LECTURE 9 - Language

Question 1

what is the critical period?

Answer 1

• a time when children are optimally equipped to learning something
• in this case, it refers to the rules of a particular language

Question 2

who was genie and what did her case tell us about language acquisition?

Answer 2

• genie was an abused child who was isolated from infancy and not spoken to until she was 13 years old
• she was able to acquire a large vocabulary but had difficulties learning grammar
• children appear to have more difficulty picking up a language after they reach puberty
• grammar-learning capability decreases steadily after age 17

Question 3

what is transformational grammar?

Answer 3

• a system of rules for translating mental representations into structured verbal output
• lies at the core of human language

Question 4

what is grammar instinct? is this in line with the Chomskyan perspective?

Answer 4

• when people who speak different languages combine vocabularies, they form a new language that does not adhere to one single system of grammatical rules
• ex. pidgin languages are built from words and sounds from two or more languages
• this can lead to the creation of a creole language, a synthesis of words from different languages that adheres to rules of grammar
• supports the idea that we tend to follow structure and grammar

Question 5

what is the modularity of language development? is this in line with the Chomskyan perspective?

Answer 5

• evidence suggests that language development is tied to other cognitive and social processes
• ex. childrens’ language learning is tied to understanding of other people’s actions and intentions
• language learning is interconnected with attention, memory, categorization, and understanding of intentions
• chomsky argued that humans have a Language Acquisition Device) that is independent of other cognitive functions like memory, attention, or social reasoning

Question 6

what language defies the idea of universal grammar?

Answer 6

• Pirahã is a language spoken by a group of people from the Brazilian Amazon
• speakers can whistle entire conversations with a structure that does not appear to incorporate recursion

Question 7

what are phonemes?

Answer 7

• the basic units of sound in language
• vowels, consonants
• phonemes can differ between languages
• infants distinguish among a wider array of phonemes than adults
• by 6 months of age, children begin to focus on sounds of their native language and gradually lose sensitivity to sounds that are not part of their native language

Question 8

what is phonology?

Answer 8

• the rules that govern how sounds can be combined within a language
• phonology differs depending on the language
• one-syllable word in English can be broken into its onset (a consonant or cluster of consonants at the start of the syllable) and its rime (the vowel sound plus the consonant sound that trails it)
• ex. “train” consists of the onset “tr” and the rime “ain”
• the rules for this differ between languages and determine the sound of a language

Question 9

what are morphemes?

Answer 9

• smallest unit of meaningful sound within a word, english speakers know ~80,000 morphemes
• some words are standalone morphemes (“run”), others contain multiple morphemes
• “incoming” consists of the three morphemes in, come, and ing (“come” is the root of the word)

Question 10

what are content morphemes?

Answer 10

• describe places, people, actions etc.
• can be used on their own

Question 11

what are functional morphemes?

Answer 11

• modify content morphemes (-s, pre-, and -er)
• cannot be used on their ownw

Question 12

what is morphology?

Answer 12

describes the rules by which morphemes can be combined into words

Question 13

what is lexical access? what do speech errors tell us about lexical access?

Answer 13

• the act of retrieving words and their meanings from our mental lexicon
• speech errors provide insight into lexical access, they are often due to interference from neighbouring words or sounds in our mental lexicon
• semantic substitution: food is in the dishwasher [fridge]
• phonological substitution: I went to the shore [store]
• tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: the feeling one gets when the right words feels just out of reach; we often recall words that are similar in
  meaning or sound, revealing the organization of our mental lexicon

Question 14

what is aphasia?

Answer 14

condition involving impaired ability to produce or understand language, usually due to stroke or injury
* damage to Broca’s area = difficulty speaking fluently
* damage to Wernicke’s area = difficulty understanding the meaning of words/sentences

Question 15

what are the three primary processes involved in language production?

Answer 15

1. prelinguistic process: selects the message one wants to communication
2. select grammatical structure of the message
3. converts the message and structure into a sequence of sounds

Question 16

what usually happens when we assign part of speech to an incorrect place in a sentence?

Answer 16

• we most commonly exchange it with a component at the same level
• a phoneme with another phoneme, a morpheme with another morpheme, a word with a word)
• swapping phonemes: snow flurries becomes flow snurries
• swapping morphemes: self-destruct instruction becomes self-instruct destruction
• swapping words: writing a mother to my letter instead of writing a letter to my mother

Question 17

what are anticipation errors in speech production?

Answer 17

• a phoneme early in the sentence is swapped for a phoneme later in the sentence
• weight of rages will press hard upon the employer (for “the rate of wages”)
• shows us that the planning of speech sounds and the planning of word placement occur at different stages of production

Question 18

what is speech segmentation?

Answer 18

segmenting incoming speech sounds and understanding the boundaries between sounds (parsing)

Question 19

what is the phonemic restoration effect?

Answer 19

our familiarity with our native language allows us to “hear” spoken phonemes that have been rendered inaudible due to background noise

Question 20

how do we comprehend language?

Answer 20

• we correctly group syllables and phonemes into words and register the underlying grammatical structure very rapidly
• children learn how to parse their native language by noticing the statistical likelihoods of many sound combinations

Question 21

what are nonlinguistic factors in language comprehension?

Answer 21

• our ability to parse spoken language is aided by nonlinguistic factors
• expectations, knowledge, and the context in which we hear language
• we begin interpreting it before the sentence ends
• interpreting language is influenced by the cues available in the environment

Question 22

what are pragmatics?

Answer 22

• the study of how the communicative function of language depends on…
• what the speaker knows
• what the listener knows
• what the speaker knows about what the listener knows
• what the listener knows about what the speaker knows

Question 23

what is common ground vs. curse of knowledge?

Answer 23

• common ground: speaker and listener share an understanding or perception of the context or share a degree of knowledge
• curse of knowledge: experts cannot put themselves into the shoes of a less knowledgable listener
• communication errors occur when speaker and listener view a situation differently

Question 24

what is bilingualism?

Answer 24

• ability to master two languages so well that one can communicate fluently with other native speakers in each language at that level
• both languages can be learned simultaneously (simultaneous bilingualism) or one after the other (sequential bilingualism)
• in simultaneous bilingualism, both languages are combined into one mental lexicon
• evidence for cognitive advantages of bilingual children are mixed and early studies that reported such benefits have been found to
  be flawed

Question 25

do differences in language lead to differences in the contents of people's thoughts and experience of the world?

Answer 25

* linguistic determinism/sapir-whorf hypothesis suggests that differences among languages reflect and contribute to differences in underlying thought processes * strong version: language shapes the way we perceive and experience the world * weak version: language does not affect subjective experience, but does reflect and shape differences in higher cognitive processes such as categorization

Question 26

does language change colour perception?

Answer 26

* colour spectrum is divided differently in the Russian and English language * Russian differentiates between lighter blues and darker blues, whereas English does not * Russian speakers were faster to respond when two stimuli fell into different categories of blue

Question 27

what is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 27

* language may affect how we process spatial information * language differences reflect or influence how people think about responsibility and how they regard and remember mistakes made by others * access to the meaning of emotion words enhances people's ability to perceive emotional facial expressions * conceptual act theory of emotion: processing and experience of emotion are shaped by conceptual knowledge about emotions, which in turn are supported by language

Question 28

which of the following would support the idea that there is a critical period of language learning? a. person exposed to two languages from birth through their teenage years can only speak one of those languages as an adult b. an adult learning a second language always makes grammatical errors when speaking c. a person born deaf can learn sign language d. an adult that becomes deaf can learn sign language e. adults learn language as well as children

Answer 28

b. an adult learning a second language always makes grammatical errors when speaking