Contents › Section 7: Theory, terminology and disciplinary question › answer 31 of 39
How does the term "naturalistic speech" differ from "natural language"
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"Natural language" is often used in linguistics simply to mean language with some hint that it may be different from computer, animal or somehow artificial languages. It is most commonly found as part of the term "Natural Language Processing" which is basically a subfield of computational linguistics.
"Naturalistic language" is much less clearly defined and not really used in opposition to "natural language". It is often used to imply real, unrehearsed or unguided language - but still natural language (not artificial language made to look natural). The two common terms in which it is used are "naturalistic language learning" (meaning not in a classroom - and naturalistic refers to learning rather than language) and "naturalistic speech" (meaning live, unrehearsed speech).
© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).