Language and Communication Lecture Notes

A set of vocabulary flashcards covering the core concepts, criteria, theories, and studies of human language and animal communication.

Regular

A defining criterion of true language stating that it is governed by rules and grammar, allowing sentences to be reorganized while retaining meaning.

Arbitrary

A defining criterion of true language stating that the specific sound assigned to a concept does not need to relate to or describe the concept in any way.

Productive

A defining criterion of true language stating that there are almost limitless ways to combine words to describe objects, situations, and actions.

Sapere Wharf hypothesis

The hypothesis suggesting that the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive and experience the world.

Peraja

A hunter-gatherer tribe in Brazil whose native language contains only three counting words corresponding to one, two, and many.

Morphemes

The smallest units of sound that contain information in oral languages, or units of sign in sign languages, which can stand alone or be combined to form words.

Phonemes

The constituent individual sounds that make up morphemes, serving as the smallest sound units of a language.

Syntax

The set of grammatical rules that governs the order in which words are combined to form sentences.

Semantics

The meaning assigned to individual words and symbols within a language.

Babbling

An early stage of infant language development where drawn-out sounds combining consonants and vowels are made with rhythm and inflection.

Language explosion

A developmental stage occurring between roughly $1.2$ and $6$ years of age during which a child's vocabulary expands very rapidly.

Speech segmentation

The ability to isolate and distinguish individual word units from a continuous stream of spoken language.

Expressive vocabulary

The total number of words that can be spoken or actively produced by a child.

Universal phonine sensitivity

The innate ability of young infants to discriminate between virtually all phonemic speech sounds, including non-native sounds, which declines by the end of the first year of life.

Head turn procedure

An experimental testing technique used to indirectly assess phonemic discrimination in pre-verbal infants using auditory habituation and toy doll rewards.

Social learning theory

The theory proposing that children acquire language through imitation of adult speech models and instrumental conditioning via reinforcement.

Genie

A child rescued at age $13$ who had suffered extreme isolation with virtually no human interactions or language exposure, demonstrating significant long-term difficulties in acquiring language.

Over extensions

Language errors where a child applies a rule or category label too broadly at the level of meaning or syntax.

Over regularization

A specific syntactic error where a child applies a standard grammatical rule too broadly to irregular words, such as adding the suffix -ed to form "runned".

Under extensions

Language errors occurring when a child applies a word or rule too narrowly, such as using a general term to refer exclusively to a single specific object.

Language acquisition device

An innate mechanism proposed by Nome Chomsky that enables humans to understand and use universal grammar rules rapidly and automatically.

Waggle dance

A complex form of communication performed by honeybees consisting of a waggle phase and a loop return phase in a figure-eight pattern to indicate the distance and direction of a food source.

Washu

A chimpanzee taught by scientists to use American Sign Language (ASL) through instrumental conditioning to communicate simple and complex requests.

Sarah

A chimpanzee trained in a laboratory to communicate requests and answer simple questions using plastic symbols, though unable to combine them in novel combinations.

Kanzi

A bonobo or chimp who learned to communicate by using geometric symbols called lexograms through observational immersion rather than instrumental conditioning.

Lexograms

Geometric figures arranged on a keyboard used to facilitate symbolic language communication in animal studies, such as with Kanzi.