LING100 Notes

Week 1 (Communication and Language)

Language Death

• Important points in culture are related to their language

• Identification/identity is related to language

• Different languages produce different perspectives of the world

• Language has more purposes than just communication

• If something does not have a language, it is not considered human

Language Revival 2

• There is a “language shift” in languages when different/multiple languages are being spoken

• Languages encode info

• Losing a language = losing part of someone’s identity

• Language/Dialect creates community

• Socio-cultural identity is identity related to the language (mother tongue)

Humans are Equipped for the Perception of Speech

• Foetuses can differentiate sounds between voices, music, etc

• 6 month old infants are capable of determining which parent speaks which language

Language Functions

• Language has multiple functions

Language as a Means of Communication 1

• Language is not the only form of communication

Language as a means of Communication 2

• Language is THE MAIN form of communication

Language as a means of storage and transmission of info

• Not all languages can be written

• We don’t inhibit a language, we inhibit the ability to learn it, specific human languages are not innate (do animals have innate languages?)

• Contact establishing function of a language: to establish contact with a person to make favourable conditions for fruitful communication, this is a result of choices of themes or topics common in a particular culture and ritualised word combinations or sentence patterns (ex: talking about the weather or how an individual is doing)

• Metalinguistic function of a language: the use of a language (as Jacobson calls “Code”) to discuss and describe itself

• Poetic/Aesthetic function of a language: involves the use of a language artistically, equivalent to a painting being used to make something memorable/beautiful, usually has a rhythm rhyme, alliteration, etc. less about communication and more about presentation

• Normally, there are no texts that have only one particular function, functions coexist with each other in texts

• A function may be dominant in a text, but there are still other functions within

• Each language has multiple functions within them

Week 2 (Animal Communication)

• Semiotics: The study of signs

• Signs have features such as: it should be material, it should stand for something else (it has meaning), it serves as a means of communication

• Signifier: part of the sign that sets off at least one sense organ (pronunciation, spelling, touching, etc.)

• Individual instances of signs are called tokens

• Signified component refers to both the real world object and its conceptual content

• Compare conceptual systems with one another (is it a tree or a bush?)

• All signs can act as signals when they trigger a specific action

• Three types of signs: iconic, indexical, symbolic

• The types are dependent on: whether the signifier naturally resembles its referent, whether the signifier is directly linked with the referent being a partial or representative sample of it, or whether the signifier and referent are arbitrarily associated

• Iconic signs (aka icons) share some resemblance to their referent (ex: a photograph) (they look like they resemble..they sound like they resemble..)

• Indexical signs are partial or representative sample of the referent they refer to (ex: the presence of smoke is an indexical of fire) (indexical = indicator)

• Symptomatic signs are a subcategory of indexical signs, however, they are spontaneous (ex: a person’s body temp rising may indicate them being sick)

• Symbolic signs share an arbitrary relationship to their signs

• The majority of words of human language are symbolic or arbitrary signs, but there are some words that are called onomatopoeic, like squish, buzz, splat

• These words are iconic because they somewhat resemble what they signify

• Iconic signs are widespread in the communication systems of all animals

• Human communication doesn’t make extensive use of iconic signs

• Graded sign structure (gradual transition)

• Discrete sign structure (no gradual transition, categorical (stepwise) differences)

• Semiotics: different types of signs and how they function in communication

• All three types of signs can be graded and discrete

• The passing on or exchange of information is communication

• Animals communicate among themselves and with humans

• The words communication and language do not mean the same thing

• Not any form of communication qualifies as a language

• Non vocal forms of communication: scent/pheromones, light (lightning bugs or fireflies), electricity (impulses at various frequencies produced by eels), colour (colour patterning and colour changes used by octopus)

• More non vocal forms of communication: posture, gestures (waving goodbye, dogs wagging tails), facial expressions

• Animal communication is mainly impulsive and not deliberate, it is largely iconic and symptomatic (if a monkey gives a certain cry in fear, it is acting on impulse of its feelings rather than warning its group members of danger)

• The symptomatic vocalisation is used by the group members for their benefit

• Animals do not communicate about anything other than the here and now

• Animal communication is limited

• Humans are more discrete with their forms of communication (pheromones, morphemes, and words)

• The bee’s ability to dance and navigate is innate, but experience increases the accuracy of these activities

• There is no evidence that bees have to learn their behaviour, they inherit the dances of their parents

• Individual bees raised in isolation from the hive function normally when they are introduced to the hive for the first time

Week 3 (Animal Communication pt.2)

• Ornithologists distinguish two major classes of vocalizations: calls and songs

• Calls consist of single notes or short note sequences, they are used for: flight, specialized alarm calls, pleasure, distress, territorial defense, feeding, flocking, nesting and general alarms

• Flight calls: take off, during flight, landing at nesting sites

• Specialized alarm calls: mobbing call (sharp call like the word chink, characterized by abruptness, function is to alert the birds in the area of a possible predator) Aerial predator call (doesn’t begin abruptly, instead starts gradually, much higher frequency, announces presence of overhead predator while reducing own danger of being located, this call is shared by birds of many different species)

• Songs are used to determine territory and attract mates and require identification of both species and individuals

• Females injected with the hormone testosterone are able to produce the mating call during mating season

• Subsections of songs are distinct and recognizable, birdsong is unique from species to species, can vary from bird to bird within species

• Some bird vocalization is innate, however there is much that appears to be acquired

• Birds such as a male bullfinch learn the song, the bullfinch song is the song of a canary, when offsprings of this particular bullfinch mature, they sing the song they learned from their father

• Birds recognize the distinctive calls of the parents, they learn the calls in two and a half days after hatching, no other neighboring calls attract them afterwards

• Some experiments indicate that there are some songbirds that have both an innate and a learned component in their songs

• This means that a combination of innate and acquired components is one way that the acquisition of complex behavior takes place in nature

• Recursion allows phrases to be embedded inside simple sentences or add another phrase to the end of a given sentence

• Was once thought to be the unique property of human language

• Gary Marcus concluded that humans are not unique in their capacity to recognize recursions

• Recognizing recursion may only be found in species that can acquire new patterns of vocalization (ex: songbirds, humans, and cetacous)

• Parrots live in societies in the wild and live long enough to make the process of learning worthwhile

• Dr. Pepperber claims her parrot at 30 years of age had the intelligence of a five year old child and had not reached his full potential

• Alex (the parrot) was able to perform for anyone, not just Dr. Pepperber

• It is not clear whether alex’s skills were the results of rote learning rather than abstract thought

• Many birds develop dialect in songs

• Birds have a special hemisphere in the brain controlling the songs (like humans)

• There is interplay between innate and learned aspects, general characteristics appear to be fixed biologically whereas the details of the system appear to be learned. Songs may be innate, or entirely or partially learned

• Some birds, like starlings, are capable to recognize recursion as humans in their language

• Cultural transmission is not necessarily unique to humans, it has been noted in parrots

• Nicholas humphrey has proposed that intelligence evolves in response to the social environment rather than the natural one

• Human language structure and language use are vastly more complex than any known animal communication system

• Dolphin vocalizations: pure tones, pulsed sounds, whistle squeals, train of regular clicks, barks, yelps, and moans

• It is believed that dolphins are highly intelligent

• Most studied is the bottlenose dolphins, each dolphin possesses its own distinctive whistle, much like an SOS message

• Signature whistle is innate, dolphins begin producing their whistle as early as the day they were born

• The most striking fact about the vocalization if whales is that they engage in song sections that may last for hours

