Glossary

Abjads

A writing system where each grapheme stands for a consonant with no or minimal representation of vowels.

Abugida

A writing system where each grapheme stands for a consonant-vowel syllable. More complicated syllables are represented by combining these graphemes.

Acquired disorder

A medical condition that develops after conception.

Adjective

A word that modifies a noun or noun phrase.

Adverb

A word that modifies a verb, adjective, determiner, clause, preposition or sentence.

Affricate consonant

A consonant that begins with a stop and releases a fricative.

Agglutinative language

A language which primarily employs agglutination (sticking morphemes together) in its morphology.

Allomorph

A variant form of a morpheme.

Allophone

A phoneme that has different variants depending on its environment without changing the meaning of the word.

Alphabet

A writing system where graphemes exist for consonants and vowels.

Alveolar consonant

A consonant produced with the tip of the tongue touching or close to the superior alveolar ridge.

Analytic language

A language that primarily employs helper words and word order to show the relationship between words.

Aphasia

An acquired disorder which affects language processing after brain trauma.

Approximant consonant

A consonant produced with the articulators approaching each other but not touching.

Articulation

The formation of speech.

Aspirated

A consonant produced with a strong burst of breath.

Babbling

A stage in language development where the infant experiments with articulation of sounds without any recognizable words.

Back-propagation

In artificial intelligence neural networks, an error correction method whereby the output is fed back as an input into the system.

Backness (vowel)

The quality of the vowel on the tongue’s horizontal position.

Bilingual

A person who speaks two languages.

Bilingualism

The phenomenon of speaking two languages.

Bound morpheme

A morpheme that can only appear as part of a larger expression.

Broca’s region

A region in the frontal lobe of the brain and usually found in the left hemisphere linked to speech production.

Clause

A group of words that contain a subject and a predicate within a complex or compound sentence.

Coda (syllable)

The part of the syllable that includes all the consonants that follow the nucleus.

Communication

The imparting or sharing of information.

Conceptualization

The process of forming a concept or idea.

Conditioning

The process of acquiring an association between a stimulus and a response, or the change in the frequency of a behaviour in response to an input.

Conjunction

A word used to connect clauses or sentences.

Consonant

A speech sound that is produced with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract.

Constituent

A word or group of words that can function as a single unit.

Cooing sounds

A stage in language development where the infant produces cooing sounds.

Creole

A natural language that develops from the simplification and mixing of two or more languages. Creoles often emerge in children brought up in an environment where adults speak pidgin.

Deep dyslexics

A reading disorder where patients substitute semantically similar words.

Dental consonant

A consonant produced with the tongue touching the upper teeth.

Derivation morphology

Forming a new word from an existing word through the addition of a prefix or suffix.

Determiner

A word that determines the type of reference a noun or noun group.

Developmental disorders

A group of disorders originating in childhood with serious impairment in various areas of functioning.

Diphthong

Two adjacent vowels that are within the same syllable.

Dual-route model

A reading model that proposes two separate paths for reading aloud: a lexical route and a sub-lexical route.

Dyslexia

A disorder which manifests as reading difficulties.

Early sequential bilingualism

Learning one language first and then acquiring another language in childhood.

EEG

Electroencephalography (EEG) is an electrophysiological measurement technique used to record electrical activity on the scalp. This activity represents the electoral activity on the surface of the brain underneath the scalp.

Featural script

A writing system where graphemes represent common elements to represent phonological similarity.

First Nations (group)

A collective name used to refer to groups of Indigenous peoples in what is now called Canada, distinct from the Métis and Inuit populations.

fMRI

Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a measurement technique used to detect changes in blood flow within the brain.

Form (word)

The sounds that make up a word.

Formulation

The creation of the word form during speech production.

Free morpheme

A morpheme that can stand on its own without being dependent on other words or morphemes.

Freudian slip

An unintentional speech error hypothesized by Sigmund Freud as indicating subconscious feelings.

Fricative consonant

A consonant produced with the forcing of air through a narrow gap between two articulators.

Fusional language

Another name for a language that employs inflectional morphology.

Generative grammar

A linguistic theory that looks at linguistics as the discovery of innate grammatical structures.

Glottal consonant

A consonant produced using the glottis.

Grapheme

The smallest unit of representation in a writing system.

Grapheme-to-phoneme converter (GPC)

The hypothesized system that converts graphemes into phonemes when reading aloud.

Height (vowel)

The quality of the vowel on the tongue’s vertical position.

Imitation

Reproducing observed behaviour.

