Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
14 results found in Language.
- Ableist Language (Disability Slurs, Derogatory Disability Language)
- Ableist language refers to words, phrases, and framings that demean, stereotype, or pathologize people with disabilities — from explicit slurs such as 'cripple,' 'handicap,' 'retard,' or 'lame' used p…
- Bilingual Education (Bilingual-Bicultural Education, Bi-Bi Education)
- Bilingual education in the context of deaf education refers to teaching approaches that use both sign language and the written form of a spoken language as languages of instruction. Often called bilin…
- Chinese Sign Language (CSL, Zhongguo Shouyu)
- Chinese Sign Language (CSL) is the primary sign language used by the deaf community in mainland China. Like all sign languages, CSL has its own grammar, syntax, and vocabulary that are distinct from s…
- French Sign Language (LSF, Langue des Signes Française)
- French Sign Language (Langue des Signes Française, or LSF) is the primary sign language used by the Deaf community in France. Legally recognized by the French Handicap Law of 2005 as having educationa…
- Halant (Virama, Hasanta)
- A diacritical mark used in Indian (Indic) scripts to suppress the inherent vowel of a consonant, enabling the formation of consonant clusters or conjuncts. When a halant follows a consonant, it indica…
- Ideographic Characters (Ideographs, Logograms, CJK Characters, Han Characters)
- Ideographic characters are written symbols that represent a word, morpheme, or concept rather than an individual sound, as used in Chinese (Hanzi), Japanese (Kanji), and historically Korean (Hanja). B…
- Language-Based Learning Impairment (LLI, Language Learning Impairment, Language Learning Disability)
- A developmental condition in which children have difficulty acquiring language and later reading skills while other cognitive abilities appear relatively intact. Language-based learning impairments af…
- Narrative Skills (Narrative Competence, Storytelling Skills)
- The ability to recount events — real or imagined — as a coherent, temporally ordered, causally linked story that another person can follow. Narrative skills rest on autobiographical memory retrieval, …
- Personal Narrative (Storytelling, Conversational Narrative)
- The act of telling others about one's own experiences, events, and feelings — a fundamental aspect of human social interaction. Personal narrative serves multiple functions: building and maintaining r…
- Rapid Auditory Processing (RAP, Auditory Temporal Processing)
- The ability to perceive and process rapidly changing auditory signals that occur within tens of milliseconds, such as the rapid frequency and amplitude transitions that characterise speech sounds. Rap…
- Second Language Acquisition (SLA, L2 Acquisition)
- The process by which a person learns a language other than their first (native) language. In deaf education and accessibility, second language acquisition theory is particularly relevant because writt…
- Semantic Relatedness (Semantic Similarity, Semantic Association)
- A measure of how closely related two words or concepts are in meaning, encompassing various types of relationships including synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and general topical association. In assistive…
- Sign Language Writing System (Sign Language Script, Sign Language Notation, Sign Language Character System)
- A system of symbols or characters designed to represent sign language in written form. Unlike spoken languages, which have well-established writing systems, sign languages generally lack a standard wr…
- Specific Language Impairment (SLI, Developmental Language Disorder)
- A neurodevelopmental condition characterised by significant difficulties in acquiring and using language that cannot be attributed to hearing loss, intellectual disability, neurological damage, or env…