Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Preceding the verb.
  • adjective Having not yet learned to speak.
  • adjective Marked by the absence of spoken language.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective child development At an early stage of development in which one is not yet able to communicate by means of words.
  • adjective linguistics, of a part of speech Occurring before the verb in a sentence or expression.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word preverbal.

Examples

  • Italy, where bilingualism is common, studied 40 "preverbal" seven month olds.

    Macleans.ca 2009

  • I might be able to afford the preverbal double-wide if this gets passed.

    Key conservative Democrat urges health care slowdown 2009

  • Within a few generations Hera's pitiful descendents were mating with preverbal cavemen.

    MIND MELD: If We Ran Battlestar Galactica 2009

  • The Division of Ophthalmology offers special testing not routinely available for children elsewhere, including vision testing for preverbal children, orthoptic evaluation and treatment, adult and pediatric visual field testing, electroretinography (awake or with sedation), visual evoked responses and ultrasonography.

    Ophthalmology (Eye) 2010

  • We have about 12 weeks left to finish off 2009 and I expect this period will be a messy one with a series of events likely to hit the preverbal fan ..

    We still have a rough ride until year end. Canadian silver bug/Green Assassin Brigade 2009

  • We have about 12 weeks left to finish off 2009 and I expect this period will be a messy one with a series of events likely to hit the preverbal fan ..

    Archive 2009-10-11 Canadian silver bug/Green Assassin Brigade 2009

  • The two men live in a world where preverbal children, using handsets called "Starfish", can download music by "pointing", and have thereby become "arbiters of musical success".

    How novels came to terms with the internet 2011

  • This video of twin toddlers engaging in what sounds like a preverbal debate has set the Internet cooing and scrambling to decode exactly what these babies are saying to each other.

    Babies Act Like Babies, Create Viral Sensation 2011

  • And since mothering is our first preverbal template for an existence in which we feel welcomed or rejected, loved or abandoned, many of us have fused our relationship with our mothers with our concepts of God.

    Women Food and God Geneen Roth 2010

  • Whether we are aware of those early experiences or believe in preverbal templates does not alter the truth: our daily lives, from the mundane to the sublime, from our reactions to sitting in traffic to our responses to the death of someone we love, are expressions—outpicturings—of our deepest beliefs.

    Women Food and God Geneen Roth 2010

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.