• The songs consist of repeated units that are unique to each individual whale

• These songs are similar to the structure of bird songs by consisting of repeated subunits

• Function of the songs are to identify individuals and to keep a herd of migrating whales together

• These animals possess a degree of intelligence, however, this degree of intelligence does not seem to be associated with a more highly developed communication system

• 99% of our genetic DNA is shared with chimpanzees and gorillas

• Non-human primate communication serves to mark and announce territory, to warn other members, and interact with members in various ways

• “Snake call” causes members to look at the ground

• “Airborne predator” causes members to look up and seek cover in the trees and bushes

• “Terrestrial predator call” causes members to climb trees to the ends of branches

• Communication appears to be genetically determined, this has been established by raising newborns in isolation, intention stands behind alarm calls in many monkeys

• Infant vervet monkeys appear to distinguish innately among broad class of mammals, however, this innate ability must be perfected

• A mixture of innate components and learning is typical for the acquisition of vocalization

• Chimps do not have the physiology for vocalization, if they are to be taught a language it will be sign language

• Nim Chimpsky: never used more than a three word utterance, never initiated “conversation”, mostly repeated what his trainer signed at him, his utterances didn't get longer or more complex with time, he was not creative in his language use

• Children acquire language differently, they learn language from the surrounding cultural group, it is not innate

• We known of no apes that have successfully taught their offspring sign or use such language to talk to other apes

• Chimpanzees demonstrate any rudimentary syntactic ability

• Like bird calls, the vocal repertoire of the velvet monkey seems to consist simply of small vocabulary of distinct calls which are not combined with each other in any systematic fashion

• Not only in human language is it possible to talk about events in a remote time/place (forager honey bees)

• Communication of bees is innate

• There is no evidence of recombining various sections of the message to form new messages

• There are no parallels between the phonemic or morphological recombination of human language and the natural communication systems of non-human primates

• Lack of linguistic communication may be explained: the small groups of chimpanzees/gorillas living in a food-rich environment may not have required the development of any other mode of communication

• Human species are still ranked as unique in its capacity to concentrate a large vocabulary into sentences that touch on virtually every experience and thought

• Common feature of animal communication systems is its correlation between the intensity and length of the signal and magnitude of the message (many animals try to make themselves larger, humans do the equivalent thing by shouting or changing production of sentences to show emotions)

• Animals have singular or a few responses available for each signal. These responses do not always seem to be under voluntary control

• The number of possible signals available to an animal tends to be severely limited: social vertebrates tend to have 20-40 displays, social insects have 10-20 categories of signals

• The average english speaker has an active vocabulary of 5000 words, the english language is estimated to have over 500 000 words, the number of sentences available to a speaker is infinite

• Social animals have more types of signals than asocial animals

• Nicholas Humphrey proposed that intelligence evolves in response to the social environment rather than the natural one

• “Clever Hans Phenomenon” was not objective: unwitting minimal cues emitted by the horse’s questioners were responsible for the remarkable feats of clever hans. Clever Hans was a horse taught to answer complicated arithmetic, spelling, and other questions by stomping the correct number of times. Clever Hans’ performance resulted from dressage

• According to G.H Hovelmann, animal language research has taught us far less about higher intellectual capabilities in the animal than about the fallibility of a man

• The function of the animal communication is to control and to facilitate social organization. It plays a huge role in our mental life

Week 4

• We can tell that something is a human language by first distinguishing knowledge and using the knowledge to speak and understand sentences

• Linguistics is concerned with competence:

• Humans have capacity to produce sounds that signify certain meanings and to understand or interpret the sounds produced by others

• The sounds and sound patterns, the basic units of meaning, such as words, and the rules to combine them to form new sentences constitute the grammar of a language

• The most fundamental assumption is that human language at all levels is rule/principle governed. Every known language has systematic rules governing pronunciation, word formation, and grammatical constructions. The way in which meanings are associated with phrases of a language is characterized by regular rules. The use of language to communicate is governed by important generalizations that can be expressed by rules

• Two types of rules = two types of grammar

• Descriptive rules: rules that describe the actual language and its grammar that exists in the minds of the speakers. All speakers have shared knowledge and it makes communication possible. Such a model is called descriptive grammar

• Prescriptive rules (aka grammar): prescribe or dictate to the speaker the way the language supposedly should be written

• Two factors involved in grammar programs: memory and decision making. Computers are good at memory but are poor decision makers; humans are good at decision making but are relatively poor at memory. The problem with the human mind is the ability to assess the plausibility of the possible interpretations and to make decisions about what is more likely

• Phonetics is the study of language by examining the inventory and structure of the sounds of speech

• Phonetics comes from a Greek word

• Language can perform its functions as the most important means of communication only as a language of sounds

• Two ways of approaching phonetics:

• The first approach studies the psychological mechanisms of speech production (articulatory phonetics)

• The second approach is known as acoustic phonetics, this is concerned with measuring and analyzing the physical properties of the sound waves we produce when we speak

• Although we can produce the sound of our mother tongue, it is not part of our competence to be able to explain how to produce them

• There seems to be a universal set of sounds in each language: considerable overlap among languages, there do not sem to be any sounds which can be found in only one language, children produce sounds which exist in languages other than that of their community

• One of the properties of language is that the relationship between speech sounds and meaning is arbitrary. There is no relationship between concept and word from meaning. If you dont know a language the sounds spoken to you will be incomprehensible

• Consequences of arbitrariness: different languages have different sounds to represent the same thing, different sounds but the same message

• There is some sound iconicity in language: these are words whose pronunciation suggests the meaning (onomatopoeic words). The onomatopoeic words make up a small group of words in the vocabulary of most languages. The majority of words are arbitrary

• There are sounds from other languages which are not possible to represent with the English orthography (nasal vowels of French, tones in Chinese and Bantu languages)

• The english orthography is ambiguous: the same sound may be represented in many different ways (full, phone, rough), the same letter or sequence may represent different sounds (rough, through, though)

• Phonetic alphabets: phonetic transcriptions which are usually enclosed in square brackets

• Phonology is the study of the sound systems that are used in different languages

• Not only can humans produce and perceive the sounds of a language, they also know how these sounds work together as a system

• Phonemes: units of phonology. They differentiate the meanings of morphemes and words

• As a native speaker of the language x, you only hear the sounds of your language (ex: japanese speakers do not distinguish between sounds such as l and r like we do in english, they treat them as one sound)

• Morphology: the study of the structure of words. The unit of morphology is morpheme, this is the smallest meaningful unit which cannot be divided into smaller units

• Speakers of a language can identify the internal structure of the words in their language. Speakers use the knowledge they have of words to discover and pronounce new words

• Some languages have extremely complex internal structure (ex: Zogue)

• Lexical morphemes: form the base of the word and have the central (lexical) meaning of the word such as: cat, space, fat, girl in girls

• Grammatical morphemes: (affixes: prefixes and suffixes) mark grammatical categories of a word: -ed in opened, -s in pigs, speaks (differentiates singular to plural things)

• Derivational morphemes: (affixes: prefixes and suffixes) derivation forms a word with a meaning and/or category distinct from that of its base through the addition of an affix: -er in teacher, -able in understandable

• Free morphemes can stand alone as an independent word: put, cut, sing, coat. Very often, lexical morphemes are free, but there are some grammatical morphemes that are free too: a or the (articles) do not have lexical meanings, but grammatical

• bound morphemes cannot stand alone, it must be attached to another morpheme in order to become an independent word: all affixes are bound morphemes. Some lexical morphemes can also be bound, especially when the word has been borrowed from another language

