Week 9 Flashcards
(118 cards)
1
Q
This week’s objectives
By the end of this week you should be able to:
- Describe, with examples, some similarities and differences between how animals and humans use language.
- Describe the notion of linguistic relativity and how language might constrain the way we think.
- Describe how certain patterns of aphasia may arise from damage to different areas of the brain.
- Discuss how these patterns of aphasia may tell us something about the organisation of language
- Describe the dual-route cascaded model of reading
explain how the model accounts for surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia and deep dyslexia. - List some of the limitations of the model.
A
1.
2
Q
Describe, with examples, some similarities and differences between how animals and humans use language.
A
Many species communicate.
Bees are only able to convey a few messages.
The signals bees use are tied closely to their meaning: they are not arbitrary. They can’t vary the script and give other meanings (Can’t advise to look out for the wasps too).
In contrast, human language is generative.
- Because of the arbitrary nature of its symbol-meaning relations
- it consists of a hierarchy of units, each with their own rules of combination,
-It has generative power that can be used to create a potentially infinite number of different messages.
- Phonology and morphology can be used to create new words such as google and repurpose, and we can use the rules of syntax to generate sentences we’ve never heard anyone else say before.
We can talk about past and future events.
The human language is at the centre of those abilities we consider to be uniquely human, including the ability to mentally ‘time travel’, and to explore hypothetical situations and alternative possibilities.
- Human language consists of a hierarchy of units and rule systems.
- Each native speaker of a language implicitly understands the units and the rules that combine them, even if they cannot state what these rules are in words.
-Humans have a larger portion of cortex compared to other animals.
While there are similarities in language of human and animals, animal communication is restriction because it lacks recursion)
3
Q
What are the four qualities that define language?
A
Discreetness: These are the small units or sounds that we use to create words. When combined, they help us to communicate ideas.
Grammar: This is the system of rules that govern how we combine individual sounds and/or word units.
Productivity: This is the ability to produce an unlimited number of communications from these sounds and/or words units.
Displacement: This is the ability to talk about something either in the past, the future or as an abstract idea (e.g. fiction).
4
Q
Which of the four features of human language can be seen in the way bees communicate?
A
Bees use grammar and displacement.
5
Q
When did the human brain achieve its present form?
A
70,000 years ago.
6
Q
What is psycholinguistics?
A
The scientific study of the psychological aspects of language, such as how people understand, produce and acquire language.
7
Q
What is grammar?
A
Hierarchy, units are combined according to an agreed set of rules, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the language,
8
Q
What is a phoneme?
A
It is the smallest unit of speech sound in a language that can signal a difference in meaning.
They have no meaning, but can alter a word when combined with other elements. D changed to I in dog would make it different.
9
Q
What is phonology
A
A set of phonological rules.
P can not precede S. eg. Psychology.
10
Q
What are morphemes?
A
2nd from he bottom in the hierarchy. The smallest units of meaning in a language.
11
Q
What is morphology?
A
determine how morphemes can be combined to make words.
For example, even if you’ve never heard the words reskill or downscale before, you’ll already have a fair idea of what they might mean.
Words, phrases and sentences
12
Q
Words are third from the bottom of the hierarchy.
A
Words form sentences.
Adjective come before the noun in the English language.
13
Q
Syntax
A
Grammatical function words and grammatical endings need to be included, are collectively referred to as the rules of syntax.
14
Q
Semantics
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The study of word and sentence meaning.
15
Q
Content words
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Words that represent specific objects, events, ideas, feelings and actions.
16
Q
Arbitrary words are
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Words that don’t have any direct relation to the concept it stands for. For example, the Spanish, French and German words for dog are perro, chien and Hund, respectively.
17
Q
Function words
A
Have little meaning on their own, but specify the meaning relationships among other words (e.g. to in She gave the book to the boy).
Some function words contribute virtually no meaning at all; they are just required according to the rules of the language (e.g. to in I love to write).
18
Q
Thematic role
A
Each word or phrase contributes to the meaning of the sentence in a specific way.
For example, if you hear the sentence The mouse chased the cat, you know that the mouse is doing the chasing. The mouse is the agent. That is its thematic role. In contrast, in the sentence The mouse was chased by the cat, the mouse is the one being subject to the action; the mouse is the patient.
19
Q
Pragmatics
A
The study of how language meaning is influenced by social context is referred to as pragmatics. Pragmatics concerns itself not with the grammatical structure of language, but with the social purpose it serves, and the social rules governing what language to use in different situations. “Can you raise your hand” can mean two different things from a doctor to a teacher.
