mother tongue). The terms primary language or preferred language are used
to refer to the language which bilingual or multilingual speakers are most
fluent in or which they prefer using for most everyday communicative func-
tions. A child may have more than one primary language if he or she acquires
more than one language during the period of primary language development.primary language acquisitionn
a term referring to the acquisition of any language from infancy, sometimes
preferred over the term first language acquisition because of the
difficulty in establishing which language should be considered “first” in
some cases, such as in childhood bilingualism.
primary language instructionn
an approach to the teaching of second language students in which instruction
in the students’ primary language – i.e. the native language of the students
- is used for subjects which are the most cognitively demanding.
primary stressn
see stress
primingn
processing a word that has been recently encountered and activated is faster
and easier than processing one that has not. This phenomenon is called
priming. For example, in a lexical decision task, the decision of whether
a stimulus is an English word or not will be made faster for words that have
recently been presented than for words that have not been activated.
Concepts that are related to one another in some way are also assumed to
be connected in mental networks and when one member of the network is
activated, the others are as well. This phenomenon is called spreading
activation. For this reason, when the word doctor is presented, related
words such as hospital, nurse, and medicationare also primed.
see also implicit memory
principal clausen
see dependent clause
principle of subjacencyn
see bounding theory
principles^1 n
in teaching, beliefs and theories that teachers hold concerning effective
approaches to teaching and learning and which serve as the basis for some
of their decision-making. For example,
primary language acquisition