Week 4 PYSCH 105

Video 1

[Music] the story of how we grow and change across the lifespan is one of the most interesting in all of psychology we'll begin by considering how genetic and environmental factors interact to shape us before we're even born development begins a conception sperm and egg cell unite to form the fertilized egg or zygote within hours of this union the nuclei of the two cells merge the zygote begins a process of dividing and re dividing producing a blastocyst a mass of identical cells about 10 to 14 days after fertilization the blastocyst attaches itself to the wall of the uterus then the embryonic stage begins during this phase cells differentiate into 3 distinct types those that will become the nervous system and outer skin those that will form the skeletal system and voluntary muscles and those that will form the gut and digestive organs one month after conception the embryo begins to develop the major organ systems of the body including the heart and lungs also the arms legs and facial features at about the same time we can detect the beginnings of a nervous system two months after conception the fetal stage begins by this point the mass of cells now call the fetus has grown to an inch in length and the heart has begun to beat the nervous system continues to grow at a remarkable pace new nerve cells are generated at a rate that can approach 250,000 new cells per minute and these cells start to form a network the fetus is capable of simple behaviors for instance it'll show a sucking reflex if it's lips are touched it's not long before other more sophisticated capacities come into view including the capacity for learning in one study researchers asked pregnant mothers to read aloud to their unborn infants twice a day for the last six weeks of their pregnancy once the babies were born researchers set up an apparatus that was controlled by the way newborns sucked on a special pacifier if they sucked in one way the apparatus played a story their mothers had read before they were born if they sucked in another way the apparatus played an unfamiliar story the researchers found that the infant's adjusted their sucking pattern so they could listen to the story which they had been exposed to in utero indicating that the infants had learned one story and preferred it to the other story they didn't know and that is very interesting so what is guiding prenatal development the genome for sure but it's also important to note that environmental factors are just as important so what does environment really mean in this early stage of development consider the earliest stages of embryonic growth every cell in the embryo has the same genes and receives the same genetic instructions so how does each cell managed to develop appropriately into different body parts the answer seems to be that the fate of each cell is determined in part by its cellular neighbors the cells that form its physical environment as the cells reproduce and differentiate they become distinct and the newly created neurons actually migrate toward their appropriate positions this migration process is guided by glial cells acting as guide wires various chemicals also guide the process by attracting some types of nerve cells and repelling other types in all cases the migrating neurons approach the surface of the developing cortex but the first arriving neurons stop short of the surface later arriving neurons passed these now stationary cells and these late arrivals in turn are passed by even later arrivals as a result the cortex develops from the inside out with layers closer to the surface established later than the deeper layers so far we focus on how the local environment surrounding each neuron guides its differentiation and migration more global features of the environment also play a major role namely the organisms own bodily fluids especially its blood so for example hormones circulating in the fetus's blood have a powerful influence on the development of the child's external anatomy and the development of the nervous system also the blood stream of mammalian embryos is intimately connected to the mother's blood supply and so her blood too becomes part of the embryos environment unfortunately many environmental factors are teratogens factors that can disrupt development teratogen x' include general environmental factors such as air pollution and radiation lead and mercury but also cigarettes alcohol and drugs that the mother may use or viruses she may carry teratogen do not always harm the fetus but they are more likely to do so when they and larger amounts for longer periods of time and when the fetus is growing most rapidly [Music] the average newborn weighs approximately seven and a half pounds although small a newborn is not completely helpless because their reflexes and sensory capacities help them interact with the environment newborn reflexes are inborn automatic responses to particular forms of stimulation they are crucial to survival as they help the newborn survive until it's capable of more complex behaviors they usually disappear around four to five months of age here are some examples of reflexes the rooting reflex is the newborns response to anything that touches her cheek when you stroke a baby's cheek she naturally turns her head in that direction and begins to suck the sucking reflex is the automatic unlearned sucking motions that infants do with their mouths also if you put your finger into a newborns hand you will witness the grasping reflex the baby will automatically grasp anything that touches their palms the Moro reflex is the newborns response when they feel like they're falling the baby spreads their arms pulls them back in and usually cries but