Language 2 Flashcards
(17 cards)
What do all human languages share?
- Phonology
- Morphology
- Syntax
- Discourse
- Pragmatics
Phonology
Basic sounds (and signs: hand shapes, movement and location)
- Different languages choose different subsets
- No real boundaries between words
- Children have to learn to segment speech as part of language learning
Morphology
Morphemes: smallest meaningful units
- E.g., dog, complain, -s, -ed
- Saussure: “the arbitrariness of the sign”
Syntax
A simple language
- Nouns = Tom, Kate, Jane
- Verbs = thinks, likes
- Sentence = noun + verb + noun
- E.g., Tom likes Kate
Discourse
Linguistic context for a sentence
- Including: shared communication history between speakers and listeners
- “yellow disk”
“orange slice”
Laterality
Speech is lateralized to the left hemisphere in 90% of population
- Laterality is critical in surgical situations
Left hemisphere
More specialized for the analysis of sequences of stimuli and for high-frequency (details) input
- the outline
Right hemisphere
More specialized for the analysis of space, and low-frequency (global) info
- where everything is
Broca’s aphasia
Aware of their deficit
- Impaired at grammatical processing (in both production and comprehension)
- Can interpret based on content words and semantics
- E.g., understands “the man swats the mosquito” but not “the horse kicks the cow”
Wernicke’s aphasia
They are not aware of their deficit
- Articulation fluent and production appears grammatical; lost content words. No longer comprehend the meaning of words/sentences
Whorfian hypothesis
Language determines thought
- Speakers of different language differ in how the perceive and act in objectively similar situations (Whorf, 1956)
Nicaraguan sign language
Early signs are relatively iconic
- Lack words for certain concepts: early cohort has no words for “left” & “right”
- Cannot appropriately communicate about left/right relations
Language influences thought
Label influences memory, imagery, & blames
- Curtains/diamond (Reisberg)
- Car accident - retrospective bias (Loftus)
- Agentive vs non-agentive description of events (Fausey & Boroditsky)
Fausey and Boroditsky (2010)
Agentive vs non-agentive description of events
- People blamed Timberlake more following the agentive descriptive
- Also fine Timberlake and extra $30,829 (53%) more
- This was the case even when people watched the video first
Korean and English speakers
When they saw two examples: one tight and one loose fit
- Koran adults looked longer at the familiarized relations (tight fit)
- English adults: no different in looking time
- Also: when shown several examples of tight and loose (or vice versa) Koreans … - did better
German and Spanish speakers
- In Spanish apple is masculine and violin is feminine
- In German, apple is feminine and violin is masculine
- Better memory when grammatical gender and the gender of the name were the same
Piraha tribe
has words for one, two, and many. People there can represent large approx. number but not large exact number
