Dr. Lo Lectures

What is Language

• A communication System

• Means of transmitting meaningful messages that serve an ecological function

• Learned through Interaction with other who share the same system

• Allows information to be transmitted over space and time

Symbol System

A Conventional representation of an object,Function, Process, Idea

Psycholinguistics

Study of the mental representations and processes involved in language

Pragmatics

Broader influences on meaning ex: context, non-verbal cues, Culture

Semantics

Meaning of words given syntax

Grammar

Rules for combining words

Syntax

Rules for the order of words in phrases and sentences

Morphology

Study of words and other meaningful units

Morpheme

Smallest unit of meaning ex: Un-Break-Able

Lexicon

Mental Dictionary of words

Phoneme

Smallest units of sound that distinguish meaning.

Phonetics

Acoustics of speech sounds

Linguistic Relativity

Differences in the categories/Distinctions enshrined in different languages determine/influence how we perceive, analyze, and act upon the world

Fausey & Boroditsky (2011)

Compared English and Spanish Speakers, Resulted that Spanish speakers are more likely to use non-agentive descriptions and less likely to remember “actor” in accidental events

Modular Input Systems

Feed into a common ‘general problem solver” where cognitive processing occurs

Natavist View

• There must be an innately specified “Language acquisition device”

• Depends in genetic dispositions

• Applies to all languages: “Universal Grammar”

Interactionist View

• Language cannot be innately Specified

• Critical contributions from the environment

• Language acquisition must be grounded in experience/interaction for learning to occur: “embodied cognition”

Williams Syndrome

• Very rare from of intellectual disability of known genetic etiology

  • Genetic mutations on chromosome 7 from conception → reduced protein expression in cortex

Williams Sydrome is Characterized by:

Facial, Heart, and Kidney Abnormalities
Mental Impairment (Mental age of 7)
Severely impaired planning, problem solving, spatical and numerical reasoning
Oriented to the social world
Language acquisition slow, but has much better lexical and grammatical development that expected.

Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Language significantly below level expected from age and IQ on standardized testing of expressive and/or receptive language

Nonverbal IQ, Nonlinguistic (ex:self-help, social) development in normal range

Not caused by hearing loss, physician abnormality of speech organs, environmental deprivation or brain damage

Presenting Features of SLI

Delay in talking (ex: 1st words at 2 years)
Immature production of speech sounds in early speech
Use of simplified grammatical structures past the age when grammatical forms are usually mastered
Restricted vocabulary in both production and comprehension
Weak short-term memory
Poor understanding of complex language

Autism Core Symptom triad

• Socialization

  • Quality of reciprocal interaction

• Communication

  • Delayed Language acquisition

  • Persistent imparimnets in pragmatic aspects of language

• Imagination

  • Lack of spontaneous Play/ pretend

Theory of Mind

The ability to attribute mental states such as beliefs, intentions, and desires to oneself and others, which is often impaired in individuals with autism.

Mentalizing

The Ability to predict and explain the behavior of others in terms of their mental states

1st order representations

Infants internally represent physical states of the world (Object permanence)

2nd Order Representations

Children are able to represent mental states ex: thinks/pretends an orange is a ball

3rd order Representations

Child understands concept of “belief” ex: people can have different beliefs, Beliefs can be false

Imagination Impairments

Meta-representational problems—> Impaiments in spontaneous play, pretend play

Socialazation

“treat people and objects alike”- Social aloofness, passiveness, lack of empathy
Lack of awareness of others as mentalizing beings

Communication Problems

Range of problems in both verbal and non-verbal communication, Particularly in pragmanic aspects of language

Why do children with Autism perform poorly on ToM tasks?