Indigenous language

A language that is native to a region.

Indo-European

A family of languages spoken in Europe, the Iranian Plateau, and the Indian subcontinent. This language family includes English, French, Spanish, Hindi, and Iranian.

Inflectional morphology

The process of changing word meaning through affixation and vowel change.

Interactive activation and competition (IAC) model

A model for representing memory in artificial intelligence networks. Usually composed of three levels of interacting components of increasing complexity.

Inuit (group)

The group of culturally similar Indigenous peoples who traditionally lived in the Arctic regions of Canada, Greenland, and Alaska.

Isolation (words)

Words that appear in utterances alone and demarcated by moments of silence on either end.

Isolation language

A language that mostly has isolated morphemes as words with no inflectional morphology.

Kana

Syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units.

Kanji

Chinese characters adopted to write Japanese.

L1

The language acquired before the end of the critical language acquisition period.

L2

The language acquired after the end of the critical language acquisition period. Usually results in an inability to acquire native fluency without great effort.

Labial consonant

A consonant produced with one or both lips.

Language acquisition

The process of acquiring a language.

Language acquisition device (LAD)

A hypothesized mechanism that is an instinctive mental capacity to acquire language.

Language change

The phenomenon whereby some permanent change is made in the features and uses of language across time.

Language family

A group of languages that are related by common descent from an ancestral language.

Language processing

The way humans use language to communicate and how it is processed and comprehended.

Late sequential bilingualism

Learning one language first and then acquiring another language in adolescence or adulthood.

Lemma

The form of a word as it is presented at the head of an entry in a dictionary.

Lesion

A damaged or abnormally changed tissue caused by disease or trauma.

Lexical route

In the dual-route model, the pathway that processes whole words.

Lexicalization

The process of developing a word for production.

Linguistic theory

A theory about language that explores the nature of language and attempts to resolve some of the fundamental questions about it.

Logogen model

A speech recognition model that uses units called logogens to explain word comprehension.

Logograms

A written character that represents a word or morpheme.

Manner of articulation

The configuration and interaction of the articulators when producing phonemes.

Meaning (word)

The concept associated with a word.

Métis

A distinct Indigenous group in Canada. Their ancestors were French and Scottish men who migrated to Canada in the 17th and 18th centuries to work in the fur trade and who had children with First Nations women and then formed new communities (Definition source: Pulling Together: Foundations Guide, “Glossary of Terms.” Licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.).

Minimal pair

A pair of words in a language that differ in only one phonological element (such as a phoneme).

Monophthong

A pure vowel sound.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaning in a language.

Morphological typology

A method of classifying languages based on their common methods for modifying morphemes.

Movable (word)

The concept that words are movable and not bound to a particular position in a sentence.

Multilingualism

The phenomenon of speaking many languages.

N400

A component of event related potentials that is a negative peak around 400 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus.

Nasal consonant

A consonant produced with the nasal passage open along with the oral tract.

Node (syntax)

A location in a diagram.

Non-lexical route

In the dual-route model, the pathway that processes words using grapheme-to-phoneme conversion.

Non-terminal element

Symbols or elements that can be replaced.

Nonconcatenative morphology

A type of morpheme modification that involves modifying the root without sequentially stringing units one after the other.

Noun

A word that refers to a thing, a person, a place, an animal, a quality, or an action.

Noun phrase

A syntactic unit that has a noun as its head.

Nucleus (syllable)

The part of the syllable that is mandatory and usually includes vowels and sometimes syllabic consonants. Also called the peak.

Number (grammar)

A grammatical category that expresses count distinctions (e.g., one versus many).

Object (syntax)

In subject-prominent languages, a noun that is distinguished by a transitive verb from the subject.

Onsets (syllable)

The part of the syllable that includes all the consonants that occur before the nucleus.

P600

A component of event related potentials that is a positive peak around 600 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus.

Palatal consonant

A consonant produced with the body of the tongue touching the hard palate.

Peak (syllable)

The part of the syllable that is mandatory and usually includes vowels and sometimes syllabic consonants. Also called the nucleus.

PET

Positron emission tomography is a technique that uses radioactive substances to measure metabolic changes and other physiological changes such as blood flow.

Phone

Any distinct speech sound.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound in a language. While a phone is not specific to any language, phoneme is language-specific and changing a phoneme would change the meaning of a word within a language.

Phonetic

A branch of linguistics that explores sound production and perception.

Phonological dyslexia

A reading disability which mainly affects the reading of novel non-words while preserving the ability to read familiar words.

