1. Theory of mind- the capacity to reflect on one’s own thoughts and to distinguish them from other peoples thoughts and ideas.
2. Joint attention- paying attention to something that another person is referencing.
3. False belief- children who haven’t developed theory of mind yet, they attribute their thoughts onto someone else. Eg. Crayon box full of crackers- next person will think crackers when only having seen the crayon box.
4. Personification- the attribution of human characteristics to something non-human (inanimate objects)
5. Metacognition- thinking of one’s own thinking. Knowledge of your own thoughts and factors that influence your thinking.
6. Conceptual knowledge- thoughtful and reflective learning; gaining a deep understanding of something.
7. Social cognition- Social cognition refers to how we process, store, and use information about other people. In other words, it focuses on understanding how we think about others and how that in turn influences our behaviour, feelings, and social interactions.
8. Inner speech- Private, running monologue used by children to support thought.
9. Pragmatics- the component of language that includes the functional use of language in the social context.
10. Receptive language- includes learning to listen to, recognise, and understand the communication of others. Understanding what others are trying to tell us.
11. Expressive language- Communication by voice, gestures, facial expressions, or other signs. Allows us to communicate to others.
12. Holophrases- One word utterances that express a complete meaningful thought. Eg. “Sleep”; as in “I want to go to sleep”.
13. Fast mapping- the addition of a word to the child’s lexicon after one exposure. Taking on new words to their vocabulary.
14. Overregulation- Applying a language rule to a word or phrase that does not follow the same rule.
15. Decoding- the ability to figure out how to decipher unknown words through the understanding of letters and sounds.
16. Telegraphic speech- combinations of two words that convey meaning.
17. Motherese-“baby talk” spoken by adults to children. The use of motherese has been shown to advance the development of language in children. It is high pitched, slow, exaggerated, short, simple and often repeated.
18. LAD- Language acquisition device. The notion that the learning of language is aided by an innate human ability to speak. The LAD has sets of language rules for all languages (Chomsky).
19. Oral language fluency- use of expression, accuracy, rate and correct phrasing.
20. Divergent thinking- Generating several possible ideas or solutions from a given problem.
21. Convergent thinking- Deriving one