bi-polar adjectiven
see semantic differential
biscriptualismn
competence in reading and writing two scripts of the same language such as
the ability of a speaker of standard Chinese to be able to read romanized
Chinese as well as Chinese written in Chinese characters.
biserial correlation (rb)n
see correlation
bi-uniquenessn
see natural morphology
Blackboardn
see learning management system
black box modeln
a term derived from physics and used to refer to a system that can be
represented in terms of observable inputs to the system and observable
outputs from it, although precisely what the system is and how it works
cannot be observed. The system is thus contained in a “black box”.
Language learning is sometimes described as a black box problem because
although we can observe the language which learners hear and see and the
sentences they produce, we cannot observe what goes on inside the black
box, i.e. how they actually learn language.
Black English (BE)n
another term for african american english
Black English Vernacular (BEV)n
another term for african american english
blank slaten
see initial state
bleeding ordern
in phonology, when rules are ordered so that the application of one
rule destroys the input of another rule, this is called a bleeding order. For
example, in French there is a rule that nasalizes a vowel before a nasal-
consonant and another rule that deletes a syllable final nasal consonant,
producing words like [bõ] from underlying /bon /. If the nasal deletion rule
were applied before the vowel nasalization rule, this would destroy the
bleeding order