second language learning

1. Explain the following terms
1. Reinforcement: Reinforcement is a term used in operant conditioning to refer to anything that
increases the likelihood that a response will occur.
2. Stimulus: A stimulus is something in the environment of a person that causes a physiological or
psychological response:
3. Cognitive capacity: The capacity of the human mind to perceive, receive, process, store, and retrieve
information.
4. Scaffolding: The language that a speaker uses to support the communicative success of another
speaker.
5. Developmental Sequence: The order in which certain features of language are acquired.
6. Zone of proximal development: A metaphorical place in which a learner is capable of a higher level of
performance because there is support from interaction with an interlocutor.
7. Telegraphic speech: Telegraphic speech, according to linguistics and psychology, is speech during the
two-word stage of language acquisition in children
8. Metalinguistic awareness: The ability to treat language as an object
9. Tabula rasa: A terms used by behaviorists which refers to the emptiness of mind.
10. Poverty of stimulus: In linguistics, the poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the assertion that natural
language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available to children learning a
language.
11. Innate capacity: Our inborn capacity to acquire language
12. Language acquisition device: The Language Acquisition Device (LAD) is a hypothetical module of the
human mind posited to account for children's innate predisposition for language acquisition
13. Cognitive development: The development human mind in terms of perceiving, receiving, processing,
storing, and retrieving information.
14. Order of acquisition: The order of acquisition is a concept in language acquisition describing the
specific order in which all language learners acquire the grammatical features of their first language.
15. Overgeneralization: The process of extending the application of a rule to items that are excluded
from it in the language norm, as when a child uses the regular past tense verb ending -ed of forms like I
walked to produce forms like *I goed or *I rided.
16. Competence and performance: Competence refers to our linguistic knowledge while performance
refers to our linguistic production.

2. 17. Language register: In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a particular purpose or
in a particular social setting
18. Babbling: Babbling (also called twaddling) 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.
19. Underextension: Underextension involves not applying a new word to objects that are included in
the meaning of that word. Kids apply the word too narrowly. For example, a child might learn the word
dog, but might only use it to refer to his own dog rather than all of the other dogs that he encounters.
20. Input: Input is the language that a learner is exposed to