20
Q
What are the four types of speech acts, based on the scheme proposed by Bach & Harnish (1979)?
A
Constatives These include statements of fact (It’s half past five), claims (Picasso is a great artist), descriptions (That bus is filthy!) and arguments (You cannot rely on Mary’s testimony, because she has dementia).
Directives: These include commands (Shut the door please!) and requests (Could I have another piece?).
Commissives: These include making promises (I’ll be there by half past ten).
Acknowledgements: These include statements that acknowledge another person’s feelings (You seem sad today), apologies (I’m sorry for losing my temper), thanks and condolences.
21
Q
Damage to specific areas in the temporal lobe (usually on the left) can lead to:
A
Pure word deafness, a disorder in which the person’s hearing remains normal, but they have difficulties understanding speech.
22
Q
Damage to specific areas in the temporal lobe (usually on the left) can lead to:
A
Pure word deafness, a disorder in which the person’s hearing remains normal, but they have difficulties understanding speech.
23
Q
Voice onset time is:
A
The delay in which the word is spoken.
24
Q
Categorical perception
A
Demonstrates something very important about speech perception: that we learn to hone in on the sound differences that are most important in our language, and ignore the others.
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Speech segmentation
The task of perceiving where each word within a spoken sentence begins and ends.
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Top down processing in speech.
Top-down processing refers to the use of existing knowledge, concepts, ideas and expectations to help interpret incoming sensory information. Many of these processes take place without our awareness.
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Mental lexicon
Understanding word meanings involves making contact with our our internal store of knowledge about words we know and their meanings.
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Categorical perception is:
Demonstrates something very important about speech perception: that we learn to hone in on the sound differences that are most important in our language, and ignore the others. We’re ‘tuned’ to pick up the important differences. This is why it’s often hard to hear differences between similar-sounding words in a foreign language. The sound distinctions you need to pay attention to are not the same.
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Brain regions involved in speech comprehension:
Left hemisphere: Speech comprehension.
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What is Wernicke’s area?
What happens if it is damaged?
An area that was first linked to auditory word recognition over a century ago.
Wernicke's aphasia - speech disorder where speech compression is severely compromised.
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What is aphasia
It is the name given to a language disturbance that occurs as a result of a stroke or other brain impairment.
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What is Broca's area responsible for?
Speech production.
Damage to left frontal lobe.
Deciding what to say, organising words into sentences, planning articulacy movements.
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What is Wernick's area responsible for?
Perceiving speech sounds, recognising auditory word, retrieving knowledge about word sounds.
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Examples of speech aphasia
Sentence is empty if you can't describe what you are seeing in detail.
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Word retrieval takes part in
Different areas of the brain.
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Language experts believe:
Humans are born linguists, inheriting a biological readiness to recognise and eventually produce the sounds and structure of whatever language they are exposed to.
- have genetic and neural capacities that make them ideally equipped for learning complex movement sequences such as the ones needed for language, including sequences of speech sounds
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Linguist Noam Chomsky believes:
Humans are uniquely born with a brain mechanism already ‘prewired’ to understand general grammatical rules common to all languages (which he terms ‘universal grammar’;
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Brain areas responsible for language:
he size of the human cerebral cortex—and of the frontal lobes enables us to maintain long sequences of information over short periods.
This capacity, known as working memory, makes it possible for us to understand and formulate complex action sequences of the kind found in language.
Finally, the human frontal lobes in particular are capable of exerting powerful control over our mental processes, which enables us to be less tied to the present and allows us to think in much more abstract ways.
39
What is child directed speech?
High pitch tone that we use when talking to babies. Used all over the world.
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What is the critical period (hypothesis) for acquiring a new language?
Infancy to puberty
| This can be applied to learning a second language as well.
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Sensitive period hypothesis.
Some specific aspects of language competence, such as phonology and syntax, develop fully only if they are acquired before puberty.
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Deaf people who are not exposed to sign language before the age of 12 fail to acquire which kind of rule?
Some types of grammatical rules; for example, rules about when and how to apply morphological inflections, such as the sign language of adding -ing to verbs.
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Why might there be an optimal period for acquiring certain aspects of language?
The brain is maximally ‘plastic’ at a young age.
- There are still large regions of cortex that can be dedicated or rededicated to the learning of complex associations.
- In contrast, the mature brain has already been organised to support certain kinds of learned associations, and there is less flexibility for acquiring new ones.
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Phonological awareness
Awareness of the sound structure of one’s language.
