Digital Intro: Language
human language is the most complex nuts Bonkers behavior on the planet it involves both the ability to comprehend spoken and written words and to create Communication in real time as we speak or when we write most languages are oral from the mouth but other languages are signed with communication expressed by hand movements though language is often used for the transmission of information there's a snake in that bush this is only the simplest function language also allows us to access existing knowledge hey if you eat these berries you will not die from that snake bite you can also draw conclusions and set goals you can understand and communicate complex social relationships language is fundamental to our ability to think language in the brain we've talked Brain about how function is localized in the brain and that's definitely true for some aspects of language but the locations of speaking Reading Writing and even singing are more complicated than that consider Aphasia a neurological impairment of language the region of the brain known as broka area in the left frontal lobe is involved with the production of speech trauma to this area might cause difficulty with speech production which is the ability to speak or sign in a fluid and grammatical way people with brokas aasia May understand everything said to them but have difficulty expressing themselves sometimes they're only able to speak in short phrases or one or two words at a time um it's it's hard it's um well it's speech it's like um words that don't understand brain is good you know um but it's um speech like um I don't know trauma to vernica area a region in the left temporal lobe involved in expression and comprehension would allow a person to speak fluently but in a way that does not make sense people with vernica Aphasia can speak easily but their understanding of speech is impaired their answers might not match the question they might add non-existent words into their sentences and then feel confused when other people people don't understand them I would talk with Donna sometimes we're out with them other people are working with them of them I'm very happy with them good this girl was very good and happy and I play golf and hit other trees we play out with the hands we save a lot of hands on hold for people's for us other hands other what you get but I talk with a lot of am foram despite evidence for this localized function the brain also is amazingly complex and flexible some people have seriously damaged brokas areas and never develop AP fasia others have relearned how to speak through extensive practice building on their ability to sing which is controlled by a different part of the brain and though the language areas are usually located on the left hemisphere of the brain for some people especially those who are left-handed the language areas might be found predominantly in the right Hemisphere or even spread across both hemispheres so that's nuts the psychology of language also known as Psycholinguistics
psycholinguistics is the study of the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain that is the psychological and neurobiological factors involved in language acquisition comprehension and production psycholinguists divide their studies according to the different parts of human language up first first phonetics and phenology this is the study of speech sound with the research focused on how the brain processes and understands these sounds morphology is the study of word structures especially between related words such as dog and dogs and the formation of words based on rules like plural syntax is the study of how words are combined to form sentences and semantics considers the meaning of these words and sentences so just to be clear syntax is the structure how words are combined how sentences are combined and semantics is what the words mean and the last subdivision of psycholinguistics is pragmatics which is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning oh okay the field of psycholinguistics is vast so we're going to tackle the most Central questions which are how is language first acquired where does it come from and why does it develop so quickly you may have already heard about BF Skinner the pioneering behaviorist who brought us learning through reinforcement he believed language was a product of associative principles and operant conditioning Skinner argued that children learn to associate words with meanings largely through reinforcement so if a baby says and her mother gives her some milk then the outcome the milk in the attention would be super rewarding and eventually she'd work her way up to saying milk through these learned associations and shaping processes but then in walks gnome Chomsky the legendary linguist and he argues that children would never reach their full complex sonnet writing potential if learning was dependent on conditioning alone Chomsky in instead propose the idea of innate learning and ubiquitous grammatical categories pointing out that while the world's thousands of languages may sound wildly different they're actually very similar sharing some basic elements that he called Universal grammar chomsky's Universal grammar is based on the idea that humans are born with an innate ability to acquire language we're born with it and even a genetic predisposition to learn grammatical rules rather than being linguistic blank slates Chomsky suggested were hardwired from day one in chomsky's account children are born with a knowledge of general rules of syntax that determine how sentences are constructed of course language needs to be learned in the sense that children learn the language they hear spoken around them but babies don't need to figure out how languages can work they don't need to figure out what kinds of words we can build what types of sentences we can make and what sorts of interpretations we're allowed much of what you know when you know a language you couldn't have possibly learned
Group of Investigators
Left Hemisphere of the baby’s brain
SPecial responsiveness in 2 days old
Sucking rate and responsiveness
Dishabituated
Charactsircs rhythm of language
Labial consonants - sounds we made using our lips than tongue
Stop Consonants - where there is no airflow when saying a letter
Biological hardwired
Baby Learning Words and Their Rate - 10 words / day