• Words and their types:

• Simple (with or without grammatical morpheme)

• Derivative (with derivational affixes)

• Compound (a combination of two or more lexical morphemes without affixation)

• Syntax:

• The knowledge of how words are combined into phrases and sentences is called syntax. A sentence must obey the grammar of the language. Sentences are not just strings of words but have internal constituents. Native speakers can recognize grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in their language

• If a phrase contains both: an argument and a modifier, the argument has to be closer to the head than the modifier

• Elements of a phrase: a head, predicate, arguments, modifiers

• Ambiguous constructions:

• Different transformations help speakers to solve a problem of ambiguity: John sent a message to his friends from spain. The ambiguity here relates to.. From Spain whether john sent a message from spain to his friends, or whether his friends are from spain

• Syntax provides the ability to build messages from smaller components. In animal communication, there is a one-to-one correspondence between message and signal. The only moderation is intensity of signal. The ability to combine a finite number of units in an infinite number of ways (sentences) is fundamentally different from the signal to message correspondence of animal communication

• Its a feature that novel utterances are continually being created and we are able to understand and produce utterances we have never heard before. The potential number of utterances (sentences) in any human language is infinite. However, there are some constraints on creativity (grammar and semantic rules)

• Language is recursive. This is the property which gives language its power. A recursive set of rules is one in which the output of one rule appears as the input of one of the rules which created the input. Thanks to this property we can extend any word combination or any sentence. It means that any word combination is not a final one, any sentence is not a final one.

• The number of relative clauses can be infinite

• Memory restrictions prevent us from such long sentences (five words plus or minus two words is an average sentence in our speech)

• Humans must be able to deal with sentences on line, both producing them and understanding them as the need arises

• Speakers of different languages have to use different patterns to say the same thing

• Semantics is the study of meaning (not just the word meaning, but the meaning of word combinations, phrases, sentences, etc)

• Words have two main types of meaning: denotation refers to the direct and specific meaning of a word as distinct from an implied or associated idea

• Connotation refers to the implied or associated ideas of a word, it is the development of a denotational direct meaning

• Polysemy: diversity of meanings.

• Homophony: when a single phonetic form has completely different not connected meanings. They are different words. Ex: light - not heavy, light - illumination

• If the different words are pronounced the same, whether or not they are written the same, they are called homophones. Ex: two, to, too

• Words that are spelled the same, whether or not they are pronounced the same, are called homographs. Ex: wind - to turn/moving air

• Part of a native speaker's linguistic competence includes the ability to determine the meaning of sentences. This competence also allows speakers to determine when a sentence has more than one meaning (is ambiguous).

• The conventions that allow a native speaker to use and interpret language correction is called pragmatics. A native speaker also knows the norms for carrying on conversations: when its okay to interrupt, how to be polite, what topics are taboo, etc. these vary from language to language and culture to culture

• The study of discourse is the study of connected sequences of sentences (or sentence fragments) produced by a single speaker

• Language can be viewed as organized hierarchically

• Sentences are organized into discourse: sounds, then morphemes, then words, then sentences, then discourse

• Language is a semiotic system

• Language is arbitrary (the relationship between speech sounds and meaning is arbitrary)

• Language is creative/productive. At the same time, there are constraints that establish the boundaries within which innovation can occur (a prison but not to imprison)

• Languages are rule-governed structures

• Language has function words

• Language is recursive

• Language has mechanisms for introducing new symbols and signals (birds and bees etc. cannot just add new ‘words’ to describe new things

• Language can be used in unrestricted number of domains

• Language symbols can be broken down into smaller parts

• More than one meaning can be conveyed by a symbol or group of symbols

• Language can refer to the past, future, and non-immediate situations

• Language users can learn other variants of the same language (british vs australian), speak several languages (birds cannot learn more than one dialect)

• Human beings are equipped for the perception of speech

• Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution created a special capacity for language in humans that is not found in any other species

• There are no ‘primitive languages’. Some of the most complex phenomena we know about are found in societies that have neither writing nor electricity. There are simply no grounds for claiming that one language or variety of language is somehow superior to another

Week 6-7: The origin and evolution of human language

• Language evolved from an existing animal communication system by accreting complications

• Language arose de novo: it is an entirely different type of system from animal communication

Academic and non-acedemic approach to the origin of human language

• Many religions provide an account of the origin of human language

• Rousseau, Condillac, and Herder tried to give some non-religious explanation of the Origin of Human language, but these explanations were regarded as speculations

• Linguistic society of paris made the decision to ban all presentations or any papers concerning the origin of human language in 1866

• Noam chomsky (1960) regarded the origin of human language as a matter of evolutionary biology

Hypothesis of the origin of human language

• The “bow-wow” theory: language is basically onomatopoeic: humans simply imitated sounds from their surroundings: cuckoo, kiwi, etc. but the number of onomatopoeic words is very small in all languages and there are not so many objects that produce any sounds

• The “pooh-pooh” theory: the original words were formed from emotion-carrying grunts sounds of exertion, relief, jubilation, and so on. Some of them may be universal. But it doesn’t explain the origin of the words that name objects, actions, attributes, etc.

• The “ding-dong” theory: the origin of words is connected with the ability of all people reflected in ‘vocal expression’

• The “yo-he-ho” theory: the origin of words is associated with the human necessity to cooperate

• The “la-la” theory: language first developed from song, both as a means of sexual attraction and as an accompaniment to other physical activities

The sound symbolism hypothesis

• People have often sought for words’ meaning that would be derived from the intrinsic signification of the sounds (or letters) of which they are composed (phonetic or sound symbolism)

• Sound symbolism means that each sound has meaning, symbolizes something, for example, the sound (L) stands for love (Eng), lieben (German), L’ubit’ (Russian). It symbolizes LOVE, something pleasant, etc

Types of evidence

• The Paleontological Evidence:

• Humans have a domed tongue in a L-shaped oral cavity

• Thanks to this fact, humans are able to produce a wide range of sounds that are simply impossible for other apes who have a flat tongue in a flat mouth. It is also impossible even for Neanerthals

• Though there is a negative side too: humans are much more likely than other apes to choke to death

• The development of L-shapes vocal tract arise in pre-humans concurrently with: an increase in brain size, and the change in bipedal locomotion

• Genetic evidence:

• The gene FOXP2 has been discovered in the late twentieth century. This gene doesn’t make us talk; it provides some of the ability that allows speech to develop. People who inherited this gene have difficulty in:

• Giving lists of words which start with the same letter

• Making some linguistic linkages to the derived words from the same root

• Moving facial muscles in such a way as to produce fluent speech

• Developing the broca’s area

• Affecting the ability to understand and produce language

Pidgin and creole languages and emergence of language

• Is it possible to find a primitive language in order to compare it with a language like English?

• There is no evidence to support that there are primitive languages:

• Languages of technologically primitive cultures have all the features of those technologically complex cultures

• The vocabulary of the so-called ‘primitive languages’ is not poor at all

• The grammar of the languages can be very complex in many cases and there are many different types of generalizations in these types of languages.

• ‘Primitive’ languages can cope with the modern world. Any language can develop a vocabulary for talking about anything, as long as its speakers want to discuss that topic using borrowed

• Solitary infants raised in social isolation remain virtually speechless and don’t invent or discover a language (language is not primitive)

The development of pidgins

• Pidgin is created from the need of two cultures to communicate with one another.

• Pidgin is a primitive system of communication.