-people need to have grasped the idea that words can be decomposed into phonemes.
An important prediction of a child's reading ability.
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What are eye fixations when reading?
The positions where the eye lingers for a few milliseconds.
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What are saccades when reading?
The red arrows represent the sweeping movements of the eyes that occur between fixations.
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Sight vocabulary
A mental lexicon of familiar visual word forms, whose entries can be activated rapidly as we view words.
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Channels for reading are:
The ability to recognise visual words requires a unique type of parallel visual processing, in which all of the letters of a word are processed simultaneously through parallel processing.
These activate entries in our visual mental lexicon that contain that letter in a similar position. This activation combines with that from the other channels, ensuring that the correct entry will receive more activation than any other entry.
EG. pat and tap, we automatically take into account the fact that the letters t and p occur in different positions within each of these words.
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Word form area
A region of the brain specifically dedicated to it. This lies at the base of the left temporal lobe, and is sometimes called the visual
50
Why do dyslexic children have trouble reading?
Due to their phonological awareness.
Also have trouble with the kind of parallel visual letter analysis that is crucial for recognising words from a single glance.
51
What does learning to read involve?
The ability to ‘sound out’ words (in the early learning stages), and the ability to process the visual features of words rapidly.
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What is bilingual?
It is used to describe people who are competent in (at least) two languages.
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Is learning a different language possible for adults?
The critical period hypothesis seems to be incorrect. Adults are able to learn a second language, however they learn in a different way to children.
- Adult learners ‘piggy back’ the knowledge of their new language on to their native language knowledge
- It works well for languages that share similarities with the person’s native language, but not so well for languages that are structurally very different.
54
Why do adults learn a new language different to children?
If you start young, you can achieve a good level of proficiency in a second language, no matter how different it is from your first. However, if you start later in life, your success will depend on how much you can capitalise on its similarities to your own.
Our repertoire of phonemes and their pronunciations is crystallised at a young age, and few adults learners will learn to speak a second language without any hint of a ‘foreign’ accent.
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What does the success of an adult learning a new language depend on?
Children do not need any special intellectual abilities.
Adults requires effort and seems to depend to a much larger extent on aptitude. There is considerable disagreement as to what constitutes ‘aptitude’ for language learning, but it is likely to involve the ability to think flexibly and use multiple strategies to facilitate the learning of new concepts and procedures.
56
What are the disadvantages of bilingualism in children?
Immigrant children tend to show some reduction in the speed at which they recognise words in their native language. Also, even though the combined vocabularies of bilingual children are often larger than those of monolingual children, their vocabulary in each language is generally smaller.
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What are the advantages of bilingualism in children?
A number of studies have shown that bilingual individuals outperform comparable monolinguals on tests that required a high degree of cognitive control—eg, rapidly alternating between two different tasks .
It has been suggested that experience of switching between languages may enhance a child’s ability to control cognitive function more generally. However, other factors, such as socioeconomic status, also affect performance on these tasks, and these are hard to control for. Indeed, when these factors are carefully controlled, and a large sample is used, the differences may be reduced or even absent.
-The level of proficiency we can achieve in a second language depends on the degree of exposure we have to the language and also the age at which we are first exposed to it.
58
Describe the notion of linguistic relativity and how language might constrain the way we think.
Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested the human thinking was constrained by language.
Existing evidence does not support this because: Certain types of cognitive processes, particularly spatial ones, seem to be minimally affected by the person’s language. For example, in the Amazon, the language of the Mundurukú people contains few words for geometric or spatial concepts, yet Mundurukú children perform as well as Western children on many geometric and spatial tasks.
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What is the linguistic relativity hypothesis view?
He proposed that people are only able to reflect on a concept when they have the appropriate language to describe that concept.
Eg. The English language has 11 colour terms, where the Himba language only has five.
Thoughts vary from language to language.
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What does English children being able to name more colour tiles than Himba children suggest?
The study suggests that having labels for certain distinctions may help us to perceive and retain those distinctions.
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How do we understand spoken language?
We use top-down processing: we use existing knowledge, concepts, ideas and expectations to help interpret what we hear.
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Can people acquire a language at any age?
People can acquire a second language at any age, but there are many advantages to starting young.
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Which part of the brain is devoted to language?
A large part of our cerebral cortex, especially the left hemisphere, is devoted to language processing.
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BIOLOGICAL LEVEL
A large part of our cerebral cortex, especially the left hemisphere, is devoted to language processing.
Language areas in the brain are highly specialised: different types of language skills are supported by different brain circuits.
