Language and Thinking

Language and Thinking

Importance of Language

  • Language is integral to human experience.
  • Quote by Willem J.M. Levelt (1989): "Talking is one of our dearest occupations. We spend hours a day conversing, telling stories, teaching, quarreling, and, of course, speaking to ourselves. Speaking is, moreover, one of our most complex cognitive, linguistic, and motor skills. Articulation flows automatically, at a rate of about fifteen speech sounds per second, while we are attending only to the ideas we want to get across to our interlocutors."

Critical Period

  • Definition: "A period in childhood when experience with language produces optimal language acquisition" (Sdorow, 2002).

Prelinguistic Communication

Preverbal Infants

  • Babies respond to maternal speech even in utero (e.g., kicking).
  • Experiment: DeCasper & Fifer (1980) - Newborns show preference for their mother's voice over strangers.
  • Significance: Indicates that newborns can perceive speech.

Steps to Speech Development

  1. Newborns produce many sounds (crying, burping, sneezing).
  2. At 2 months: Infants begin to produce vowel-like sounds (cooing).
  3. At 6 months: Cooing evolves into babbling (speech-like sounds).
  4. At 10-12 months: Infants start using single words.

Infant-Directed Speech

  • Definition: Infant-directed speech (also known as motherese) includes:
    • Higher pitch.
    • More variable pitch.
    • Exaggerated intonation.
    • Slower pace.
    • Offers more language cues.
  • Purpose: Designed to attract and maintain infants' attention.

Phonemes and Morphemes

Development of Speech Perception

  • Phonemes: Basic building blocks of language consisting of consonant and vowel sounds (e.g., P-T-K-T).
  • Infants can distinguish many phoneme sounds, sometimes as early as one month after birth.
  • Methodologies: Clever research techniques have facilitated the understanding of speech perception in infants.
  • Note: Not all languages utilize the same phoneme sets.

Morphemes

  • Definition: The smallest meaningful units of language, which can include:
    • Words, prefixes, or suffixes used consistently to modify other words.
  • Examples of Morphemes:
    • dog (1 morpheme)
    • dogs (2 morphemes: dog + s)
    • antidisestablishmentarianism (8 morphemes)

Surface vs. Deep Structure

  • Deep Structure: Refers to the underlying meaning of a sentence.
  • Surface Structure: How a sentence is verbally constructed.
  • Examples:
    • "The dog chased the cat." (Deep Structure: Dog → chaser; Cat → chased)
    • "The cat was chased by the dog." (Surface Structure differs despite identical deep structures)

First Words

Identifying Words in Speech

  • Challenges of word identification:
    • Conversations lack silent gaps, necessitating keen attention to stressed syllables and sound patterns.

Vocabulary Growth

  • Vocabulary spurt illustrated by child's word count over months (0–24 months).
    • Example Data: Child 1, Child 2, Child 3 – progression in word count over time highlighted by advancements in age.

Theories Explaining the Vocabulary Spurt

  1. Naming Insight: Awareness that all objects have names and words refer to things (Gillis & De Schutter, 1986; Kamhi, 1986; Reznick & Goldfield, 1992).
  2. Change in Concepts: More detailed and differentiated concepts lead to increased word usage (Lifter & Bloom, 1989).
  3. Ability to Sort Objects: Enhanced sorting skills correspond to accelerated learning rates (Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1987).

Fast Mapping

  • Definition: Rapid connection of new words to their meanings without considering all possible definitions, symbolized by a practical questioning example: "Where is the sebular?"

Joint Attention

  • Learning occurs more effectively in contexts where parents label objects when toddlers engage with them (touch/look).
  • Adults provide labels while focusing on the object/action, enhancing learning opportunities.

Holophrases

  • Definition: A single-word utterance used by a child to convey more complex meanings. Common holophrases include:
    • "Dada" (looking at father) - Relation: Instance Naming.
    • "Mama" (looking at bottle of milk) - Volition: Communication of need.
    • "Down" (when sitting) - Action: Demonstrates transition.
    • "Ball" (after throwing) - State of Object: Descriptive of context.
    • Reference: Greenfield & Smith (1976, p. 70).