• When speakers of different languages have to communicate to carry out practical tasks but do not have the opportunity to learn one another’s language, they develop a make-shift jargon called pidgin

• Word order is not stable in pidgin

• Pidgin has no function of words

• Endings such as the ones we saw in latin are removed

• Tenses tend to get spelled out as separate words rather than being part of the verb

• Pronouns have a single form, not two or more as in English (I, me, and my)

• Most words can be nouns or verbs or adjectives without any inflections or any other changes

• Compounds are very common

• Reduplication (the repetition of words or part of words for grammatical purposes) is common

• Pidgin has no relative or subordinate clauses

• Pidgin has a very limited and impoverished vocabulary and syntax

• Sounds are usually those common to the languages the pidgin is based on

• Difficult consonant clusters are simplified, the vowel systems is small

• A pidgin is NOT a language

The Development of Creoles

• Creole results when children learn a pidgin as their mother tongue

• Two factors keep children from learning the language of power

1. The language in power is spoken by a minority of people in the community

2. The society is rigidly stratified so children get little exposure to the language of power

• Children in this situation turn the pidgin they hear from their parents into a creole

• Creoles all over the world share the same common features

Compared to pidgins creoles have:

• A larger vocabulary

• Much more complex grammar

• Ability to express virtually any thought expressible in normal language

• Consistent word order (SVO)

• Function words

• There is an addition of a definite or an indefinite article to noun changes the meaning of the sentence

• In english there is no straightforward way to distinguish purposes that have been accomplished from those that have not

The comparison of creoles and natural languages

• Reduced morphology (in Creoles): a) no conjugation of verbs for tense and person, b) no declensions of nouns for case and number, c) almost no prepositions, d) no agreement for gender

• Creoles lack vocabulary and often express things periphrastically which would be expressed with a single word in a natural language

• “Old English + French”= Modern English (Creolization of English ?)

The explanation and the interpretation of the similarities among all Creole languages

• Although the children who first learn the creole are not exposed to a real language, they nonetheless acquire a grammar which has all the features of a real language

• All creoles have the same structure independent of the languages on which they are based

• There are numerous differences between the structure of creole and the structure of any of the languages with which creole speakers might have been in contact

Bickerton’s explanation of the similarities among all Creole languages

• Bickerton views many of the similarities among creoles as resulting from our possessing a genetic blueprint for language, in other words, that linguistic structures are innate to humans.

• Children simply ‘fill’ in the innate linguistic structure with the words of the pidgin and as a result of the creole language evolves

• There is a generalized “blueprint” of grammar/communicate that is innate for all humans

• The process if creolization is a natural experiment in language evolution that has unfolded independently dozens of times in the modern world

• Bickerton cites as evidence for this hypothesis the linguistic behavior of children which resembles Creole languages.

• 1) English children learn question inversion quite late; the children who speak Creole do not use inversion

Noam Chomsky’s explanation of the similarities among all Creole languages (Universal Grammar)

• Two sources of evidence:

1. We have knowledge which could not have acquired from simple exposure of language and in the short period of time

2. Many facts about our native language do not appear in spoken language because our memory store cannot manage them. However, children somehow separate out the grammatical from ungrammatical

• The universal grammar, conjectured by noam chomsky, is a computing device, somehow realized neurologically, that it makes a wide range of grammatical models available to the child

• According to chomsky, the child must then select which of the available grammatical models matches the grammar of the language in which the child is born (native language)

Bickerton/Chomsky’s debates

• Bickerton argues that universal grammar is more specific than that. He concludes that we are preprogrammed not just to a universal grammar with adjustable switches, but to a particular set of switch settings, that surface again and again in creole grammar

• The process of learning a language is one of the suppressing features of the grammar which do not correspond to data. If it is so one would expect children to learn creole-like features of their local languages earlier and more easily than features conflicting with creole grammar

• Bickerton: there is a natural grammar which shows up in creole

The origin of speech

• The question of language (speech) origin has been obscured by the dominance of N Chomsky, whose theory of innate “universal grammar” ignored the problem of how this language ability arose

• Natural selection plays an important role in the evolution of a design of the language faculty (S. Pinker and Paul Bloom)

• Advances in brain imaging, neuroscience, and genetics helped researchers to go deeper into our brain and our biological past

• 2 million years ago the hominid brain began a period of rapid expansion, including in the primary brain areas associated with producing or processing language - Broca’s area located in the left frontal cortex and wernicke’s area located in the left temporal lobe

• FOXP2 “speech gene” which affects both language and the ability to articulate, was apparently a target of natural selection. This gene may have undergone its final mutation fewer than 100 000 years ago

• Fully developed language was in place by at least 50 000 years ago, when humans were creating art and symbolic behaviors that point unequivocally to fluent language

• Many researchers think hand and face gestures offer behavior that is more analogous to speech than are animal vocalizations. McNeill: the hands are really precisely linked to speech articulation. Gesture is not a behavioral fossil that was superseded by language but an indispensable part of language

• Apes frequently gesture with limbs and hands. Gesture remains very much alive in human communication. Blind subjects gesture at equal rates as sighted subjects to a known blind audience. There are many supporters of the gestural hypothesis of human language origin. One of the arguments is the appearance if gestural communication in human infants before speech. The creation of sign languages is directly related to the ability of humans to use gestures in communication: signed languages are more iconic and allow for a degree of simultaneity not possible in spoken language

• Other researchers believe that primate calls are better candidates for speech precursors than any gestures are

• The latest linguistic studies point to clicks produced by some people in africa and in australia as having deep roots, originating at the limits of linguistic analysis sometime earlier than 10 000 years ago, and genetic data suggests that click-speaking populations go back to common ancestors, perhaps 50 00 or more years ago. Plausible as it all sounds the theory of clicks as the first language is by no means proven

• The identical capacity for language among all races suggests that this phenomenon must have existed before racial diversification about 30 00 - 50 000 years ago

• Selection plays an important role in the evolution of a design of the language faculty

Conclusions

• Language is a system that evolved via conventional neo-darwinian mechanisms

• Modern language abilities are in large part the products of a history of selection for neural circuitry enabling efficient communication of an unlimited set of messages of a certain kind

Week 8

Intro

• Neurolinguistics is a branch of neuroscience that has as its goal the understanding of how language is represented and processed in the brain

• The greek philosopher aristotle believed that the primary function of the brain was to cool the blood

• The importance of the studies of individuals with injured brains and strokes for neurolinguistics

• Most research in the area of language breakdown focuses on brain damage because of head injury (accidents) and strokes

• Stroke damage tends to be more localized than damage from the head injuries but both can have an impact on individual’s ability to use language

Aphasia pt 1

• Aphasia: a broad term encompassing numerous syndromes of communicative impairment, usually the loss of language ability as a result of some damage to the brain

• Often, a stroke blows to the head, brain infection, brain tumors, and brain hemorrhage. Most patients will suffer aphasic impairment experience a mixture of deficits in speaking, listening, reading, and writing

• The impairment of reading ability is called acquired dyslexia (or acquired alexia)

• The impairment of writing ability is called acquired dysgraphia (or acquired agraphia)

• Phonological acquired dyslexia happens when the patient seems to have lost ability to use spelling to sound rules. Phonological dyslexics can only read the words they have seen before but not new words

• Surface dyslexia is the opposite of phonological dyslexia. Surface dyslexics seem to be unable to recognize words as wholes. They have no problem to read regularly spelled words, but they apply regular spelling-to-sound rules to words that do not follow these rules like yacht

Aphasia pt 2

• Anomia means the loss of the ability to name things (objects)

• Word deafness happens when a patient cant understand spoken words, but can read, write and speak normally.