even at birth the infant's immature brain is ready to support many activities as their senses function quite well from the start infants can discriminate between tones of a different pitch and loudness and they show early preference for their mother's voice over that of a stranger though quite nearsighted newborns can see objects of foot or so away discriminate brightness and color and track and moving stimulus with their eyes what okay what allow me to hold on it we can tell you wait a minute how can we possibly know these things about infants they can understand language to follow instructions they can't talk to tell us that they understand the difference between stimuli they can't even point you might think that some serious high-tech methods must be used but the opposite is actually the case to study perceptual and cognitive abilities of infants habituation procedures are used habituation is the decline in responding to a stimulus once the stimulus has become familiar in habituation experiment a baby might be placed in a highchair and presented with visual stimuli while a video camera records their eye and face movements when the experiment begins a stimulus for example the face of an adult appears in the baby's field of view and the amount of time the baby looks at the faces recorded by the camera then the stimulus is removed for a few seconds before it appears again and the gaze is again measured over time the baby starts to obituary to the face such that each presentation elicits less looking or gazing at the stimulus then a new stimulus for example the face of a different adult or the same face looking in a different direction is presented and the researchers observe whether the gaze time significantly increases if the infant's gaze time increases when a new stimulus is presented this indicates that the baby can differentiate between the two stimuli the trick of this procedure is simply to change the stimulus in controlled ways to see if the baby notices the difference research using the habituation procedure has found that babies can notice changes in colours sounds and even principles of numbers and physics everyone is affected differently by their personal experiences of course but we all share inherent genetic growth tendencies we roll over before we sit we sit before we stand and we stand before we walk the same thing applies to her cognitive development how we learn to think no remember and communicate and if we're going to talk about cognitive development we got to start with a Jean Piaget developmental psychologists extra the NIA Piaget was known for testing children's aptitudes and abilities he became fascinated by the fact that children of a certain age consistently made particular mistakes that older kids and adults didn't and then he theorized that these mistakes and later successes revealed the way that humans go through specific stages of cognitive development in fact pH is most important contribution to understanding cognitive development was the idea that development occurs in unique and distinct stages with each stage occurring at a specific time in a specific sequence and in a way that allows the child to think about the world using new capacities Piaget argue that children do not just passively learn but also actively try to make sense of their worlds as they learn and mature children develop schemas patterns of knowledge and long-term memory that help them remember organize and respond to information when children experience new things they attempt to reconcile the new knowledge with existing schemas he believed that children used two distinct methods in doing so assimilation and accommodation when children employed simulation the use already developed schemas to understand new information if children have learned a schema for horses they may call the striped animal they see at the zoo a horse rather than a zebra in this case children label the new information with existing knowledge accommodation on the other hand involves learning new information and thus changing the schema when a mother says no honey that's a zebra not horse the child may adapt the schema to fit the new stimulus learning that there are different types of four-legged animals but our knowledge base grows in ways that are much more complex than just those two steps at Peter I knew that he went on to devise a four stage theory of cognitive development that describes how we learn in different phases of our lives he called stage 1 the sensory motor stage from birth on to about age 2 this is the time when babies experience the world through their senses and actions touching grabbing looking hearing putting things in their mouth at this stage Piaget observed that younger babies have to see something to know it exists he realized that infants typically look at a new toy with delight but if the toy disappears from view they show a little concern at a slightly later age infants might show signs of distress when the toy disappears but they still make no effort to retrieve it at about eight months infants do start to search for toys that have been hidden but even then they're searching shows a peculiar limitation suppose that a nine month old sees an experimenter hide a toy monkey under a cover located to the child's right the child will happily push the cover off and snatch up the monkey the experimenter now repeats the process a few times always hiding the monkey under the same cover to the child's right again and again the child pulls the cover off and retrieves the monkey but now the experimenter slightly changes the procedure very slowly and in full view of the child she hides the toy in a different place say under a cover to the child's left the child