Naming Errors

  • Underextension: A word is applied too narrowly.
  • Overextension: A word is applied too broadly.
  • Disappearance: Gradual loss of previous word usage.

Early Grammar

Development of Early Grammar

  • At age 2: Children begin producing multi-word utterances.
  • From ages 2–5: Significant advancements in mastering grammatical rules take place.
  • Basic Child Grammar: Grammatical properties common in early child language, often observed universally (e.g., telegraphic speech).

Mean Length of Utterances in Morphemes (MLU)

  • Utilized as an index of language progress in children.
  • MLU Defined Stages (according to Brown, 1973):
    • Stage 1: Combining words.
    • Stage 2: Modulating meaning through grammatical morphemes.
    • Stages 3-4: Learning of complex grammatical constructions such as questions and negatives.

Growth of Grammatical Complexity

  • Illustration of mean length of utterance (morphemes) over time for children named Eve, Adam, and Sarah shown graphically.

Acquiring Grammatical Categories

  • Comprehension generally precedes production in infants.
  • Big Bird Study (Golinkoff, 1987): Significant outcomes regarding grammatical understanding.

Theories of Language Development

Behaviorist Explanations

  • Language learned through:
    • Reinforcement.
    • Shaping.
    • Extinction.
    • Operant conditioning principles.
  • Critiques of Behaviorism:
    • Minimal teaching on grammar by parents.
    • Children produce grammatical sentences not solely based on learned models.
    • Fails to explain cases of overgeneralization (i.e., using rules inappropriately).

Nativist Explanations

  • Language acquisition abilities are innate and facilitated by exposure.
  • Language Acquisition Device (LAD): A construct facilitating language learning.
  • Newborns can recognize contrasts in all human language phonemes from birth, regardless of prior exposure.

Interactionist Explanations

  • Critique: Nativist explanations do not detail how language development occurs.
  • Interactionism posits that:
    • Infants are inherently predisposed to acquire language.
    • Social interactions significantly influence language learning, illustrated through a study with deaf children in Nicaragua.

Language Development and the Brain

Areas of Language Processing

  • In infancy, language processing is distributed throughout various brain regions.
  • As development progresses, it becomes concentrated in specific areas:
    • Broca’s Area: Pertains to language production (spoken or signed).
    • Wernicke’s Area: Involved in speech comprehension (spoken or signed).

Graphic Representation

  • Illustrations demonstrating Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area's locations and functions.

Bilingualism

Importance of Studying Bilingualism

  • Research shows structural brain changes due to experience, reflected in:
    • London taxi driver's brain changes.
    • Changes in professional musicians’ brains.
  • Bilingualism leads to:
    • Increased density of grey matter in the left inferior parietal cortex, essential for vocabulary acquisition (Bialystok et al., 2009).

Bilingualism – Disadvantages

  • Claims that bilingual individuals may have smaller vocabulary sizes in each language compared to monolingual peers.
  • Bilinguals may face challenges with lexical access (retrieving words).

Bilingualism – Advantages

  • Enhanced executive control abilities linked to bilingualism.
  • Notable bilingual advantages persist in executive control tasks throughout life, including:
    • Dimensional change card sort task.
    • Theory of mind assessments.
    • Simon task.
    • Flanker task.

Executive Functioning Insights

  • Executive Functioning: Responsible for inhibition, among other cognitive functions (Miyake et al., 2000).
  • Speaking one language among bilinguals often necessitates inhibitory control (Bialystok, 2009).
  • Bilingual individuals generally exhibit stronger inhibitory control abilities than monolinguals, supported by Carlson & Meltzoff (2008).

Processing in Bilingualism

  • While processing language, bilinguals display heightened activation in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT) during verbal stimulus visual processing (Leonard et al., 2010).
  • Findings indicate that processing in a second language results in longer response times and less lateralized activation in the brain compared to first language responses.

Conclusion

Reflective Question

  • Inquiry: Can learning a new language provide individuals with diverse worldviews?