• Mental age is higher than down syndrome—> Not due to IQ

• Problems not due to perception, memory, language alone

  • consistent with the view that autsim is due to deficits in ToM

Reading Requires

Highly sophisticated pattern recognition skills
Extremely efficient memory encoding and retrieval skills
Symbolic processing

Specific Reading Disability (SRD)

Reading difficulty despite at least average cognitive ability and educational opportunity

What Causes SRD

Non-cognitive factors (motivation, attitude to reading at home, practice, etc)
General Cognitive Factors (Attention, Listening comprehension)
Specific Cognitive Factors (Visual Discrimination, Phonemic Awareness)

Top-Down Theories

Reading is a “Psycholinguistic Guessing Game”
Readers use knowledge and context to predict up-coming words with minimal reliance on word decoding
Readers should attend to meaning/function of text not to surface form

Bottom Up theories

Reading requires “Transcoding” written symbols into meanings
Readers must practice and automate the kilss required to translate lower levels (features to letters) to higher levels (Lexical, Semantic)
Must initially attend to low level features to achieve automaticity

The main Views of Top Down reading

Efficient reading is a purely visual process
Efficient reading is a highly selective and inferential process
Learning to read is natural

Phonological awareness and reading acquisition

The ability to attend to an manipulate the seperate sounds in words

Phoneme Counting

How many sounds are in a word

Rhyme Recognition

Which words rhyme

Rhyme Production

Tell me a word that rhymes

Phoneme Matching

Do these words have the same first/last sound?

Phoneme Deletion

Say pat with out the /p/

Oddity Tasks

Which is the odd one out? deck, neck, fit

Spoken Language is learned Holistically

Phonemes are not invariant units in spoken language
Children use international cues to help them inentify meaning
Children cannot attend to work form, they use meaning instead

To acquire phonemic awareness Children need:

To become aware of the symbolic status of words
To develop sensitivity to the FORM of words

Melby-Lervag, Lyster, & Hulme (2012)

Collated results of 235 studies investing relationship between reading and phonological skills of, Phonemic Awareness, Rhyme Awareness, Verbal-short term memory
- Significantly larger difference between “dyslexic” and age-matched controls on phonemic awareness than rhyme awareness than STM.

Dyslexia Comprehension

Struggle to decode words, but comprehension is reasonably good

Poor Comprehenders

age-appropriate level of word and sentence reading but limited understanding

Stages of Reading Development

1) Logographic
2) Alphabetic
3) Orthographic

Logographic

Words recognized by idiosyncratic global features

Alphabetic

Letter-sound relationships learned: new words can be “Sounded out”

Orthographic

Words recognized automatically from orthographic features

Attentional Processes

Slow, attentionally mediated,serial
Increase benefit for related items as well as cost of unrelated
Extra Facilitation but also interference when attentional prediction are wrong

Automatic Processes

Fast, obligatory, parallel
Re-activate related items with no cost for unrelated
Facilitation without interference

Neely (1977)

Compared semantic category priming at different prime target intervals, ex: Bird- Eagle, Furniture- Chair

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)

Measure electrical activity at the scalp time-locked to stimulus presentations

Temporally percise, but poor spatial resolution

Neuroimaging methods

Measure changes in blood flow/oxygen"
Spatially precise BUT poor time resolution
Use “Subtraction methods” to isolate brain regions involved in cognitive processes.

Pugh et al. (2001)

Hierarchially structured tasks varying demands on phonological decoding and analysis
- Visual-spatial processing
- Ortjographic processing
Simple Phonological analysis
Phonological assembly
Lexical-semantic processing

What is the BEST way to teach reading?

Universal Phonics Programs

WHY is the Universal Phonics Program the best way to teach reading?

It is the best at PREVENTING reading failure

Hulme et al. (2012)

152 5 year olds were selected for low verbal ability
20 weeks of training in letter knowledge and phoneme awareness in book reading
Compared with training in speaking/listening skills
Phonological training group improved significantly more
Benefits in training caused by changes in phoneme awareness and latter sound knowledge.

Hulme & Snowling (2014)

• Age appropriate decoding and phonological awareness, BUT poor comprehension, vocabulary and inference skills

• Randomly allocated 8-9 year old children from 20 schools to complete

  • Text comprehension training

  • oral language training

  • Combination training

• 20 weeks of training administered by the same teacher

  • Compared with wait-list control at end of training and at 11 month follow up