of sounds in a language.
What is phonetics?
100
The stage expected to occur between 9 an 18 months.
What is the one word stage?
100
Genetic condition resulting in exaggerated features, high social and linguistic ability in children, and sensitive hearing.
What is Williams Syndrome?
200
The process of gaining linguistic knowledge through instruction, such as in school.
What is language learning?
200
This design feature accounts for larger messages being able to be broken down into smaller discrete parts.
What is discreteness?
200
The rules governing word formation.
What is morphology?
200
The stage at which, according to Steven Pinker, language acquisition happens so quickly that "All hell breaks loose."
What is the late multi-word stage?
200
Language disorder caused by trauma or stroke resulting in agrammatic speech.
What is Broca's Aphasia?
300
The unconscious knowledge of Grammar that allows us to produce and understand a language.
What is linguistic competence?
300
This design feature allows you to understand the following sentence even though you (probably) haven't heard it before: "The tiny purple gnomes living in my sock drawer keep screaming, "Elvis lives!""
What is productivity?
300
The rules governing sentence formation.
What is syntax?
300
The stage at which children are reducing their phoneme inventories to just those phonemes in their native language.
What is the babbling stage?
300
The link between brain hemispheres, often severed in the case of severe seizures.
What is the Corpus Callosum?
400
The set of grammatical rules based on what we actually say, as opposed to what some supposed language authority says we should say.
What is descriptive grammar?
400
The temporal and spatial design feature exemplified by the following (wonderful) movie introduction: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away."
What is displacement?
400
The rules of how sounds are combined in a language.
What is phonology?
400
The stage at which children are said to speak telegraphically, producing few function words and inflections.
What is the one word stage?
400
The term for the organization of a given system, such as language, into one hemisphere of the brain.
What is lateralization?
500
The set of linguistic rules thought to be common to all languages and hypothesized to be a part of human cognitive hard-wiring.
What is Universal Grammar?
500
This design feature is best exemplified by embedding phrases into phrases they themselves contain. For example, "The boy in the woods with the backpack near the river on the rocks by the house in the scary place by..."
What is recursion?
500
Rules governing how meaning is expressed by words and sentences in a language.
What is semantics?
500
The stage at which negation begins to be indicated with the word "no."