• Word blindness happens when a patient is unable to understand written words, but can read them aloud

• Paralexia happens when patients use one word for another

• Aphasia is usually accompanied by word finding difficulties

• The study of specific types of aphasia can tell us about the building blocks of language in the brain

Neurolinguistics believe that:

• The study of language form and use will reveal the principles of brain function

• The study of brain function may support or refute specific linguistic theories

The human brain

• The brain is composed of nerve cells/neurons (10 billion) that are the basic information processing units of the nervous system. Each neuron can be directly connected up to 10 000 other neurons

• The lower brain structures and their responsibilities are responsible for respiration, heart rate, muscle coordination, etc. they are shared by many mammals

• The cerebral cortex has folds on its surface. 65% of the cortex is hidden within its folds

• The folds have two parts: sulci (parts that are folded in, and gyri (parts that are folded out

The cerebral hemispheres and cerebral cortex

• The human brain has the greatest proportion of cortex to brain mass of all animals

• In humans, the cortex is the gray outer covering of the wrinkled mass, the cerebrum, that sits like a cap over the rest of the brain. The left hemisphere controls the right side of the body and the opposite

Two cerebral hemispheres and their functions

• There are two reasons to consider the cerebral hemispheres as separate brains:

1. The hemispheres are almost completely anatomically separate. The main connection between them is a bundle of nerve fibers known as the corpus callosum, whose primary function is to allow the two hemispheres to communicate with one another

2. The two hemispheres show considerable functional distinctness. Each hemisphere controls the opposite half of the body as mentioned earlier

Contralateral responsibilities of the cerebral hemispheres

• These responsibilities account for the fact that people who suffer damage to one hemisphere of the brain will exhibit paralysis on the opposite side of the body

• The left hemisphere excels in analytic tasks and the right hemisphere excels in tasks that require holistic approach, including complex pattern recognition

The functions of the two hemispheres

• Left hemisphere:

• Speech

• Writing

• Temporal-order judgments

• Language

• Reading

• Associative thought

• Calculation

• Analytic processing

• Arithmetic

• Right visual field

• Right hemisphere:

• Holistic processing

• Non-verbal ideation

• Environmental sounds

• Visual spatial skills

• Left visual field

• Complex pattern recognition of familiar faces, melodies, etc

Images of the living brain using different techniques

• Autopsy analysis

• Electrical stimulation with electrodes deeply inserted into living brain

• CT scanning. Provides static images of the brain, not dynamic

• PET scan helps to focus on brain activities while humans are involved in various sorts of cognitive activities. PET is much less invasive than electrical stimulation of the brain

• fMRI helps to monitor increases in blood flow to specific areas of the brain thanks to detecting iron using powerful magnetic fields

• MEG records subtle changes in the magnetic fields generated within the brain. Its not invasive and provides a more detailed analysis on what parts are involved in a language processing activities

Where is language localized in the brain

• Broca’s area (located in the lower area of the left frontal lobe - left hemisphere)

1. Partial paralysis of the muscles of the face, the tongue, the jaw, the throat required for articulation

2. It is known in Broca’s aphasia that the muscles that function poorly in speech, operate normally in other tasks (some patients can sing with elegance)

3. The speech of a patient with Broca’s aphasia also has features such as faulty grammar, that cannot be explained by muscular failure

4. Usually speech production is a big problem in case of Broca’s aphasia

5. Broca’s aphasia refers to non-fluent or motor aphasia. In case of global aphasia, the patient is completely mute

Broca’s aphasia consequences Part 1:

1. Speech labored and slow, lack of intonation (dysprosody)

2. Articulation is impaired, patients simplify the consonant clusters. Making speech errors that are called phonemic paraphasias

3. The response to a question will often make sense, but generally cannot be expressed as a fully formed or grammatical sentence. A very deep cause of this fact - the disturbance of syntactic competence

4. The inflections of verbs and other parts of speech, such as: ing, -ed, -en are omitted, but not the derivational affixes

5. Function words, pronouns, are omitted (it,is,to,a,the,etc). The cause is NOT the economy efforts

6. The patients who experience Broca;s aphasia show difficulty judging grammatically of sentences

7. Telegraphic speech: use few words as possible (orally and in written form)

8. Most broca’s aphasics show writing disturbances (pargraphia) that are comparable to their speaking deficits

9. While silent reading of Broca’s aphasics is good, their reading aloud shows the same telegraphic style as their spontaneous speech

10. Most brocas aphasics are aware of their language deficit and are frustrated a lesion in broca’s area disturbs the production of speech, but has a much smaller effect on comprehension

Conclusions

• In cases of non-fluent aphasia, (Broca’s aphasia) form is compromised but the content of language remains relatively intact. In case of fluent aphasia (Wernicke’s aphasia) it is characterized by a rapid flow of form with little content

Angular gyrus and its functions

• The disruption of reading and writing ability is associated with the damage to the angular gyrus of the parietal lobe

Brain asymmetry and handedness

• Examples to prove brain asymmetry

1. The right ear advantage (REA)

2. Split brain studies:

• When written words, letters and numbers were presented to the left hemisphere alone, patients were able to describe them orally, but the information perceived exclusively by the hemisphere could not be verbalized either orally or in writing. The right hemisphere was mute

• In one of the many split brain experiments, a patient is blindfolded and an object (a key or something else) is placed in one hand. When the key is held in the right, the patient can easily name it, because the right hand is connected to the left hemisphere. However, when the key is placed in the left hand, the patient can not say what it is not able to name it

Right-handed and Left-Handed individuals

• Most right-handed individuals have language represented in the left cerebral hemisphere and are left lateralized for language, but not all aspects of language are represented in the left hemisphere. Adults, whose left hemisphere has been surgically removed, retain some language comprehension ability.

• Studies have revealed that the distribution of brain asymmetries in left-handed people is different from that in right-handers

• Contrary to what might be expected, few left-handers have a mirror image representation for language (that is, language localization in the right hemisphere). rather , they tend to show significant language representation in both hemispheres. Thus left-handers are generally less lateralized for language

• Right-handers who are strongly left lateralized for language show some language deficit in cases of damage to the right hemisphere

Brain and Sign language

• Brain’s left hemisphere is dominant for sign language, just as it is for speech

• Broca’s area is indeed activated in hearing patients when they are speaking and in deaf patients when they are signing

• The prognosis for the recovery of the signers’ language abilities after the stroke are similar to that of hearing patients with the same brain damage

• When neurosurgeons remove brain tumors from deaf signers, they must take the same precautions to avoid damaging the language centers as they do with hearing patients

• The relation between handedness and the recovery from damage to the language areas suggests that cerebral dominance for handedness and dominance for language are not totally independent

Lexical knowledge and its Location in the brain

• Lexical knowledge (vocabulary) is located in the temporal lobes

• A word in the brain may be considered to be a network rather than a single entry (each word is a subject of different associations) “Neurons that are repeatedly activated together come to be associated with each other, creating a cell assembly”

• Object related words (usually nouns) and action-related words (usually verbs) are located in different though close parts of the brain

First and Second language processing

• Second-language processing involves a wider variety of cortical sites than the first-language processing

• “This supports the view that the less automatic nature of language use in a second language requires the involvement of diverse mental process in addition to those specifically dedicated to language

Regaining Linguistic Competence

• The pessimistic view that damage to tissue in Broca’s and Wernwicke’s areas inevitably leads to a permanent linguistic impairment is unwarranted; actually a considerable degree of recovery is observed

• The neural tissue destroyed by a stroke cannot be regenerated, but it seems the functions of the damaged areas can often be assumed, at least in part, by other regions

• In some cases the recovery reflects the existence of an alternative store of learning on the opposite side of the brain, which remains dormant until the dominant side is injured

• In other cases the function is taken over by neurons in areas adjacent to or surrounding the damaged site

• It has been established that some group of patients are more likely than others to regain their linguistic competence

• Children, especially under eight, often make excellent recovery. Left-handed people also make better progress than right-handers

Week 9

Intro

• How do children learn a mother tongue?