closely watches her every movement and then does exactly what he did before he searches under the cover on the right even though he saw the experimenter hide the toy another place just a moment earlier this phenomenon is called the a not B effect where a designates the place where the object was first hidden and B is the place where it was hidden last why does this error occur KJ argued that the nine-month-old still has not grasped the fact that the object's existence is independent of his own actions so the child believes that he's reaching toward place a where he found the toy previously is as much a part of the monkey as the monkey's tail is in effect then the child is not really searching for the monkey he's searching for the monkey that I find on the right according to Piaget a major accomplishment of the sensorimotor period is coming to understanding that objects exist on their own even when they are not reached for seeing heard or felt Piaget held that what makes this accomplishment possible is the infant's increasingly sophisticated schemas in this way object permanence is considered one of the major achievements of the sensory motor stage the second of Fiji's phases of development is the pre-operational stage and he believed it began around age 2 it carried on through age 6 or 7 the pre-operational stage is marked by a child's ability to mentally represent objects and events with words and images and they're big into animism now and they believe that their favorite teddy bear Batman or stuffed zebra not horse has feelings and opinions during this stage children begin to use language and to think more abstractly about objects but their understanding is more intuitive and without much ability to deduce your reason the thinking is pre-operational meaning that the child lacks the ability to operate on or transform objects mentally in one study that showed the extent of this inability researchers showed children a room within a small doll house inside the room a small toy was visible behind a small couch the researchers took the children to another library which is an exact replica of the dollhouse room but full-sized okay Charlotte can you come fine big Snoopy remember big Snoopy's hiding in the same place in his room where little Snoopy siding when children who are about two and a half years old or asked to find the toy they didn't know where to look they were simply unable to make the transition across the change in a room size remember big Snoopy's in the same place when little Snoopy siding was in the same place little Snoopy is you know I think he's back there somewhere let's just see if you can find him back there three year-old children on the other hand immediately look for the toy behind the couch they were improving their operational skills you watch while I hide little Snoopy I'm hiding him right there okay he's hiding here now I'm gonna take big Snoopy and I'm gonna take big snippy and hide him in the same place in his big new okay okay Mario big snip he's hiding remember he's hiding in the same place in his big room for little Snoopy can you find him I'm finding Snoopy let's see where he is the inability of young children to view transitions also leads them to be egocentric the ability to take another person's viewpoint increases rapidly during the pre-operational stage another revealing example of pre-operational thought is the young child's apparent failure to conserve one procedure demonstrating this failure uses two identical glasses which stand side by side and are filled with the same amount of liquid I say thing those two are the same now yeah we're gonna take the blue water from this glass pour it this glass now does this glass have more water does this glass have more water or are they the same this one has more water can you tell me why okay that's higher than that in the pre-operational period children also failed tests that depend on the conservation of number have more quarters does this row have more quarters or are they the same it's say the same okay now watch now does this row have more quarters does this row have more quarters or are they the same code that one has more quarters why is that awkward hey crank it why do preschool children fail to conserve according to Piaget part of the problem is their inability to interrelate different dimensions of a situation to conserve liquid quantity for example the children must first comprehend that there are two relevant factors the height and width of the glass they must then appreciate that a decrease in the columns height is accompanied by an increase in its width so the children must be able to attend to both dimensions simultaneously and relate the dimensions to each other PJ's third stage of cognitive development is the concrete operational stage around ages 6 to 12 in this stage kids are starting to think logically about concrete events that they've experienced children now grasp the fact that changes in one aspect of a situation can be compensated by changes in some other aspects they're also able to transform their own mental representations in a variety of ways and understand for example what would happen if the liquid will pour back into its original glass but according to Piaget children's intellectual capacities are still limited in an important way they can apply their mental operations only to concrete objects or events it's not until age 11 or 12 that formal operations begin this is a stage marked by the ability to think in abstract terms and to use scientific and philosophical lines of thought children in the formal operational stage are better able to system out of test alternative ideas to determine their influences on outcomes for instance rather than