Universals
Noam Chomsky's famous and controversial hypothesis that humans are born with a language-specific module of the mind
What is the Innateness Hypothesis?
3 of the six characteristics of language acquisition
Universality, Flexibility, Rapidity, Uniformity, Stages, Critical Period
Lenneberg's proposal to explain how children are able to recover language abilities after brain damage
The Critical Period effect
Words that languages share, indicating the languages are related
Cognates
Pidgin languages
What are simplified languages created when two different language communities make contact and need to communicate?
The logical type of universal that corresponds to the idea of parameters in the Principles and Parameters framework
What is disjunctive?
Children do not respond to this source of evidence
Explicit instruction from adults
The part of language Genie was unable to learn
What are morphology and syntax?
The hypothetical universal ancestor language
proto-world
One cause of language extinction
globalization
This type of universal is the focus of theoretical linguistics
Logical proof that certain languages cannot be acquired on the basis of positive evidence alone, because for every set of positive evidence there is an infinite number of possible grammars
Gold's Theorem
Development of an individual over time
What is ontogenetic development
Reasons languages may change
What are ease of articulation, perception, and learnability
The difference between a dead language and an extinct language
What is whether the language is still preserved, for example in a specific religious or cultural setting, or if the language is not spoken or preserved at all
The terms for universals that apply specifically to language and universals that follow from other cognitive processes
What are domain-specific and domain-general?
Poverty of the Stimulus argument for Innateness
Two of the stages of language development after the first year
Holophrastic, two-word, telegraphic, grammatical fluency
Comparative reconstruction
What is the method of constructing hypothetical ancestral languages through the examination of languages spoken today
The argument for innateness from creoles
If children who get only simple, unstructured linguistic input then speak a full complex language, the structure of language must be innate
Criteria for a universal that can support the Innateness Hypothesis
-Apply to all languages
-Unique to language
-Can't be explained by alternative means
The Principles and Parameters model
Language acquisition is guided by a set of Principles, which hold for all languages, and by setting various Parameters, which describe ways in which languages vary, based on the input from the environment
This is how habituation studies are used to evaluate what infants know
What is showing the baby something familiar until they get used to it, and then switching the stimuli to something new and observing whether the infant becomes interested (looks longer, sucks harder, etc.) indicating they know that something has changed.
What is when a group of speakers of one language become geographically separated into two groups and then each group undergoes language change until they speak two separate languages?
New languages arise when different languages make contact and create a new language