Chapter 9 Notes: Language

Language and Communication: From Rules to Meaning

• Social species have systems of communication that allow them to communicate with each other

• Language: a system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar that convey meaning

• Grammar: a set of rules that specify how the units of language can be used to produce meaningful messages

• Language allows for the exchange of information about the world, coordinating group action or forming strong social bonds

• Human language may be evolved from signaling systems that exist for other species

• The complex structure of human language makes it distinct

• Humans are able to express a wide range of ideas/concepts and generate novel sentences

• Humans use words to refer to the intangible, and use language to name, categorize and describe things in our brain which influences the organization of information in the brain

The Complex Structure of Human Language

• Human language is relatively recent and emerged 1-3 million years ago as a spoken system, 6,000 years ago as a written system 

• 4000 human languages, with 50 language families

• Languages share a basic structure that are a set of sounds and rules to combine them and produce meaning

Basic characteristics

• Smallest units of sound: phonemes 

• Phonological rules: indicate how phenomes can be combines to produce speech sounds

• Phonemes + phonemes = morphemes: smallest meaningful units of language

• Morphological rules: indicate how morphemes can be combined to from words, some- content and function morphemes can stand alone as words

• Content morphemes: refer to things and events

• Function morphemes: serve grammatical functions

• Half of morphemes are function morphemes and makes human language grammatically complex enough for expressing abstract ideas 

• Syntactic rules: indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences

Language Development

• Language is a cognitive skill

• Language can be used by young children early on

• Children learn language at a very fast rate

• Children make few errors while learning to speak

• Children’s passive mastery of language develops faster than active mastery, they understand language better than they speak it

Distinguishing speech sounds

• At birth infants are able to distinguish among contrasting sounds in all languages

• Within 6 months, they lose the ability and can only distignyise among contrasting sounds in primary language

• Infants cannot produce speech sounds dependably, coo to communicate

• Between 4-6 months, begin to babble

• Babbling is a natural part of language development

• Babbling serves as a signal that the infant is in a state of focused attention and ready to learn

• Babbling problems can lead to speech impairments

Language milestones

• 10-12 months begin to utter first words

• Infants at 18 mo can say about 5o words and understand more

• Toddlers learn nouns before verbs, concrete objects seen everyday

• By starting school they know 10,000 words

• A child in fifth grade knows the meanings of 40,000 words 

• By college, an average vocabulary consists of about 200,000 2ords

• Fast mapping: the process through which children map a word onto an underlying concept after one exposure, allows them to learn rapidly

• Telegraphic speech at 2 years of age, sentences are devoid of function morphemes and consist mostly of content words, grammatical and consistent with syntactic rules of language

Emergence of grammatical rules

• Young children memorize particular sounds that express what they want to communicate

• As they acquire grammatical rules of language, they overregularize 

• For example they overregularize the rules of past tense indicated by -ed 

• Errors show that language acquisition is not simply a matter of intimating adult speech

• Children acquire rules by listening to speech around them and using the rules to create forms they haven’t heard

• They can do this without being aware of the grammatical rules they have learned

• Few children and adults can articulate the grammatical rules of their native language, but they follow them

• 3 yoa, children begin to complete sentences and they increase in complexity over the following 2 years

• 4-5 yoa have completed many aspects of language development

• Children gain more refined language skills with maturity 

language development and cognitive development

• Occurs as a sequence of steps and milestones

• Orderly progression could be explained by general cognitive development and is not specific to experience with language, cognitive development may be necessary before they have the capacity to put together a simple sentence

• Orderly progression might depend on experience with a specific language, and reflect a child’s knowledge of that language

• Research shows that some of the key milestones of language development fpened on experience with english and early language development is likely based on specific characteristics that come with language development rather than limitations of cognitive development

Theories of Language Development

Behaviorist Explanations

• BF Skinner explained language learning: we learn to talk in the same way we learn other skills by reinforcing, shaping, extinction and the other principles of operant conditioning

• When infants mature they vocalize and vocalizations that aren't reinforced diminish gradually, but those that are reinforced remain in developing repertoire

• Maturing children imitate the speech patterns they hear

• Offers simple account of language development, but doesn’t account for many of the fundamental characteristics of language development

Nativist Explanations

• Chomsky critiques behaviorist approach, he believes the language learning skills are innate and the brain is specialized to acquire language rapidly through exposure to speech

• Nativist theory holds that language development is best explained as an innate and biological capacity

• Human brain is equipped with universal grammar: a collection of processes that facilitate language acquisition 

• Language processes naturally emerge as an infant matures, given that the infant gets adequate input in order to maintain the process

Language ability is partly separate from general intelligence

• Genetic dysphasia is a syndrome that is characterized by an inability to learn the grammatical structure of language despite having otherwise standard intelligence