haphazardly changing different aspects of a situation that allow no clear conclusions to be drawn they systematically make changes in one thing at a time and observe what difference that particular change makes they learn to use deductive reasoning and become capable of imagining situations that might be despite the tremendous impact of Piaget his four stage moral on our thinking about development it has also been criticized for oversimplifying things and for being too rigid and how it classifies certain abilities by age today for example researchers have detected these phases at earlier ages than PA ever did like some types of object permanence have been observed in babies as young as three months in spite of many updates to PJ's theory there's no doubt he's one of the most influential developmental psychologists in history and that his work remains relevant to this day but cognitive skills are only part of the changes that are occurring during childhood equally crucial is the development of the child's social skills the ability to understand predict and create bonds with the other people in their environments one of the important milestones in the child social development is learning about his or her own self existence this self-awareness is known as consciousness and the content of consciousness is known as the self-concept the self-concept is a representation or schema that contains knowledge about us including our beliefs about our personality traits physical characteristics abilities values goals and roles as well as the knowledge that we exist as individuals some animals have at least a primitive sense of self including chimpanzees orangutans and perhaps dolphins in one study researchers painted a dot on the foreheads of anesthetized chimpanzees and then placed each animal in a cage with a mirror when the chimps woke up and looked in the mirror they touched the dots on their faces and not the dots on the faces in the mirror these action suggests that the chimps understood that they were looking at themselves and not other animals infants who have a similar dot painted on their foreheads recognized themselves in a mirror in the same way by about 18 months of age by age two the infant becomes aware of his or her gender by age for self descriptions are likely to be based on physical features like hair color and possessions and by about age six the child is able to understand basic emotions and concepts of traits being able to make statements like I'm a nice person soon after by about age five or six they begin to make comparisons with other children a process known as social comparison for example a child might describe himself as being faster than one boy but slower than another psychological development also occurs as children form relationships interact with others and manage their feelings forming healthy attachments is very important and is the major social milestone of infancy the emotional bonds that we develop with those whom we feel closest and particularly the bonds the infant develops with the mother or primary caregiver are referred to as attachment studies by the developmental psychologist John Bowlby and others in the 1950s showed that children and orphanages did not develop normally they were usually sickly emotionally slow to respond and generally unmotivated these observations helped make it clear that normal infant development requires successful attachment to a caregiver in one classic study showing the importance of attachment Wisconsin University psychologist Harry and Margaret Harlow investigated the responses of young monkeys separated from their biological mothers to two surrogate fake mothers introduced to their cages one mother the wire mother consisted of a round wooden head and a mesh of cold metal wires with a bottle of milk from which the babies could drink the second mother was a foam rubber form wrapped in a heated terry cloth blanket with no milk the Harlow's found that although the infant monkeys went to the wire mother for food they overwhelmingly preferred and spent significantly more time with the warm terry cloth mother that provided no food but did provide comfort this is the apparatus we use that looks diabolical that just way the baby monkey feels about [Applause] we'll do a similar situation contact with the mother changes his entire personality the Harlow studies confirm that babies have social as well as physical needs poet monkeys and human babies need a secure base that allows them to feel safe from this base they can gain the confidence they need to venture out and explore their worlds developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth measured an infant's attachment to his or her parent the test is called the strange situation during the procedure a parent and the infant are first left alone while the infant explores the room full of toys then a strange adult enters the room and talks for a minute to the parent after which the parent leaves the room the stranger stays with the infant for a few minutes and then the parent again enters and the stranger leaves a child with a secure attachment style usually explores freely while the mother is present and engages with the stranger the child may be upset when the mother departs but is also happy to see the mother return a child with an ambivalent attachment style is wary about the situation in general particularly the stranger and stays close or even clings to the mother rather than exploring the toys when the mother leaves the child is extremely distressed and is ambivalent when she returns a child with an avoidant attachment style will avoid or ignore the mother showing little emotion when the mother departs or returns the child may run away