Language Acquisition and Literacy

Babies begin babbling around 5-7 months of age

1. Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition, during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering articulate sounds, but not yet producing any recognizable words.  
2. Holophrasis is the prelinguistic use of a single word to express a complex idea.
3. Cryptophasia is a phenomenon of a language developed by twins (identical or fraternal) that only the two children could understand.
4. The generative principle reflects the human capacity to generate an infinite number of phrases and sentences from a finite grammatical or linguistic competence.
5. The nativist account of language acquisition theorizes that children are born knowing how language works.
6. The Language Acquisition Device is a hypothetical module of the human mind posited to account for children's innate predisposition for language acquisition. It was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s,
7. The social-pragmatics account of language acquisition theorizes that children acquire linguistic capabilities through context and social interaction.
8. Emergentism posits that language acquisition is a cognitive process that emerges from the interaction of biological pressures and the environment. According to these theories, neither nature nor nurture alone is sufficient to trigger language learning.
9. Metalinguistic awareness refers to the ability to objectify language as a process as well as an artifact.  
10. Covert speech is thinking in the form of sound - 'hearing' one's own voice silently to oneself, without the intentional movement of any extremities such as the lips, tongue, or hands.
11. Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception.
12. The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its respective speakers conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view, or otherwise influences their cognitive processes. The strong version of this principle is similar to linguistic determinism.
13. Reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning. Whole word recognition is a literacy strategy that involves identifying words without having to sound them out.
14. Phonetic decomposition is a literacy strategy that involves sounding out words by drawing correspondences between printed letters and phonemes.