• They don’t learn their first language as math, literature, etc.

• They are not taught their language, yet they still learn to speak/communicate

• The end results of language acquisition is grammar - the mental system allows people to speak and understand a language

• Children learn their mother tongue by the time they are five or six years old

• Learning a first language is like learning to walk: you do not have to be taught how to do it

• It’s not easy to learn the second language. We need lots of time, years of practice and still it’s not perfect in comparison with the first one

Theories of Learning

Behaviorism:

• Conditioning is the most important concept in this framework. That is, a certain response is associated with a certain stimulus

Two types of conditioning: Classical and Operant

• Classical Conditioning contains three important factors:

• The unconditional stimulus

• The unconditioned response

• The conditioned stimulus

• The conditioned response

• In Operant conditioning, animals learn a behavior pattern as the result of trial-and-error in order to get a reward or avoid punishment

• Behaviourism and language learning

• Is first language acquisition associated with classical or operant conditioning?

• Learning by instinct

Perception of speech in early infancy

• Newborns respond differently to human voices than to other sounds, they show a preference for the language of their parents over other languages by the time they are two days old and they can recognize their mother’s voice within a matter of weeks

• Experiments show that children can distinguish voiced and voiceless sounds when they are a month old

• If these perceptual mechanisms are innate they should be universal for all babies irrespective of race, nationality, language or origin

Several arguments in support of universality of first language acquisition

1. All languages are acquired with equal ease before the child turns four or five

2. The experiments described by Peter D. Eimas, give all reasons to come to the following conclusion: “Infants in the world all over are equipped with an inborn sensitivity to these two (even three) categories of voicing whether or not the distinction is important in their home language”

3. Janet Walker tested infants from Hindi, Salish, and English backgrounds at the age of six months and second time at the age of one year. She tested the sounds made in Hindi, Salish, and English. She found that at six months all children could distinguish the sounds in all three languages. But at one year, the English children could only distinguish English sounds, the Hindi children could only distinguish Hindi sounds. By one year or even 10 months the babies are no longer universal phoneticans, but have turned into their parents, they do not distinguish English phonemes unless they are English speaking.

4. People who learn at least two languages in early childhood appear to retain a greater flexibility of the vocal musculature and are more likely to learn to speak an additional language or languages in their adult years without the “accent of their native language”

5. Between six months and one year with the onset of babbling, the effect of the environment overrode their innate ability to distinguish the sounds of all languages

6. The extremely early acquisition of pitch patterns may help to explain the difficulty adults have in learning intonation of a second language

7. Children are predisposed to perceive some acoustic differences and not others. The differences they can perceive are important to language learning. This is the same as bees can learn some aspects of its food source but not others

Summary of learning

• Evidence against behaviourism:

1. Pigeons cannot be taught to jump for food

2. Children do not learn by limitation

3. Children do not learn language by operant conditioning (rewards)

• Evidence for Templating Learning:

1. Bees only learn odour, colour, shape of a food source

2. Birds are innately preprogrammed with the tempo of their species’ birdsong

3. Infants are innately preprogrammed with various perceptual mechanisms specific to language

First language Acquisition

Intro:

• Like adults, the child is confronted with the task of learning a language about which the child knows nothing

• The ability to learn language is inherited from our biological parents, the specific language that we acquire is not.

• By the age of five to eight a child:

- will have dissected the language into its minimal separable units of sound and meaning

- will have discovered the rules for recombining sounds into words; the meanings of individual words and the rules for recombining words into meaningful sentences etc

The grammar of language includes:

1. Rules of phonology, which describe how to put sounds together to form words

2. Rules of syntax, which describe how to put words together to form sentences

3. Rules of semantics, which describe how to interpret the meanings of words and sentences

4. Rules of pragmatics, which describe how to participate in a conversation, how to sequence sentences and how to anticipate the information needed by an interlocutor

Two reasons to support the acquisition of grammar by children:

1. Mature language users are able to produce and understand an unlimited number of novel sentences. Without the acquisition of grammar but simple memorization of a fixed inventory of words and sentences would never equip young learners to deal with previously undead utterances

2. The second reason that children acquire grammar comes from speech errors like *goed, *doed, *runned, etc. Such errors tell us that children don’t just imitate what they hear but create rules of their own

The study methods of first language acquisition

• Naturalistic (diary study): for extended period of time to observe development as an ongoing process in individual children when a researcher or parents keep daily notes on a child’s linguistic progress. Though speech samples from individual children capture only a small portion of their utterances

• Experimentation: typically cross-sectional when the linguistic knowledge of different children is compared at a particular point in development

Prerequisites for Language

• All children overgeneralize or overregularize a single rule before learning to apply it more narrowly and before constructing other less widely applicable rules

• According to some estimates: children have to hear the adult form of an irregular verb before all over regularizations are eliminated

• Children tend to have a different range of referents from adult usage. Two phenomena have identified here - underextension and overextension

• Underextension: quite common when children use a word to refer to an object in a very restricted context (ex: using a dog and referring to their own family dog only)

• Overextension: happens when children use a word to refer not to just one specific object but to a whole range of objects, very often not appropriate in adult language (ex: the use of “doggie” for any four-legged animal). An additional reason to overextensions: deliberate attempts to compensate for vocabulary limitation by that age

• All children speak in one-word sentences before they speak in two-word sentences

• The similarities in language learning for different children and different languages are so great that many linguists have believed that the human brain is preprogrammed for language learning. Children are born with prior knowledge of the type of categories (nouns, verbs, etc.), operations, and principles that are found in the grammar of any language (Universal Grammar UG)

• It’s now known that a child who hears no language learns no oral language. A child learns only the language spoken in his/ her environment

Caregiver Speech

• Caregiver speech is a distinct register that differs from others in:

1. Its simplified vocabulary. More limited vocabulary use

2. Its systematic phonological simplification of some words. distinct consonant/vowel combinations, frequent syllable reduplication, and slow, carefully articulated speech

3. Higher pitch

4. Exaggerated intonation and stress

5. short , simple sentences, which contain fewer function words, few incomplete sentences, more imperatives and questions

6. High proportion of questions (among mothers) or imperatives (among fathers)

7. More repetitions, few utterances per conversational turn

8. More restricted vocabulary

• Speech with the first two characteristics (simplified vocab and phonological simplification of some words) is formally designated as Baby Talk

• The speech style typical of middle-class caregivers in North America is not essential for language acquisition. All children have no trouble to acquire a first language

• Caregiver’s speech helps the children in acquiring the conventional form of the language:

1. Clear pronunciation, clear pauses help the children to understand the beginning and end of the utterances

2. A simplified vocabulary helps to make the most important words active among children

3. Stress is exaggerated, it helps the kids to learn the appropriate word stress

4. Syntactic simplification has a clear function: it appears that the children construct their initial grammars on the basis of the short, simple, grammatical sentences that are addressed to them in the first year or two they speak

Correcting Language

• Children’s errors are essential date for students of child language because it is the consistent departures from adult models that indicate the nature of a child’s current hypotheses about the grammar of language