Pick apart language into words
a group of investigators was interested in language in the brain so they took a bunch of two day old babies and they played them recordings of human speech half the time it was played forward my ankle is in so much pain and the other half of the time the audio was played in Reverse looking now the left hemisphere of the baby's brains increased in blood flow when they heard the regular speech but not the reverse speech and this suggests that there is special responsiveness to language like signals already happening at 2 days old languages vary and their significant sounds tones rhythms and Melodies enough so that most of us can guess whether a speaker is speaking Japanese or German or French even if we don't understand these languages incredibly newborn infants can can do almost as well you can measure a baby's responsiveness their attentiveness by how much they suck on a pacifier in one study the pacifier was connected to a recording device so that every time the baby sucked a bit of French was heard from a nearby loudspeaker the 4day old French babies rapidly discovered that they had the power to elicit this speech just by sucking and they sucked faster and faster fter to hear more of it after a few minutes however they apparently got bored and therefore the sucking rate decreased now the experimentor switched the speech coming from the microphone from French to English and the babies noticed we could tell because when the switch was made their interest was revived and they began sucking faster again in other words they dishabituated when they tried the experiment again with American 4day old babies they got the same result by 2 months of age not only do infants make these discriminations but now they show a preference and listen longer when their own native language is being spoken so what's it about the native language that's attracting these infants attention at these earliest ages the first feature that babies are picking up about their native language has to do with the characteristic rhythms of speech in that language still taken together this evidence doesn't rule out the influence of environmental exposure given that the auditory cortex is developed in functioning by the third prenatal trimester babies get language input in utero and could have picked up the sound patterns in fact there's a lot of evidence that they do babies get through the same stages in development no matter what language they're learning let's start off with babbling those adorable random cables that the infants make ah but they're not really random no matter what language they're learning this early babbling uses the same set of sounds one study examined the early babbling of babies from 15 different languages including English Thai Japanese Arabic Hindi and Mayan the study found that these babies all prefer labial consonants or sounds made with the lips more than other consonants they also like stop consonants like P and B where air flow through the mouth is totally blocked over others and they also like vowels made low in the mouth like a and ah over those that are made higher up like e and ooh now you try babbling it's fun anyway here's something interesting all of these preferences are independent of how often or even whether these languages have the Sounds in them so babbling Hindi learning babies make the same amount of these sounds that the Arabic learning babies do amazingly newborns can also differentiate between any pair of sounds used in any language in the world it makes sense a baby needs to be prepared to pick up any language so they better come equipped to hear anything that could be relevant but this only last about 6 to 12 months after that babies lose the ability to distinguish between sounds that aren't relevant for the languages they're exposed to it's this earliest ability to distinguish between all possible phones even those that the infant has never been exposed to that provides the soundest evidence for language being biologically hardwired before the the end of the first year of life but no later
for example American newborns dishabituate that is notice sound contrasts in Hindi that they've never heard and that humans over the age of one don't perceive so Japanese infants gradually sto distinguishing between the phones LA and ra and in the same way American infants stop distinguishing between two different K sounds that are perceptually distinct to Arabic speakers by the age of 12 months just as true speech begins sensitivity to foreign contrasts has diminish significantly as the baby recalibrates to listen specifically for the particulars of only the languages they are exposed to and it's not just the way they deal with sounds that's the same for all infants they all pick up words at the same approximate rate and stages to and that's regardless of how the language they're learning works it doesn't matter whether the babies hear motheres that way of speaking slowly and using easy words in intonation mommy and daddy love you it doesn't matter if a language has tone like Mandarin or doesn't like English or whether the verb comes at the beginning or the end of the sentence in fact all babies in whatever language will start getting their first words around 10 to 12 months old by 18 months they've got around 50 words hey it's pretty good and then they start to undergo a huge vocabulary spurt picking up hundreds of words in the next few months so that by around two they have about 500 and they start going even faster your average 2 and 1/2-year-old is soaking up new words at the rate of about 10 a day faster than an average undergraduate taking a foreign language course
oh baby one of the most amazing things about language is our ability to know where the gaps are between words although you can see the gaps on a printed page when you are listening to someone speak the sounds are actually running together by the age of one we're already able to pick aart language into words so the ways that kids make sounds the way they pick up words it's all the same worldwide and since the languages their learning are all so different this tells us something fundamental about the human brain how babies learn language is biological our brains are configured for language other evidence that supports
Our brain is configured into learning a new language
Group of Deaf Children
