Development of the representations and processes used to understand and produce a language. Evidence about recognising a sound pattern, learning its meaning and generalising grammatical structure addresses different components of the problem.
Knowledge and skill used to understand and produce spoken language. Performance in one language or dialect should not be treated as a complete measure of a child's language competence across contexts.
Teaching intended to improve spoken-language knowledge or its use. A programme can affect reading comprehension, but its package effect does not isolate a single language component.[ref]
Ameliorating children's reading-comprehension difficulties: a randomized controlled trial by Paula J. Clarke and others. Psychological Science 21, 1106–1116; text/oral/combined interventions, untreated comparison and eleven-month follow-up
The age at which learning of a language begins, distinguished from current proficiency and duration of use. Delayed access to any first language can affect later language processing and is not equivalent to deafness.
Ability to attend to and reason about properties of language itself. Improvement in this relatively language-proximal ability is a different hypothesis from broad transfer to every executive function.
Knowledge and use of two languages, varying in proficiency, acquisition age and social setting. Treating it as a single binary exposure can obscure which experiences a cognitive hypothesis actually concerns.
Use of a signed and a spoken language. Within-person comparisons can reduce some between-group confounding while leaving differences in sensory input, movement and language structure.
A proposed benefit associated with bilingual experience for a stated outcome. Language proficiency, metalinguistic awareness, domain-general task performance and later clinical symptoms are different outcomes and require separate evidence.
Persistent developmental difficulty with language associated with functional impact. It is not interchangeable with motor speech apraxia or stuttering, and a rare single-family genetic finding does not establish a universal cause.
Speech addressed to an infant, often differing in prosody from adult-directed speech. A listening preference is an experimentally measurable tendency whose magnitude can depend on the stimuli, the infant’s experience and the measurement method; it is not a universal individual trait.[ref]
Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed-speech preference by The ManyBabies Consortium. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 3, 24–52; Participants, preregistered analyses and Discussion
The position that some language-relevant structure or learning constraints are present prior to the relevant linguistic experience. It is not equivalent to denying all learning; the specificity and content of the proposed initial endowment require evidence.
Learning word–referent mappings by integrating information across individually ambiguous encounters. Recurrent co-occurrence can favour a mapping even when no single encounter uniquely identifies it. A target-looking preference need not distinguish parallel associative accumulation from testing and revising a candidate hypothesis.[ref]
Infants rapidly learn word-referent mappings via cross-situational statistics by Linda B. Smith and Chen Yu. Cognition 106, 1558–1568; ambiguous word/picture pairings and target-versus-distractor looking
Use of distributional information in acquiring speech-sound distinctions, recurring units, dependencies or word–referent correspondences. These levels require different statistics, and success at one does not show that the complete natural-language acquisition problem has been solved.
Learning a relation between elements separated by intervening material. In an artificial system, increasing variability in can help expose the stable – relation. Such a relation need not be hierarchical syntax.[ref]
Variability and detection of invariant structure by Rebecca L. Gómez. Psychological Science 13, 431–436; three-element artificial-language strings, middle-element variability and nonadjacent dependencies
Identifying candidate units in continuous speech. Sequential predictability, prosody and other cues may support different boundaries; discrimination of a familiarised unit does not alone demonstrate that it has been assigned a meaning.
Experience-dependent changes in grouping or discriminating speech sounds. Comparing exposure distributions while holding the token range fixed can test a contribution from distributional information.[ref]
Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination by Jessica Maye and others. Cognition 82, B101–B111; unimodal/bimodal speech-sound exposure and discrimination
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Language acquisition refers to the process by which humans learn to understand and communicate in a language. This process occurs in stages and can be divided into two main types: first language acquisition and second language acquisition. 1. **First Language Acquisition**: This typically happens in early childhood when infants and young children naturally acquire their native language without formal instruction. The process involves several stages, including cooing, babbling, single words, two-word phrases, and eventually more complex sentences.