• “Mistakes” made by children are actually positive signs that children are discovering the patterns of language, an essential aspect of the language acquisition process

• A child’s own grammar, not the model provided by adult speech, determines what she or he will say at any given point of development

• Speech errors can tell us a lot about how language works

• It seems to be virtually impossible to speed up the language - learning process

• There is a considerable amount of evidence to suggest that language acquisition is to a large extent independent of other types of cognitive development and such aspects of language as morphology and syntax are independent of non-linguistic types of cognitive development

• Children benefit less from frequent adult correction of their errors than from true conversational interaction

Stages and Steps of First Language Acquisition

• The stages are universal. Every child goes through the same stages of language acquisition

• Children who hear a lot of language thanks to interaction develop much faster than children who do not. The more parents and caregivers speak to their children the better the children’s language development is

• There is no specific age at which a child enters any of the following stages

• There is not correlation between intelligence and speed of language acquisition

First stage: Cooing - nonlinguistic sounds

Second stage: Babbling - linguistic sounds

• Linguistic sounds which are not dependent on the linguistic environment (independent of the particular language to which children are exposed), indicating universality: variety of consonant and vocalic sounds

• Children from different linguistic communities exhibit significant similarities in their babbling, it means that early babbling is at least partly independent of the particular language which children are exposed

• Children who are unable to babble for medical reasons can subsequently acquire normal pronunciation, but their speech development is significantly delayed

• Even deaf children babble

• Variation in pitch, loudness, length (suprasegmental phenomena)

• At the end of this stage the vocalization possesses all characteristics of adult speech

Third stage: One-word stage

• Comprehension comes before production

• Children begin to produce one-word utterances between the ages of twelve and eighteen months. By the age of six, most children have mastered about thirteen or fourteen thousand words

• A basic property of these one-word utterances is that they can be used to express the type of meaning that is associated with an entire sentence in adult speech. Ex: more means “i want to have more juice”

• An important criterion to choose the word out of = 100 is informativeness, that is, the child selects a word reflecting what is new in a particular situation

• Early words are concrete nouns, verbs (abstract nouns, verbs, adjectives are acquired later) by the age of eighteen months or more, the average child has a vocabulary of fifty words or more. Out of the first fifty words produced by children, about two-thirds are nouns

• Each one-word utterance is associated with an entire sentence in adult speech. It is a complete sentence with intonation

• In this stage, children learn not just meaning, bt also syntax: they combine words sequentially. Ex: candy = i want candy

Fourth stage: Two-word stage

• Increase in child’s vocabulary and gradual onset of multi-word utterances

• Many binary syntactic-semantic relations are expressed: agent-action “boy kick”; action-theme “hit doggy”; agent-location “mom home”; possessor-possessed “mommy sock/daddy hat”; action-locative “sit chair”; entity-locative “cup shelf”; entity-attribute “ball red”; demonstrative-entity “there car”

• A notable feature of children’s two-word utterance is that they almost always exhibit the appropriate word order, usually noun-verb-direct object

• It happens at around one and a half years age Telegraphic speech and the acquisition of grammar

• Three-and-more-word stage at around two years of age

• Short. Simple sentences. Usually words (nouns, verbs) rich in semantic content: these words are informative, have stress. Children can form phrases consisting of a head and a compliment (agents and modifiers)

• Telegraphic speech (style) lacks function words; tense endings (verbs) and plural endings (nouns), prepositions, conjunctions, articles and so on are omitted: “get truck”; “it drop”; “me, sit truck” etc.

• Another major factor in vocabulary development is the child’s ability to make use of contextual clues to draw inferences about the meaning of new words

• Children’s creativity with compounds points to a preference for building words from other words than learning the entire new word for each concept. It required less demand on memory

• In the very early stages of language acquisition, children signal yes-no questions by means of rising intonation alone. Wh questions emerge gradually between the ages of two and four. Usually the order is the following: first what, where then who, how, and why, when, which and whose

• Children find it much harder to interpret passive sentences like “the letter was written by dad”

• Fixed word order and only when the children acquire the suffixes and function words the word order is not fixed

The acquisition of function words and grammatical morphemes:

• The view that certain grammatical knowledge is inborn is known as nativism. It is the highly supported by Noam Chomsky and his concept of Universal Grammar (UG)

• Grammatical morphemes are acquired in a certain order, the order of acquisition may be best predicted by some combination of grammatical and semantic complexity, frequency, and perceptibility in speech. Maybe no one factor can be considered of primary importance in determining the acquisition of the morphemes. For example, frequency by itself cannot explain developmental order

• Children show a greater tendency to notice and remember elements that occur at the end of the utterance than those found in any other positions

• Children seem to take greater notice of morphemes that represent a syllable (like - ing or -ed) than just a consonant (like -s)

• All children overgeneralize a single rule (^goed, *comed) before learning to apply it more narrowly and before constructing other less widely applicable rules. This phenomenon is called overregularization or overgeneralization (we discussed it earlier)

• Nobody teaches children what past tenses or plurals are; each child discovers the patterns of language afresh

The acquisition of negative sentences:

• Negative sentences are also acquired in an orderly rule-governed way

• Stage 1: attach “no” to the beginning of the sentence (external negation):

• “No singing song”, “no the sun signing”

• Stage 2: the same rule + more complex rules that allow them to generate sentences in which the negatives “no”, “not”,”cant”, “dont” appear after the subject and before the verb but inside the negated phrase (internal negation):

• * I no can sing, “I don't like him”, *”he no bite you” (often “do” is omitted) “We can’t talk”

• Stage 3: the use of pronouns in negative sentences: “its not cold”, “i don’t want to see him”

The acquisition of semantics

• Stage 1: overgeneralization/overregularization are the errors that result from the overly broad application of a rule. They are based on physical similarities of movement, texture, size, and most frequently shape: i.e “tick-tock”. The word “dog” for example, is frequently overextended to include horses, cows, and other four-legged animals. Many overextensions may be deliberate attempts to compensate for vocabulary limitations, at the same time, children seem to overextend more in their production than in their comprehension

• Stage 2: narrowing-down until eventually the words more or less coincided with the meanings accepted by adult speakers of the language. Underextension happens when children use lexical items in a very restrictive fashion: kitty might be used to the family pet but not to other cats

The acquisition of the sound system:

• Children overgeneralize also sounds

• Vowels are generally acquired before consonants (by age two to three)

• Stops are acquired before other consonants

• Children’s ability to perceive the phonemic contrasts of their language develops well in advance of their ability to produce them

• Even children who are ot able to differentiate the words like mouth in pronunciation are able to point to pictures of the correct objects (interesting examples: fish and fis)

• The acquisition of a particular contrast (voiced/voiceless), as found in [p]/[b], is predictable. The acquisition of the individual sounds is not

• The sounds that are acquired early tend to be found in more languages whereas the sounds that are acquire late tend to be less common across languages

• Stressed syllables are more likely to be retained in children’s pronunciation than are stressed syllables

• Substitution is involved in early language acquisition. Children replace one sound by an alternative sound that the child finds easier to articulate (ex: ship - sip)

• Children simplify syllable structures by reducing consonant clusters and deleting the final consonants

Is there a critical period for acquiring a language?

• Yes. the ability to acquire a first language in an effortless and ultimately successful way begins to decline from age sic and is seriously compromised by the onset of puberty. It means there is a critical age beyond which children are not able to acquire a language natively.