this idea of universal grammar comes from the observation that children may learn languages better than they ever hear them deaf children whose parents don't speak American sign language very well nevertheless are able to learn it perfectly on their own and may even make up their own language if they need to a group of De children in a school in Nicaragua whose teachers could not sign invented a way to communicate through madeup sign signs the development of this new Nicaraguan sign language has continued and changed as new generations of students have come to the school and started using the language in addition children begin to understand the specific rules that apply to their languages even the mistakes that the young children make follow a pattern that supports a theory of a universal grammar not surprisingly kids do make mistakes calling a horse doggy the first time they see one saying I eat instead of I ate but there are all of mistakes that kids don't make that it seems like they should for example when asking a question Teddy is Happy can turn into is Teddy happy but Teddy dressed up as Alice can never turn into dressed Teddy up as Alice kids don't make mistakes like that clearly the rules of language are understood even if the exceptions to the rules are still being learned okay how can we describe this I know it's supposed to be a big red balloon how about a red big balloon could this be a red big balloon any idea why you feel more comfortable saying a big red balloon and why that feels better than saying a red big balloon you never learned a rule saying that this is three big red round plastic balls and not big three round plastic red balls though never explicitly taught to us from early in life we already know how language can work we have an abstract rule set that tells us what's possible and what's not kids can deduce for themselves how to fit all of these words into a sentence just like you do when you learn or make up a new word but are we sure how can we know that we're not just memorizing and then fixing word lists well fortunately
there's a really simple powerful test meet linguist Jean burko gleon who designed the test all the way back in 1958 [Music] when should I begin here's the um timer and what's going to happen are you going to start it I'm going to start it you ready okay but I haven't thought about this go I study psychol Linguistics that means I study the way that people acquire language the way they produce it the way they retrieve it and I also study the way they lose language for instance what happens when someone has brain damage and that affects the language centers in their brain I looked at the way Young children acquire language in a systematic way for instance how they make plurals of words they've never heard before I'm also interested in things like gender differences in language how parents talk to boys and girls how do you feel you did it in 28 seconds I don't know what I said I wasn't listening sounded great was it in English yes did you catch that imaginary creature in Jee burog Gleason's introduction that's a wug and the wug test is one of the most famous in all of linguistics researchers invite English-speaking children from ages 4 to 7 to answer questions about situations involving madeup but plausible words like wug or zib you ready for the test okay this is a wug now there is another one there are two of them there are two if you said wugs you're right you're doing as well as a toddler acquiring English and what's really amazing about the wug test is that kids pretty much all say wugs none of them have ever heard the word before because Jean burog gleon made it up so they couldn't have memorized it kids didn't say wuggies or wugi or WG or wugan and they didn't just shrug and shake their heads they said it correctly because they heard more than just lists of words in their heads even young children have figured out the rules about how language Works without ever being taught rules that they apply to new words impressively by the second year of life children use the structure of the language they are learning as further information guiding their word learning in one study three and four-year-olds were shown a picture in which a pair of hands was performing a kneading sort of motion with a mass of red confetti like material that was overflowing a low striped container some of the children were asked in this picture can you show me seing the children responded by making the same kneading motions with their hands other children were asked in this picture can you show me a Seb in response the children pointed to the container and other children were asked can you show me some Seb from this research it's clear that children use their growing knowledge of word classes within the language to guide their discovery of what a particular new word means these Universal structures are all around us without us even knowing they're there you may think that people often speak in a way that's sloppy saying have to instead of have to and W to instead of want to why do we do this well I'd like to show you how sloppy speech is actually the consequence of a strict obedience to certain rules of spoken English informal ways of speaking can be the best ways to show the structure of language since they are clearly never taught we don't explicitly teach children to say ha to or W and these are the hardest parts of speech for non-native speakers to learn we probably all agree that I want to sleep is the informal version of I want to sleep and I have to sleep is the informal version of I have to sleep so we agree that as English speakers we can be sloppy and slur words together but is that a good explanation of what's going on the next set of sentences show that this explanation doesn't work I want two sheep I want a sheep I have two sheep I have to sheep is I want a sheep a sloppy version of I want to sheep is I have to sheep just an informal way of saying I have two sheep why are Wana and haa used as informal equivalents in the first set of sentences but not the second contraction can take place when the second word is to but not to but why the word have in the sentence I have to sheep means to own or possess and the word to refers to the number of sheep but what does have mean in the sentence I have to sleep what does to mean in this sentence have to is really an expression that means must the words don't have separate meanings