• The nativist view predicts that some people with genetic dysphasia aren’t wired correctly to learn grammatical rules of language

• A biological predisposition tl acquire language explains why newborn infants can distinguish contrasts among phonemes that occur in all languages even ones they javent heard

• If language was only learned through imitation as behaviorists suggest infants would distinguish only phenomes they had heard 

• Nativist theory explains why deaf infants babble speech they have never heard, and why the pattern of language acquisition os similar throughout children globally

Language is harder to learn after puberty

• Evidence shows that language can be acquired only during a restricted period of development

• Once puberty is reached, acquiring language becomes extremely difficult 

Interactionist explanations

• Nativists are criticized because they don’t explain how language develops

• Complete theories requires an explanation of the process in which the innate capacity for language combines with environmental experience

• Interactionist approach holds that although infants are born with an innate ability to acquire language, social interactions play a crucial role in language acquisition

• Parents tailor verbal interactions to children in ways that simplify language acquisition 

• Mature languages break down experience into separate components

Language Development and The Brain

Broca and Wernicke’s Areas of the Brain

• In early infancy language processing occurs across the brain

• Language processing gradually becomes more concentrated in broca and wernickes area

• Connected by a pathway and to other brain regions 

• Damage to the areas can result in aphasia: difficulty in producing or comprehending language

• Broca’s aphasia: individuals understand language relatively well but struggle comprehending more complex forms of grammar, speak in short phrases lacking function morphemes and grammatical structure

• Wernicke’s aphasia: individuals can produce grammatical speech, but its meaningless and have difficulty comprehending language

• Wernicke's area is functional in making judgements about word meaning, damage can impair comprehension of spoken and signed language, but nonlanguage sound identification is unimpaired

Involvement of the right cerebral hemisphere

• The right cerebral hemisphere contributes to language comprehension

• When words are presented to the right hemisphere, it shows some capacity for processing meaning

• Individuals with damage to this area sometimes have subtle problems with language comprehension

• Neuroimaging studies reveal evidence of right-hemisphere activation during language tasks

• Some children who had their entire left hemispheres removed during childhood as an epilepsy treatment can recover many language abilities

Bilingualism and the brain

• Bilingual and monolingual children do not differ significantly in language development

• Bilingual individuals benefit from exerting executive control in their daily lives  when choosing to use one language selectively

• May have benefits later in life, later onset of alzheimer’s 

• Learning a second language produces lasting changes in the brain

Concepts and Categories

• Concept: a mental representation that groups or categorizes shared features of related objects, events, or other stimuli

• An abstract representation, description, or definition that designates a class or category of thing

• The brain organizes our concepts about the world into categories based on similarities and

• Categories form by noticing similarities among objects and events we experience everyday

• Concepts are fundamental to our understanding of the world

Psychological theories of concepts and categories

• Early theories: concepts as rules that specify necessary and sufficient conditions for belonging to a particular category

• Necessary condition: something that must be true of an object in order for it to belong to the category

• Sufficient condition: something that, if true of the object proves it belongs to the category

• Most natural categories cannot be easily denied in this approach

• Prototype theory: asses many of the most characteristic features of the category, we classify new objects by comparing them to the best or most typical member of a category

• Exemplar theory: we make category judgments by comparing a new instance with stored memories for other instances of the category

• Does a better job than prototype theory of accounting for certain aspects of categorization

Concepts, Categories, and The Brain

• Left hemisphere is involved in forming prototypes, while the right hemisphere is mainly active in recognizing exemplars

• We use both prototypes and exemplars when forming concepts and categories

• Visual cortex: involved in forming prototypes, prototype formation is a more holistic activity involving image processing

• prefrontal cortex and basil ganglia: involved in learning exemplars, exemplar based learning involves analysis and decision making

Category specific deficit

• Category specific deficit: an inability to recognize objects that belong to a particular category, although the ability to recognize objects outside the category is normal

• Observed even when brain trauma that produces them occurs shortly after birth

• The brain is “prewired” to organize perceptual and sensory information into broad-based categories

• Type of category-specific deficit depends on where brain is damaged

• Deficits result when an individual suffers from a stroke or other trauma to the left hemisphere of cerebral cortex

• Damage to front part of left temporal lobe results in difficulty identifying humans, to the lower left temporal lobe results in difficulty identifying animals, and to region where temporal lobe meets occipital and parietal lobes impairs ability to retrieve names of tools

Are our brains prewired

• A possible explanation is that preferences develop from the specific visual experiences that individuals have during the course of their lives

• Another possibility is that the brain may be prewired so that particular regions respond more strongly to some categories than to others

• Category-preferential regions show similar patterns of activity in the blind and sighted, provides evidence that category specific organization of visual regions does not depend on an individual’s visual experience

