3.Checklist of objectives for The Critical Period Hypothesis, Theories of Innateness, and Brain and Language

Be able to identify explanations that have and have not been offered for why it might be that feral children such as Victor and Genie were never able to fully acquire language.

1. In both cases, they already seemed to have intellectual disabilities

2. They were both in environments where they didn’t hear speech or get to practice speech

3. Both experienced trauma

4. missed the mark for the “critical period”

Be able to identify major areas in which Genie’s language acquisition was particularly weak (or strong).

Strengths

• Phonology (sounds of language): She made decent progress in pronunciation and producing sounds.

• Semantics (vocabulary/meaning): Rapid and extensive word learning, including colors, numbers, and other concrete nouns, especially within the first 2 months of exposure.

Weaknesses

• Syntax (grammar/structure): Struggled with grammatical morphemes (e.g., -ed, -s)

Be able to identify the age range, according to Johnson and Newport, during which Korean and Chinese immigrants most successfully learned a second language.

• Also be familiar with the measure Johnson and Newport used to assess proficiency

• acquisition level lower if start learning 2nd lang after 11 yrs

  • best was 3-7

• grammatical rules more difficult to learn

• Task: Grammaticality judgment of English word strings

Be able to apply Singleton’s (1995) findings concerning adult success in learning a second language to a specific example that you are given

• 5% of adults learning a 2nd language do it with complete mastery

• should not be possible if critical period is true ( should be 0%)

Regarding the Snow and H-H (1978) article, be able to answer questions about its basic findings and implications for the critical period hypothesis.

• Best at learning dutch → past the supposed start of critical period hypothesis (adolescents and adults)

• Worse → children still in critical period who were slowest

  • Goes against critical period hypothesis

Regarding the Hartshorne et al. (2018) study (massive study of 2/3 million English learners), be able to identify a) the difference between learning rate and ultimate attainment, b) the age at which learning rates began to decline, c) the age at which ultimate attainment last achieved the highest levels, and d) why there is a difference between those two ages.

• Learning rate is how fast you learn

• Ultimate attainment is how high of a level you can reach after so many years

• In this study learning rate was stable until 17.4 yrs and the best ultimate attainment happened when exposure to the language was between 10-12 yrs old

  • exposure> non exposure

• Bilinguals are never as proficient as monolinguals

  • Learning rates do not change until 17 but we do not reach status of near monolingual unless language is learned by the age of 10

  • It probably takes 7 years fully immersed in a language to learn the language (need to have a high learning rate of 7 years so need to do before 10 or else will miss it)

Be able to distinguish between examples of linguistic universals and common linguistic constraints

• Linguistic universals—all languages have

  • Nouns and verbs

  • Consonants and vowels

  • Negative, question, past/present

• Common constraints

  • Not all languages are SVO or SOV or VSO

    • Must most are, ~95%

      • SVO: the man opened the door

      • SOV: the man the door opened

      • VSO: open the man the door

Know the general relationship and order of development of pidgins and creoles, and their implications for theories of innateness.

• Pidgin was developed first as a combination of many languages, due to the forced community with lack of common language, to use common words to communicate with each other.

• creole were formed by the kids of the adults who developed pigeons, they then apply full grammatical rules to the language, full of grammatical

  • Demonstrates innateness → children were able to create and apply phonetic rules without learning them. Have to believe that children have a LAD active when doing this, since they are still in critical period.

Be able to identify the mechanism of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, sometimes described as a set of inborn “switches”, that allows children to learn the specific rules and structures of their native language

• also be able to identify a description of how that mechanism works

  • PARAMETERS = inborn "switches," as we get input from environment, interacts w/ circuit board & turns on switch that's connected to many other switches that will also turn on

1. children are born with innate universal grammar (parameters)

2. Parameters are described as switches, switches represent points of grammatical variation across languages

3. each peramater has a set of values and exposure to a certain language sets these values (SVO vs SOV)

4. once set a child learns rapidly the full grammatical system of their exposed language

Be able to identify a description of Pinker’s nativist argument, based on negative evidence, for why language acquisition must have an innate component.

1. Positive evidence alone will not allow children to learn grammar

2. They do not get negative evidence, if you add negative evidence you can learn grammar

3. Therefore part of learning language must be innate (via chomsky's parameters, activates the switch)

Be able to identify a description of Pinker’s nativist argument, based on negative evidence, for why language acquisition must have an innate component.

a. Furthermore, be able to identify descriptions of research that supports Pinker’s assumptions concerning negative evidence.

Brown & Hanlon (1970):

• When talking to parents children do not get explicit responses if its said ungrammatical (no correcting of grammar)

Hirsh-Pasek et al. (1984):

• Found same absence of explicit disapproval

• But found that mothers more likely to repeat utterances with incorrect syntax using correct syntax

• But effects only present for 2 year olds, not 3-5 year olds

Be able to identify a description of Pinker’s nativist argument, based on negative evidence, for why language acquisition must have an innate component.

b. Be able to identify ways in which empiricists such as Elman have responded to Pinker’s nativist argument regarding negative evidence.

Elman & colleagues (1996) (not innate its learned)

• Innateness is not a necessary condition for language acquisition.

• We all have the same drive to communicate

• Language learns from statistical regularities from exposure

(Elman, 2005)

• The key is to train the connectionist model gradually

• If trained gradually that network does learn grammar in the same way a child does (from positive evidence alone)

Nicaraguan sign language:

• Children are more motivated to solve the problem (compared to older children and adults), and have the cognitive tools to solve it.

Based on evidence from the KE family (whose FOXP2 gene mutation causes changes in Broca’s area physiology), and evidence from patients with damage to Broca’s area, be able to identify the most apt (i.e., covers all evidence) description of the function of Broca’s area

• Broca’s area function: organizing sequences of movements and/or symbols

  • Articulation

  • Comprehending and planning complex syntax(requires sequence)

• Not production center rather it is a sequencing area of the brain

1. KE family / FOXP2 mutation

• Individuals have difficulty with orofacial motor control (speech articulation)

• They show deficits in grammatical morphology and syntactic processing

2. Broca’s aphasia patients

• Speech is effortful and non-fluent, reflecting motor-planning problems.

• Sentences lack functional morphology (“is,” “the,” “-ed,” “-ing”) and syntactic structure

• Patients have the most trouble with complex syntax (e.g., passive sentences)

  • This shows Broca’s area is deeply involved in structuring sequences, not merely producing sounds.

Be familiar with Geschwind’s model of language processing in brain (especially the order in which linguistic information travels between different areas in the left hemisphere)

1. Starts with the visual (or auditory complex) aka seeing th words on the page

2. Moves to Wernicke’s aka associating sound with meaning , what words do i need to say

3. Broca then takes those symbols/words into a sequence and applies grammar

4. Motor cortex programs the mouth to move to articulate those words

Be able to identify results and conclusions of Caramazza and Zurif (1976) test of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics on their ability to match pictures correctly to reversible (e.g., The cow was kicked by the pig) and non-reversible sentences (e.g,, The fence was kicked by the pig)

• Wernicke’s patients:

  • Poor performance on reversible sentences

  • Poor performance on non-reversible sentences

• Broca’s patients:

  • Poor performance on reversible sentences

  • Very good performance on non-reversible sentences

• Conclusion: Both areas play a role in comprehension, but impairment from Wernicke’s aphasia is more severe.