Ch. 9: Language & Thought Flashcards
What is language?
a system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and that convey meaning; allows individuals to exchange information about the world, coordinate group action, and form strong social bonds
What is grammar?
a set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages
What 3 unique things distinguish human language from other animals’ communication?
- The complex structure (most humans can express a wide range of ideas and generate infinite novel sentences)
- Humans use words to refer to intangible things (ex. “democracy”)
- We use language to name, categorize, and describe things to ourselves when we think, which influences how knowledge is organized in our brains
What are phonemes?
the smallest units of sound that are recognizable as speech rather than as random noise (think of a child sounding out a word or learning the sounds each letter makes)
What are phonological rules?
indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds (ex. “ts” is an acceptable sound in German but not English)
What are morphemes?
the smallest meaningful units of language, made up of phonemes combined together (the “d” sound is recognizable as a speech sound but has no meaning; “dog” carries meaning, and if we added an “s” to the end that would also be a morpheme)
What two categories do all grammar rules fall into?
Morphological rules and syntactic rules
What are morphological rules?
indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words; content and some function morphemes can stand alone as words (about 50% of morphemes); the remaining function morphemes get added to content morphemes to change meaning (ex. -s, -en, re-) and are what permit us to express abstract ideas
What are the two types of morphemes?
Content and function morphemes
What are content morphemes?
Refer to things and events (ex. cat, take)
What are function morphemes?
serve grammatical functions, such as tying sentences together (and, but) or indicating time (when)
What are syntactic rules?
indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences (ex. Every sentence must contain at least one noun and at least one verb)
What are 3 important characteristics of childrens’ language development?
- Children learn language at an astonishingly rapid rate
- Children make few errors while learning to speak, and the errors they do make usually result from applying but over-regularizing grammatical rules they’ve learned
- Children’s passive mastery of language develops faster than their active mastery (they understand language better than they speak it)
When do infants lose the ability to distinguish between the sounds of all languages?
6 months old
What is babbling, and when does it start? What does it indicate?
- between 4 and 6 months
- babbling = combinations of vowels and consonants that sound like real syllables but are meaningless
- indicates that an infant is in a state of focused attention
What evidence do we have that babbling is part of the language learning process, rather than infants simply imitating sounds?
All infants, regardless of language or ability to hear, go through the same babbling sequence
At what age are first words typically spoken or signed?
10-12 months
What is fast-mapping?
the process whereby children map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure; enables them to learn at a rapid pace
What is telegraphic speech?
devoid of function morphemes and consist mostly of content words (“more milk” “throw ball”); however, sentences are generally grammatical and words are ordered in a manner consistent with the syntactic rules of the language
Why is it that 2 or 3 year olds appear to understand grammar better than 4 or 5 year olds?
very young children are simply memorizing particular sounds that express what they want to communicate while older children are applying grammatical rules (but overregularizing them; ex. Overregularizing the rule of the past tense being indicated by -ed leads to the word “runned”)
What are the two possible explinations for children’s sequential language development?
○ The orderly progression could result from general cognitive development that is unrelated to language specifically (ex. Infants start with 1 or 2 word utterances because their short term memories are limited to that much, and so more cognitive development is needed before they can put together sentences)
The orderly progression might depend on experience with a specific language (more experience = more knowledge = more complex speech)
What is the behaviourist explination of language development?
• We learn to talk the same way we learn any other skill: reinforcement, shaping, extinction, and other basic principles of operant conditioning
• Babbles that contain meaningful sounds are more likely to be reinforced, ungrammatical sentences are ignored or punished while grammatical ones are reinforced, etc.
Offers a simple account of language development, but cannot account for many fundamental characteristics of language development
What is the nativist theory of language development?
language development is best explained as an innate, biological capacity; the brain is equipped with universal grammar
What is universal grammar?
a collection of processes that facilitate language learning
What is genetic dysphasia?
a syndrome characterized by an inability to learn the grammatical structure of language despite having otherwise normal intelligence; tends to run in families and is linked to a single dominant gene
What piece of evidence suggests that the nativist theory of language development is more correct than a behaviourist one?
If we learned language through imitation like behaviourists theorized, infants would only distinguish the phonemes they’d actually heard; however, they can distinguish between phonemes from all languages; the nativist explanation also covers why Deaf infants babble even though they have never heard speech
What is the main criticism of nativist theories of language development?
they do not explain how language develops, only why
What are interactionist explanations of language development?
- Hold that, although infants are born with an innate ability to acquire language, social interactions play a crucial role in language learning
- Parents tailor their verbal interactions with children in ways that simplify the language acquisition process (ex. Speaking slowly, enunciating clearly, using simpler sentences)
What two areas of the brain are language processing concentrated in?
Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area
Where is Broca’s area, and what is it involved in?
located in the left frontal cortex and is involved in the production of the sequential patterns in vocal and sign language
What happens in Broca’s aphasia?
People with Broca’s aphasia can understand language relatively well (although have more difficulty as grammatical structures get more complex) but struggle with speech production and typically speak in short phrases consisting mostly of morphemes (function morphemes are usually missing and grammatical structure is impaired)
Where is Wernicke’s area, and what is it involved in?
located in the left posterior temporal cortex and is involved in language comprehension
What happens in Wernicke’s aphasia?
people with Wernicke’s aphasia can produce grammatical speech, but it tends to be meaningless and they have difficulty understanding language; damage to this area impairs our ability to make judgements about word meaning but our ability to identify non-language sounds is unimpaired
What is the arcurate fasciculus?
the pathway which connects Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas
