Glossary

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

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

A medical condition that develops after conception.

A word that modifies a noun or noun phrase.

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

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

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

A variant form of a morpheme.

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

A writing system where graphemes exist for consonants and vowels.

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

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

An acquired disorder which affects language processing after brain trauma.

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

The formation of speech.

A consonant produced with a strong burst of breath.

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

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

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

A person who speaks two languages.

The phenomenon of speaking two languages.

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

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

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

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

The imparting or sharing of information.

The process of forming a concept or idea.

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.

A word used to connect clauses or sentences.

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

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

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

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.

A reading disorder where patients substitute semantically similar words.

A consonant produced with the tongue touching the upper teeth.

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

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

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

Two adjacent vowels that are within the same syllable.

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

A disorder which manifests as reading difficulties.

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

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.

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

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

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

The sounds that make up a word.

The creation of the word form during speech production.

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

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

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

Another name for a language that employs inflectional morphology.

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

A consonant produced using the glottis.

The smallest unit of representation in a writing system.

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

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

Reproducing observed behaviour.

A language that is native to a region.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units.

Chinese characters adopted to write Japanese.

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

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

A consonant produced with one or both lips.

The process of acquiring a language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The process of developing a word for production.

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

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

A written character that represents a word or morpheme.

The configuration and interaction of the articulators when producing phonemes.

The concept associated with a word.

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.).

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

A pure vowel sound.

The smallest unit of meaning in a language.

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

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

The phenomenon of speaking many languages.

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

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

A location in a diagram.

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

Symbols or elements that can be replaced.

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

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

A syntactic unit that has a noun as its head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any distinct speech sound.

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.

A branch of linguistics that explores sound production and perception.

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

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

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

A group of words that act as a grammatical unit.

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

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

The point of contact between the articulators.

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

A language which has words composed of many morphemes.

Everything in a declarative sentence other than the subject.

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

An affix that is placed before the word stem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acquiring two languages at the same time.

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

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

An error in the production of speech.

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

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

The person or thing about which a statement is made.

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

An affix that is placed after the word stem.

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

A writing system where graphemes represent entire syllables.

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

The smallest unit of speech.

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

The planning of word order in a sentence.

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

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

A linguistic category that expresses time reference.

Symbols that may appear as the output of grammatical rules.

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

A consonant produced without a strong burst of breath.

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

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

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

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

A word that conveys action or a state of being.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The order of words in a sentence.