• Examples: abducted babies, Genie, Chelsia

Week 10

Second Language Acquisition Part 2

1. The study of second language Acquisition

• Focus on language pedagogic in 1950s and 1960s

• The shift from the teacher to the learner in the 1970s

• The shift from behaviorism to cognitive psychology, focusing on children’s internal grammars

• The application of some knowledge in first language acquisition to second language acquisition (SLA) or second language learning (SLL)

• SLA learners are subjects to an influence of the first language acquisition

2. Interlanguage (IL) and Second language Learners

• Interlanguage (IL) grammar is influences by both: the first and the second language, hence features of both (examples)

• The target of IL is actual proficiency or communicative competence. In other words, to use SL in a way that is appropriate to the situation and context, incl. Cultural and social (examples: different styles, pragmatic meanings relevant for this particular culture, etc)

Interlanguage (IL) and analysis of errors in second language acquisition

• Analysis of mistakes that are subjects of transfer fro the first language

• Analysis of mistakes of SL learners’ performance: the imperfect use of linguistic knowledge rather than the deficits in the knowledge itself

• The most recognizable traits of a second language learner’s speech is that it bears a certain resemblance to the first language. It means that someone whose first language is russian is likely to sound different in English from someone whose first language is Italian

• The goa of SLA is to shift processing from controlled to automatic in order to focus not on the form but on higher level processing of the message (the content)

Bilingualism

• More than half the world’s population is bilingual. Its not at all surprising because there are 30 times as many languages as countries in the world

• Some are bilingual from birth or at least from a very early age (simultaneous bilingualism)

• Others have become bilingual later in life (successive bilingualism)

• For others the second language ultimately replaces the first (subtractive bilingualism)

• Bilinguals have greater mental flexibility, are more ‘aware’ of language (its morphology, sound system, word combinations, etc.)

• Two types of bilingual education program: minority-language maintenance programs and French immersion programs

• minority -language children (one language at home, another - at school) often have difficulty in majority language schools (Englih l-ge)

• French immersion program: 1977: 37 835 students; 2005: 301 000 students

• French is the medium communication. All instruction is in french, even when the content is history or music, etc. though receiving instruction in the L1 does not have negative consequences on the L2

• No native speakers of french in these schools are admitted

• By grade six, on average students come French immersion schools outperform their monolingual English peers

• French immersion students “suffer no negative effects on their English, do well in school, outperform their monolingual counterparts in a number of ways, and are remarkably competent in French”

Additive and Successive bilingualism differences

• Additive bilingualism: “Many people living or working in large cities where the latin populations are present, such as Miami, Florida, will adopt additive bilingualism and speaking spanish in addition to their native English in order to communicate with others better, especially in occupational purposes later in life (young people and adults)

• Successive bilingualism: occurs when a child learns a second language after their first language has been established

Benefits of Bilingualism and dual language program

• Higher scores on the scholastic aptitude test

• Increased syntactic complexity in the L1

• Increased sensitivity to the needs of a listener

• Higher scores on test of mathematical ability

• Delay in the onset of symptoms in cases of dementia

• Higher scores on tests of analogical reasoning

• In dual language programs; students from two linguistic backgrounds are formally instructed in both languages. It means they are exposed to a number of native speakers of the new language rather than just having a teacher as a model

Bilingualism and the brain in the MIT encyclopedia of cognitive science

Does a bilingual speaker represent each language in different areas of the brain?

• One way to answer this question is to look at the effects of brain lesions on the processing of a bilingual's two languages. “Brain lesions that affect one language and not the other would lead to the conclusion that languages are represented in different areas of the brain. Indeed, there is evidence of different degrees of recovery in each language after a stroke”

• “Ojemann and Whitaker (1978) found that electrical stimulation of certain areas in the cortex interrupted naming in both languages, whereas stimulation of other areas interrupted naming in only one language”

• Whereas naming in L2 involves activation in areas that are involved on L1, lexical and semantic judgements of words activate mostly overlapping areas of the brain

What effects does age of second language acquisition have on brain representation?

• Researchers in cognitive science have considered whether there is a critical period for learning a second language. “Specifically, investigators have inquired about the differences between early and late second language learners, Recent work in event-related potentials (ERP) supports previous behavioral findings suggesting that second language learning is better in those who learn their second language early

• “Perani et al (1996), using positron emission tomography (PET) (a measure of localized brain activity), have found that listening to passages in a first language results in an activation of area that is not apparent in the second language for late second language learners”

• The answer to the question about critical period in SLA appears to be “yes and no”

• It is possible to predict that people who start learning SL before the age of seven will have nativelike L2 speech. Students after fourteen might have non-nativelike speech and those who are between seven and fourteen either with some accents or without it

• Example: Adults whose first language does not have gender often have difficulty learning French gender (le livre, ‘a book’, la table ‘the table’)

• The issue of age related effects in SLA is controversial. According to long (1982, 1990), older learners are initially faster than younger learners when it comes to the acquisition of morphosyntax; however, younger learners outperform older learners in the long run

• Younger learners (pre-puberty) are more successful in second language acquisition

• Older learners are more efficient, but younger learners are still more successful

• Language learning involves less effort for younger learners

• Older children and adults tend to take a more analytical approach to learning than younger children who learn more intuitively

• Concerning ‘critical period’ in second language acquisition: for pronunciation, especially intonation, finishing earlier than those for vocabulary and grammar

Individual differences and motivation

• Empathy in SLA: degree of empathy and degree of SLA success

• Affective factors emotional side of learning second language:

• The importance of integrative and instrumental motivation in second language acquisition

• Instrumental motivation involves wanting to learn the L2 for a specific purpose or a goal (degree, job, etc)

• Integrative motivation involves wanting to fit better in a particular culture

• Degree of motivation is a better predictor of future learning than is a type of motivation

Cognitive factors and different strategies for learning a second language

• A second language has to be learned deliberately. Children acquire a first language but they have to learn a second one

• L2 learners who are field independent are not distracted by irrelevant background info when trying to learn something, hence they are more successful in SLA

• L2 learners who are field dependent can be distracted by all kinds of background info, hence they can be less successful in SLA

• L2 learners need to be concerned with both accuracy (correct representation of the form) and fluency (rapid retrieval or processing those representations)

Two approaches to second language teaching: contrasive analysis and interlanguage approach

• Contrastive approach in second language acquisition. The mother tongue and a second language are compared to find common and non-common features. In other words, this approach represents and illustrates various grammatical and lexical mistakes made by vast number of L2 learners in comparison with the mother tongue

• Interlanguage approach. According to this approach, the learner builds up his/her own rules and speaks a language which is neither the target language - the L2 - nor the mother tongue. The learner, according to Selinker, builds up the interlanguage through using a series that help her communicate and learn the language. In other words, Interlanguage is associated with the study of the ways in which non-native speakers acquire, comprehend, and use linguistic patterns (or speech acts) in a second language acquisition

The second language learning process (SLL)

The nature-nurture debate (an interaction between innate and environmental factors in learning)

• Noam Chomsky emphasized the innate pre-disposition of children to human language. A major assumption Chomsky makes is that the linguistic input to children acquiring their first language underdetermines or is insufficient to account for language acquisition

• Because of it, it is assumed that the children possess an innate universal grammar (UG) which contains their grammatical development and provides a wide range of grammatical models available to a child. Thanks to interaction with parents children match the grammar of the language into which the child is born (native language)

Second language learning in action

• The SLL process is complex

• The SLL process is gradual

• The SLL process is nonlinear

• The SLL process is dynamic

• Learners learn when they are ready to do so

• Learners rely on the knowledge and experience they have

• There is tremendous individual variation among language learners

• Learning a language is a social phenomenon