but instead add up to a single word like idea but what does this have to do with the fact that have and two can contract into haa in some instances but not others the answer is that English only allows certain sequences of sounds and disallows others this is part of the underlying Universal grammar that we are naturally attuned to try to think of a word in the English language that is pronounced with the F and T sound next to each other there's lift after safety lofty soft sift and many others now think of a word in English that is pronounced with the V and T sound next to each other what it's not allowed in English it's not there you won't find it this is why we convert the VT into ft and why have to is converted to haa and have to is not since have to is implicitly a single word the rule applies and the V is changed to an F to avoid violating it have to on the other hand is always understood as two separate words okay so this is a rule in English are there other speech sounds to which this rule applies to answer this question we need to talk about the voiced and voiceless consonants
in any language consonants are produced by interrupting the Sound Stream at some point in the vocal tract for example touching the tongue just behind the upper teeth when pronouncing t or d or closing the lips when pronouncing b or P these consonants may be voiced or voiceless they are voiced if some air passes through the vocal cords causing them to vibrate just as the consonant is produced they are voiceless if no air is allowed to pass until a brief moment after the pronunciation of the consonant has begun here's a partial list now place your finger on your Adam's apple and pronounce the V sound and then the F sound you will feel more vocal cord vibration for the voiced V sound then the voiceless F sound in English I bet you didn't know this we don't say voiced and voiceless sounds next to each other no matter how the word is spelled can you think of an exception well this word might seem like one at first but that's a written word when we're speaking quickly how is it often pronounced we usually say absent absent absent again obeying the basic rule that voiced and voiceless are not pronounced together in a single word now that's pretty cool by 4 months infants are already sensitive to the voiced voiceless contrast between B and P using the habituation method once an infant's rate of sucking slows after listening to a specific consonant over and over they begin to suck more vigorously when the consonant sound changes so they can tell the difference but back to the wug test in a separate version of the classic Experiment three and four-year-olds are presented with the creature and half are told that it's a wug a word that ends with the vo consonant G and the other half are told that it's a w a word that ends with the voiceless consonant k a second creature appears and the children are told now there are two of them now there are two the question is how the children would form the plural of a word that they have surely never heard before would they add the voiceless consonant s or the voiced consonant Z preschoolers consistently choose the correct form if they presented with a wug they choose the voice consonant Z and say wugs uh and if they are presented with a W they choose the voiceless consonant s and answer WS it is important to note that although there is General agreement among psycholinguists that babies are genetically programmed to learn language there's still debate about chomsky's idea that there's a universal grammar that can account for all language learning in one survey of the world's languages none of the presumed underlying features of language acquisition were entirely Universal there seems to be a few of the over 5,000 languages spoken on Earth that don't have noun or verb phrases that don't have tenses past present future and even some that don't have nouns or verbs at all even though a basic Assumption of a universal grammar is that all languages should have these features but it is clear that language is more generative than it is imitative speakers of a language can compose sentences to represent new ideas that they've never been exposed to here's a few other powerful ideas about language in terms of language Evolution different languages have different plans for meaning book is book in English whether it sits on the table or I hold it up but in Russian book is kiga but when I hold the book up it's kigu adding a oo sending when I act on the object this is an inflection although English follows the first plan it also has inflections s which signifies plural is an example of an inflection while individual languages more strongly follow one plan over the other in languages that evolve they may change their basic plan and even change back again when considering the relationship between form and meaning psycholinguists have been interested in whether the form of a sentence depends on its meaning in other words if is syntax separate from semantics or are they linked there's a famous example sentence in linguistics that gome chsky has been talking about since the 1950s colorless green ideas sleep furiously this sentence has been the source of poems and arguments and it has even been set to music colorless green ideas sleep furiously does not seem to mean anything coherent but it sounds like an English sentence if you tried out the sentence on a child the child would giggle but I suspect that their reaction would be different if you tried it backwards furiously sleep ideas green colorless you might get a Blank Stare instead this is such a fascinating sentence because it shows there's more to what determines the structure of a sentence than whether it has meaning or Conclusion not finally it's important to know how effective language is and how it's limited if I ask you to meet my friend at the train station I might have a difficult time describing him to you black hair dark skin 5' 8 in it's really better if I have a picture in giving directions we're able to do it verbally but directions work better with a map language without gestures doesn't work as well taken together the genius of language is that with a small number of words and this system of grammar we can make up an infinite number of sentences language allows us to communicate about the future share our desires communicate negatives and think abstractly