• Category specific organization could have come from interactions with objects that had involved other senses, but may be innate

Decision Making: Rational and Otherwise

Rational ideal 

• Rational choice theory: we make decisions by determining how likely something is to happen, judging the value of the outcome, and then multiplying them

• Our judgments will vary depending on the value we assign to possible outcomes

Irrational Reality

Judging frequencies and probabilities

• Studies show people are good at estimating frequency

• We perform poorly on tasks that require thinking in terms of probabilities- the likelihood that something will happen

• When seeking advice, you’ll have better results if describing your problem using frequencies rather than probabilities

Availability bias

• Availability bias: items that are more readily available in memory are judged as having occurred more frequently

• Affects our estimates because memory strength and frequency of occurrence are related

• Frequently occurring items are remembered more easily than infrequent items, leading to the conclusion that items for which you have better memory must also have been more frequent

• Better memory wasn’t due to greater frequency but to greater familiarity

• Heuristics: fast and efficient strategies that may facilitate decision making but do not guarantee that a solution will be reached 

• Heuristics are mental shortcuts that are often effective when approaching a problem

• Algorithm: a well defined sequences of procedures or rules that guarantees a solution to a problem

The conjunction fallacy

• Conjunction fallacy: people think that two events are more likely to occur together than either individual event

• The fallacy is that when people are given more information they think there;s a higher probability that all are true

• In reality the probability diminishes rapidly

Representativeness heuristic

• People seem to ignore information about base rate- the existing probability of an event- basing their judgments on similarities to categories

• Representatativeness heuristic: making a probability judgment by comparing an object or event with a prototype of the object or event

• Heuristics highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of the way we think

• We are good at forming categories based on prototypes and making classification judgments on the basis of similarity to prototypes

• But judging probabilities is not our strong suit

• Decision making performance can usually be improves if probability problems are reframed using frequencies

Framing effects

• Framing effects: occur when people give different answers to the same problem depending on how the problem is phrases, can influence the assignment of value 

• sunk-cost fallacy: occurs when people make decisions about a current situation on the basis of what they have previously invested in the situation

Optimism bias

• Optimism bias: people believe that compared with other individuals they are more likely to experience positive events and less likely to experience negative outcomes in the future 

• Optimism about the future is a good thing for our mental and physical healh, optimistic individuals are usually well adjusted psychologically and are able to handle stress well, too much optimism can be detrimental because it may prevent us from taking necessary steps to reach our goals

• Overly optimistic individuals may think they can attain a goal even when they lack the ability to achieve it

• Optimism bias is greater in North Americans than eastern cultures

Creativity and Insight 

• Successful problem solving often depends on learning the principles that explain a particular type of problem and also solving lots of problems improves our ability to recognize certain problem types and their solutions

• Some problem solving involves brilliant flashes of insight and creative solutions that haven’t ever been tried

• Creative and insightful solutions rely on restructuring a problem to it turns into one you know how to solve

Genius and insight

• Gestalt psychologists say that insights reflect a spontaneous restructuring of a problem

• A sudden flash of insight contrasts with incremental problem solving procedures that gradually get closer to a solution

• People werre more likely to solve a non insight problem if they felt they were getting warmer

• Later researcher suggests that unconscious processes contribute to performance on insight problems 

• Insight problem solving may be impacted by unconscious processes 

• The pattern of clues that constitute a problem unconsciously activates relevant information in memory

• Activation spreads through the memory network and recruits additional relevant information

• When sufficient information is activated, it crosses the threshold of awareness and we experience a flash of insight into the solution

Sudden insight and the brain

• Aha moments accompanies insights, highlights how different it feels to solve aproblem this way

• The difference in subjective experience suggests that something different happens in the brain when we use insight to solve a problem

• The front part of right temporal love was the only region in brain that showed greater activity for insight solutions than for solutions based on analytic strategies

• Moments before insight problem is solved- increased activity deep in frontal loves- the anterior cingulate which controls cognitive processes such as the ability to switch attention

• The increased activity enabled participants to attend and detect associations that were only weakly activated, perhaps at a subconscious level 

Functional fixedness

• Sudden insights are infrequent

• They are rare because problem solving suffer from framing effects

• For problem solving, framing can limit the types of solutions that occur to us

• Functional fixedness: the tendency to perceive the functions of objects as unchanging, restricts our thinking

• Framing limits ability to generate a solution

Reasoning 

• Reasoning: a mental activity that consists of organizing information or beliefs into a series of steps in order to reach conclusions

• We rely on logic to assess the results of the reasoning process

• Logic is a system of rules that specifies which conclusions follow from a set of statements

• Logic is a tool for evaluating reasoning but it is not the process of reasoning itself

• If statements are true and an argument is valid, then sound conclusion is reached

• But if statements are true but have fault arguments, they will produce invalid conclusions