psych language

language

A shared system of symbols, including spoken, written, and signed words and gestures, and a set of rules for how to combine those symbols to communicate meaning (textbook), we accomplish specific interpersonal goals (social act), produing and understanding linguistic symbols (neurocognitive process)

feutures of human laguage

• Symbols convey meaning • Arbitrary symbol/referent relation • Structured: rule-governed • Multilayered: levels of representation • Productive: rules are generative • Evolutionary: changes over time

orthographic representation

the mental storage or structured presentation of the correct letter identities and their sequence in written language

phonological representation

the mental storage of sound information and structural patterns for words and language in the brain

levels of representation

sentence—> phrase—> word—> morpheme—> phoneme

pragmatics

real life use of language: conversation, intonation, gestures, talking to different types of people. (eg internet language)

psycholinguistics

psychology of language

language development

• 1-2 months: babies recognize the difference between phonemes

• but by 12 months, only speech differences relevant to their home language … researched via operant conditioning

language development: finding words

• Before 12 months, babies can determine when words begin and end: they statistically track which syllables are likely to occur with other syllables

• first-year babies can differentiate between the phonemes in any language

language development: word meaning

• 6–9 months: know the meaning of many common nouns

• 3 years: use grammatical context to determine the referent of a word heard

language development: speaking

• 6-7 months babbling begins

• 10 months babbling begins the reflect language

• 12 months single word utterances (vocab explosion)

• 2 years two words utterances

• 3 years sentences with grammatical function words

• 5 years speaking words similarly to adults

overlegalization error

extending rules of word formation incorrectly to irregular exceptions, e.g., “I goed to the store.” These errors reveal children’s understanding of grammar

skinner on language acquisition

Skinner (1957): nothing special Learned like any other behaviour: association, imitation, and reinforcement.

Noam Chomsky on language acquisition

a special ability Children learn too fast for reinforcement and invent sentences they never heard: an innate language acquisition device

why are kids so could learning language

“Less is more”: children’s limited cognition makes them learn from the smallest parts up, while adults process bigger chunks and miss subtleties

what makes human language special

• While non-human animals flexibly combine symbols, only humans recombine all sorts of linguistic elements (phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences) to create an infinite number of potential utterances

• Humans communicate about entities not immediately present in time or space, in a manner that is exquisitely sensitive to contextual nuance 3

• Humans communicate with a sensitivity for, and intent to alter, the minds of others; non-human animals show less evidence of this (i.e., theory of mind, mentalizing, perspective-taking)

adult language processing

• The lion’s share of human language processing occurs automatically, obligatorily, and below the level of conscious awareness, the automatic system: fast, effortless, and intuitive responses via the semantic memory network: spreading activation

• Language processing is context sensitive across all linguistic levels, Local and global context effects can trigger automatic or controlled processing – These dynamics make us superbly vulnerable to misunderstanding & misinformation/persuasion

• Multilingualism – This can increase controlled processing demands to regulate cross- language activation – Multilingualism is intimately tied to sociocultural concerns

local coherence

how well you understand relationships between adjacent pairs of sentences

global coherence

all the sentences relate to a theme

linguistic determinism

different languages impose different ways of understanding the world

the controlled system

• slow, conscious and effort required via logical thought