from the mother when she approaches the child will not explore very much regardless of who is there and the stranger will not be treated much differently from the mother finally a child with a disorganized attachment style seems to have no consistent way of coping with the stress of the strange situation the child may cry during the separation but avoid the mother when she returns or the child may approach the mother but freeze or fall to the floor although some cultural differences in attachment Styles have been found research has also found that the proportion of children who fall into each of the attachment categories is relatively constant across cultures you might wonder whether difference is an attachment style are determined more by the child's nature or more by the parents nurture most developmental psychologists believe that socialization nurture is primary arguing that a child becomes securely attached when the parent is available and able to meet the needs of the child in secure styles occur when the parent is insensitive and responds inconsistently to the child's needs it's important to note though that the attachment behavior of a child is also likely influenced at least in part by temperament the innate personality traits of the infant some children are warm friendly and responsive whereas others tend to be more irritable less manageable and difficult to console these differences may also play a role in attachment taken together it seems safe to say that attachment like all of their developmental processes is affected by an interplay of genetic and environmental influences a number of studies have demonstrated that these working models of attachment do seem to have important consequences for example children who were securely attached as infants are more likely as teenagers to have close friends and are less likely to suffer from anxiety disorders in childhood and adolescence another major developmental task beginning in childhood and continuing into adolescence is understanding right from wrong psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg believed that moral development like cognitive development follows a series of stages to develop this theory Kohlberg posed moral dilemmas to people of all ages and analyzed their answers to find evidence of their particular stage of moral development here's Kohlberg's best known moral dilemma commonly known as the Heinz dilemma a woman in Europe was near death from a rare kind of cancer there was one drug that the doctors thought might save her but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug costs him to make he charged two thousand bucks for a small dose of the drug the sick woman's husband Heinz went to everyone he knew to borrow money but he could only get together about a thousand bucks he told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later but the druggist said no Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife should the husband have done that after presenting people with this and various other moral dilemmas Kohlberg reviewed people's responses and placed them in different stages of moral reasoning according to Kohlberg an individual progresses from the capacity for preconventional morality before age 9 to the capacity for conventional morality during early adolescence and toward attaining post conventional morality which only a few fully achieved Kohlberg placed in the highest stage responses that reflected the reasoning that Heinz should steal the drug because his wife's life is more important than the pharmacist making money the value of a human life overrides the pharmacists greed many psychologists agree with Kohlberg's theory of moral development point out that moral reasoning is very different from moral behavior sometimes what we say we would do in a situation is not what we would actually do in that situation but anyway how does this theory apply to males and females Kohlberg felt that more males and females achieve the highest stage of moral development oopsy-daisy he went on to note that a women seemed to be deficient in their moral reasoning abilities and now there's a recording of me saying that these ideas were not well received by Carol Gilligan a research assistant of Kohlberg who consequently developed her own ideas of moral development in her groundbreaking book a different voice psychological theory and women's development Gilligan criticized her former mentors theory because it was based only on upper-class white males she argued that women are not deficient in reasoning she proposed that males and females simply reason differently girls and women focus more on staying connected and the importance of interpersonal relationships therefore in the Heinz dilemma many girls and women respond the Heinz should not steal the medicine the reasoning is that if he steals the medicine he's arrested and is put in jail and then he and his wife will be separated and she could die while he is in prison this work highlights the importance of considering individual differences when examining any aspect of development development proceed through the interaction among physical cognitive and socio emotional factors just as influences of nature and nurture are evident only through their interaction so physical cognitive and socio-emotional development are interwoven to constitute the whole person [Music] you

Video 2

[Music] 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 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 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 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 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 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 [Music]