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ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL LEVEL
As children, our acquisition of language is facilitated by interactions with the people around us
Young children learn to speak and to understand language during their everyday interactions with others. In contrast, learning to read requires explicit instruction.
The level of proficiency we can achieve in a second language depends on the degree of exposure we have to the language and also the age at which we are first exposed to it.
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PSYCHOLOGICAL LEVEL
he ability to understand and produce language relies on a wide array of different cognitive skills.
To understand spoken language, we use top-down processing: we use existing knowledge, concepts, ideas and expectations to help interpret what we hear.
Many of the processes we engage when producing and understand language take place without our awareness
To recognise written words, we rely on a very specialised set of visual processes. People who have difficulty with these processes may struggle with reading, even as adults.
Some aspects of language, such as phonology and grammar (syntax), are difficult to acquire if we begin after puberty.
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What is the faculty of language?
It is organised like the genetic code--hierarchical, generative, recursive, and virtually limitless with respect to its scope of expression.
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Faculty of Language Broad (FLB)
FLB includes a sensory-motor system, a conceptual-intentional system, and the computational mechanisms for recursion, providing the capacity to generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements.
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Faculty of Language Broad (FLN)
Is the abstract linguistic computational system alone, independent of the other systems with which it interacts and interfaces. FLN is a component of FLB, and the mechanisms underlying it are some subset of those underlying FLB.
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What does The "common ground" in a conversation do?
It helps people coordinate their language use. And as conversations progress common ground shifts and changes as the participants add new information and cooperate to help one another understand.
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What does The "common ground" in a conversation do?
It helps people coordinate their language use. And as conversations progress common ground shifts and changes as the participants add new information and cooperate to help one another understand.
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What is Audience design in a conversation?
Speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audiences’ knowledge. If their audiences are seen to be knowledgeable about an object (such as Ben about Gary), they tend to use a brief label of the object (i.e., Gary); for a less knowledgeable audience, they use more descriptive words (e.g., “a friend of mine”) to help the audience understand their utterances.
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What is Audience design in a conversation?
Speakers design their utterances for their audiences by taking into account the audiences’ knowledge. If their audiences are seen to be knowledgeable about an object (such as Ben about Gary), they tend to use a brief label of the object (i.e., Gary); for a less knowledgeable audience, they use more descriptive words (e.g., “a friend of mine”) to help the audience understand their utterances.
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How do we achieve our conversational coordination by virtue of our ability to interactively align each other’s actions at different levels of language use?
Lexicon (i.e., words and expressions), syntax (i.e., grammatical rules for arranging words and expressions together), as well as speech rate and accent. For instance, when one person uses a certain expression to refer to an object in a conversation, others tend to use the same expression. Accents may also be copied.
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How do we achieve our conversational coordination by virtue of our ability to interactively align each other’s actions at different levels of language use?
Lexicon (i.e., words and expressions), syntax (i.e., grammatical rules for arranging words and expressions together), as well as speech rate and accent. For instance, when one person uses a certain expression to refer to an object in a conversation, others tend to use the same expression. Accents may also be copied. You may notice you that you speak with Americans with an American accent, but speak with Britons with a British accent.
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Priming occurs in a conversation when:
You're thinking about one concept (e.g., “ring”) reminds you about other related concepts (e.g., “marriage”, “wedding ceremony”). So, if everyone in the conversation knows about Gary, Mary, and the usual course of events associated with a ring—engagement, wedding, marriage, etc.— everyone is likely to construct a shared situation model about Gary and Mary.
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What does gossip do?
It is one of the most remarkable human abilities of all that distinguish us from other animals.
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What does gossip do?
It is one of the most remarkable human abilities of all that distinguish us from other animals.
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Social brain hypothesis showed
That those primate genera that have larger brains tend to live in larger groups.
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Social brain hypothesis showed
That those primate genera that have larger brains tend to live in larger groups.
Debur argued that language, brain, and human group living have co-evolved—language and human sociality are inseparable.
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Linguistic intergroup bias is
Which can produce and reproduce the representation of intergroup relationships by painting a picture favouring the in-group.
Saying that someone is cruel, or someone is generous.
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When people linguistically labelled negative images, which part of the brain is activated?
The amygdala—a brain structure that is critically involved in the processing of negative emotions such as fear—was activated less than when they were not given a chance to label them.
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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is:
The hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.
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Social networks
Networks of social relationships among individuals through which information can travel.
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Is language a tool for thought or a tool for communication?
