Mod 36 terms

lanugage

our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning

Phonemes

in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit (Phone) (sounds in a language)

Morphemes

in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning; may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix) (combine 2+ phonemes) (M=meaning) (root words, prefixes, and suffixes)

grammar

in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others

semantics

languages set of rules for deriving meaning from sounds

syntax

languages set of rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences

Noam Chomsky

language is nature’s gift, an unlearned human trait, separate from other parts of human cognition

• universal grammar: built-in predisposition to learn grammar rules

• language acquisition device

• born with ability to acquire language

• however its not this simple: more than one part in brain used to speak

children learn grammar as they

discern patterns in language they hear

• nurture molds speech, nature enables sound

• children can discern work breaks and analyze which syllables most often go together

Receptive language

babies ability to understand what is said to and about them

Productive language

babies ability to produce words

babbling stage

starting around 4 months, the stage of speech development in which an infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language

one-word stage

the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words

two-word stage

beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements

telegraphic speech

early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram - “go car now” - using mostly nouns and verbs (follows rules on syntax)

critical period

childhood is period for mastering certain aspects on language before the language-learning window slowly closes

later-than-usual exposure (@ 2 or 3) unleashes the

idle language capacity of the brain, producing a rush of language

at 7 those who haven’t been exposed to a language lose

their ability to master any language

deafness = enchanced

visual processing

• auditory cortex stays largely intact but becomes responsive to touch and to visual input (once repurposed, it becomes less available for hearing ←why a cochlear implant works better before 2)

Aphasia

impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing understanding)

Broca’s area

helps control language expression (Broc=broken english)

• in rear left frontal lobe

• coordinated brain’s processing of language in other areas

• directs the muscle movement involved in speech

• could sing and understand, but struggle to speak

Wernicke’s area

involved in language comprehension and expression (W-U:nderstand)

• in the left temporal lobe

• can’t understand works and can only speak in meaningless sentences

linguistic determinism

the strong form of Whorf’s hypothesis- that language controls the way we think and interpret the world around us

• but we think about things that don’t have words (so this is not correct)

linguistic influence

the weaker form of “linguistic determinism”, the idea that language affects thought (thinking and world view is relative to cultural language)

words define our mental categories and perceived differences

grow as we assign different names

bilingual advantage

bilingual people exhibit skill of inhibiting one language while using the other

• more readily inhibit attention to irrelevant info

watching an activity will activate

the brain’s internal simulation of it

• so will imagining a physical experience (activates some of the same neural networks that are active during the actual experience)

outcome simulation

visualizing an outcome

process simulation

visualizing how to get to an outcome

thinking affects language which

affects thought