Phonological rule

A formal way of expressing phonological and morphological processes of sound change.

Phonology

A branch of linguistics that explores the organization of sounds in languages.

Phrase

A group of words that act as a grammatical unit.

Phrase-structure rule

A type of rewrite rule used to define a language’s syntax.

Pidgin

A grammatically simplified communication system that develops between two or more groups with no shared language.

Place of articulation

The point of contact between the articulators.

Plosive consonant

A consonant produced with the airflow blocked before release. Also known as a stop consonant.

Polysynthetic language

A language which has words composed of many morphemes.

Predicate (grammar)

Everything in a declarative sentence other than the subject.

Preferential looking technique

An experimental technique in developmental psychology often used to study non-verbal participants (e.g., human infants and animals).

Prefix

An affix that is placed before the word stem.

Preposition

A category of words that can express spatial or temporal relations or mark semantic roles.

Priming

A phenomenon where exposure to a stimulus influences the response time to a subsequent stimulus.

Pronoun

A word that can stand in for a noun or noun phrase.

Proto-Indo-European

The theorized ancestral language of the modern Indo-European language family.

Reaction time

The temporal measure of the time taken between detecting a stimulus and the response to that stimulus.

Rebus principle

The use of pre-existing pictograms purely for their sound value. For example, bee-leaf to represent the word “belief”.

Resyllabification

The process by which segments that belong to one syllable move to another syllable during morphological changes and connected speech.

Rhotic consonant

A consonant that is classified into a group of consonants similar to the phoneme /r/.

Rime (syllable)

The part of the syllable consisting of the nucleus and coda.

Roundness (vowel)

The quality of the vowel on whether the lips are rounded when producing it.

Second language acquisition

The acquisition of a language in addition to one’s L1 (or native) language.

Semivowel

A consonant that is phonetically similar to a vowel but functions as a consonant. Also known as a glide.

Simultaneous bilingualism

Acquiring two languages at the same time.

Single-word utterances

A stage in language development where the infant produces individual words.

Sonnet

A fourteen-line poem using a number of formalized rhyming schemes.

Speech errors

An error in the production of speech.

Stop consonant

A consonant produced with the airflow blocked before release. Also known as a plosive consonant.

Sub-lexical route

In the dual-route model, the pathway that processes words using grapheme-to-phoneme conversion.

Subject (syntax)

The person or thing about which a statement is made.

Sucking habituation paradigm

An experimental technique where infants are habituated to a stimulus and then suck on an artificial nipple faster when exposed to novel stimuli.

Suffix

An affix that is placed after the word stem.

Surface dyslexia

A reading disability which mainly affects the ability to recognize whole words, but can be eased by using pronunciation rules to read words.

Syllabary

A writing system where graphemes represent entire syllables.

Syllabification

The process of putting individual segments into syllables based on language-specific rules.

Syllable

The smallest unit of speech.

Syllable structures

The structure of the syllable in terms of onset, peak (or nucleus) and coda.

Syntactic planning

The planning of word order in a sentence.

Syntax

The study of how words and morphemes combine to create larger phrases and sentences.

Telegraphic speech

A stage in language development where the infant produces sentences without many function words and lacking proper grammar.

Tense (grammar)

A linguistic category that expresses time reference.

Terminal element

Symbols that may appear as the output of grammatical rules.

Two-word utterances

A stage in language development where the infant produces two words at a time.

Unaspirated

A consonant produced without a strong burst of breath.

Universal grammar

A linguistic theory that postulates that a certain number of structural rules are innate to human beings.

Unvoiced consonant

A consonant that is produced without a vibration of the vocal cords.

Vegetative sounds

A sound that is not meaningful, such as a cough or throat clearing.

Velar consonant

A consonant produced with the back of the tongue touching the soft palate.

Verb

A word that conveys action or a state of being.

Verb phrase

A syntactic unit composed of at least one verb and its dependents.

Vocabulary

The set of words of a language that are acquired by an individual.

Vocal play

A stage in language development where the infant plays with vocalizations.

Voice (phonetics)

The articulatory process whereby the vocal cords either vibrate (voiced) or don’t (unvoiced).

Voiced consonant

A consonant that is produced with a vibration of the vocal cords.

Vowel

A speech sound that is produced without complete or partial closure of the vocal tract.

Wernicke’s region

A region in the temporal lobe of the brain and usually found in the left hemisphere linked to speech comprehension.

Word

The smallest unit of language that conveys a particular meaning. A word can be made up of one or more morphemes.

Word order

The order of words in a sentence.