Essentially, language is a tool that aids in the expression and conveyance of thought and feelings of two individuals. The expression of feelings and thoughts can be sent through sounds, symbols, such as written or spoken words, posture, gesture or signs, wherein the receiver interprets a specific meaning
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Linguistic defeminisation
Language is determined by thought.
It is determined by the language of their community.
Chinese are faster.
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For 90% of right handed people:
Language is in the left hemisphere.
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For 70% of left handed people:
Language is still centralised in the right hemisphere, but 70% will have language centralised in the left hemisphere.
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Broca's aphasia - broken speech
Left frontal lobe - non fluent speech and grammatical errors.
Difference occurs because languages differ in terms of how inflected they are (inflected languages are those in which grammatical changes to nouns and verbs are indicated by changes to the words themselves). English is a less inflected language than German or Italian.
Language production is of central importance in Broca’s aphasia
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Wernike's aphasia - nonsense sentences
Back temporal lobe - fluent words missing and impaired comprehension.
Language comprehension is at the heart of Wernicke’s aphasia.
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Global apasia
Both Weniki and Brocha aphasia
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Arcuate fasciculus
A bundle of nerve fibres that
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Arcuate fasciculus
A bundle of nerve fibres that
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The central problem with the distinction between Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia is that it is oversimplified. What are the five reasons?
1. The terms Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia imply that numerous brain-damaged patients all have very similar patterns of language impairment. In fact, patients with allegedly the same form of aphasia exhibit very different symptoms.
2. Several brain areas are involved in language processing, and these areas are interconnected in complex ways. imply that numerous brain-damaged patients all have very similar patterns of language impairment. Patients with allegedly the same form of aphasia exhibit very different symptoms
one pathway (blue) is associated with basic syntactic processing, a second pathway (purple) connects sensory and motor processes, while the other two pathways are involved in semantic processing.
3. Patients with Broca’s aphasia often have damage to Wernicke’s area and those with Wernicke’s aphasia sometimes have damage to Broca’s area.
4. The grammatical limitations of English-speaking patients with Wernicke’s aphasia are less obvious than those of patients who speak more inflected languages.
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The distinction between Broca and Wernicke:
Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia imply that numerous brain-damaged patients all have very similar patterns of language impairment. In fact, patients with allegedly the same form of aphasia exhibit very different symptoms.
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Amonia
An impaired ability to name objects.
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Problems with word retrieval can occur at two different stages. What are they?
(1) abstract word selection or lemma selection; and
| (2) accessing the phonological form of the word.
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Agrammatism
Patients who can apparently find the appropriate words but not order them grammatically.
Patients with agrammatism typically:
Produce short sentences containing content words (e.g., nouns, verbs) but lacking function words (e.g., the, in, and) and word endings. This is important because function words play a key role in producing a grammatical structure for sentences.
Also have problems with the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences.
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Syntactic processing for comprehension (and probably also speech production)
The take-home message is that involves two pathways linking the major language regions (Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area).pathways.
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Jargon aphasia
A brain-damaged condition in which speech is reasonably correct grammatically but there are severe problems in accessing the appropriate words.
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Neologisms
Jargon aphasics often substitute one word for another and also produces words which are made-up .
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Speech as communication
1. Maxim of relevance : the speaker should say things relevant to the situation.
2. Maxim of quantity : the speaker should be as informative as necessary.
3. Maxim of quality : the speaker should be truthful.
4. Maxim of manner : the speaker should make his/her contribution easy to understand.
103
Describe the dual-route cascaded model of reading
explain how the model accounts for surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia and deep dyslexia.
- List some of the limitations of the model.
1
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What is the Dual-route approach?
reading words and non-words involves different processes. These processes are relatively neat and tidy and some are rule-based. However, the dual-route approach has become less neat and tidy over time!
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What is the Dual-route approach?
Reading words and non-words involves different processes. These processes are relatively neat and tidy and some are rule-based. However, the dual-route approach has become less neat and tidy over time!
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According to the connectionist triangle approach:
Reading processes are used more flexibly than assumed within the dual-route model.
Reading involves interactive processes – all the relevant knowledge we possess about word sounds, word spellings and word meanings is used in parallel (at the same time) whether reading words or non-words.
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What is surface dyslexia?
A condition in which regular words can be read but there is impaired ability to read irregular or exception words.
Patients apparently largely reliant on Route 1 (Grapheme– phoneme rule system) are surface dyslexics. Surface dyslexia is a condition involving special problems in reading irregular words.
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Lexicon
A store of detailed information (e.g., orthographic, phonological, semantic, syntactic) about words.
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Phonological dyslexia
A condition in which familiar words can be read but there is impaired ability to read unfamiliar words and pseudo words.
Phonological dyslexics fit this predicted pattern fairly well. Phonological dyslexia involves special problems with reading unfamiliar words and nonwords. Caccappolo-van Vliet tudied two phonological dyslexics. Both patients showed the typical pattern associated with phonological dyslexia – their performance on reading regular and irregular words exceeded 90% compared to under 60% with non-words.
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Deep dyslexia
Is a condition involving problems in reading unfamiliar words and an inability to read non-words. However, the most striking symptom is semantic reading errors (e.g., ship read as boat ).
Deep dyslexics use a completely different reading system based in the right hemisphere. In contrast, the great majority of people have language primarily based in the left hemisphere. Colt concluded, “the explanation of any symptom of deep dyslexia is outside the scope of the DRC [dual-route cascaded] model”.
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What are the limitations of the dual-route cascaded model?
1. the model’s account of the involvement of semantic processes in reading is vague. The semantic system can play an important role via Route 2, but how this operates remains unclear. The above is a serious problem. Semantic processes are often very important in reading.
2. Second, the model does not exhibit learning. As a result, it does not explain how children acquire grapheme– phoneme rules in the first place.
3. The model assumes phonological processing of words typically occurs fairly slowly and has little effect on word recognition and reading. Phonological processing often occurs rapidly and automatically.
4. Adelman tested the model by focusing on individual differences. The model did not provide an adequate account of individual differences. In addition, the model’s assumption that readers have perfect knowledge of the positions of letters within words was shown to be incorrect.
Fifth, it is more impressive when a computational model accounts for numerous findings using relatively few parameters (values free to change) rather than many. The model has over 30 parameters, so it is unsurprising it fits the data well.
6. The dual-route model cannot be applied universally. As Coltheart et al. (2001, p. 236) admitted, “Monosyllabic nonwords cannot even be written in the Chinese script or in Japanese kanji, so the distinction between a lexical and nonlexical route for reading cannot even arise.”
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The dual-route model postulates that both direct and indirect routes are used under various
circumstances.
1. when irregular words such as yacht are encountered, the lexical access route has to be used and the word checked against the lexicon to read it aloud because the grapheme/phoneme conversion rule is not useful for such a purpose.
2. On the other hand, when nonwords like fot are encountered, the sublexical process has to be used and grapheme/phoneme conversion rules used to read it aloud because our mental lexicon does not contain such words.
Therefore the lexical route is not useful.
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Castles and Coltheart (1993) classify developmental dyslexia into two forms.
A person who has difficulty with the direct access route will be slower at reading irregular words out loud because these words cannot be easily recognized from the existing lexicon. In contrast, a person with indirect access difficulties will be slow at reading non words compared to regular words due to difficulty with grapheme/ phoneme conversion.
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What abilities does reading requires?
Cognitive abilities such as working memory and long term memory retrieval processes.
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Reading development can also be broken down into different phases.
Phase one consists of children being able to recognize a small number of words by sight. Primary schools in Victoria use this knowledge of the phases of learning to read and many schools teach children ‘magic words’ before moving on to other words.
Phase two involves the development of the sublexical (indirect) access route where meaning is derived through the phonological route.
Stage 3 is the dual route model where an individuals will use both the lexical access and sublexical (unfamiliar words) access route.
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Faculty of Language in the Narrow Sense (FLN):
Recursion is the only uniquely human component of language. This system allows us to general internal representations that allow us to communicate via the sensory motor and phonological system. Recursion is considered to be central to FLN (as this allows us to generate an infinite range of expressions). There is no equivalent of this in other species.
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Organism internal factors (e.g. lung capacity limiting spoken sentences ) can limit the capacity of the FLB
1
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Questions raised in relation to the evolution of language
What is unique to human language? While there are similarities in language of human and animals, animal communication is restriction because it lacks recursion)
Did language evolve gradually? Did it evolve from preexisting communication systems or did some parts of language develop separately in humans?
Overall, the authors argue that research needs to move toward comparative approaches to identify what is shared and unique to language in humans.
The authors encourage further testing of elements of the FLN in other animals. The authors also suggest that the FLN may have developed for reasons beyond language.
Figures 2 and 3 (in the article) provide a snapshot of how these elements interact (Fig 2) and the questions that need to be explored (Fig 3)
While there are similarities in language of human and animals, animal communication is restriction because it lacks recursion)
