CHYS lecture 5

What is language?

• Five major components

  • Arbitrariness

    • Uses symbols that aren't related to the concept that they represent (hieroglyphics versus English letters)

  • Productivity

    • Can produce communications that are unique; can express completely novel ideas

  • Semanticy

    • Language represents a form of pattern information

  • Displacement

    • Language is independent of time so you can talk about past present and future

  • Duality

    • Language is represented on 2 levels: the sounds of a language and its underlying meaning

Development

• Occurs universally and visually through common stages:

• Crying (zero to four months)

• Cooing /babbling (4 to 12 months)

• Initial words (12 to 18 months)

• Two word sentences (18 to 36 months)

• Short sentences (2.5 to five years)

• Adult usage (five plus years)

Components of a language

• Sentence: the umpires talked to the players

• Phrase: ( The Umpires) (Talked to the players )

• Morpheme: (The) (Umpire)(s) (Talk)(ed) (to) (the) (play)(er)(s)

• Phoneme: (di) (ampayer)(z) (tok)(t) (tuw) (da) (play)r)(z)

Phone a logical development

• Sounds of a language

• How you master the sounds

• Babbling is playing around with the sounds of a language

  • Initially universal then specific

  • From the same neutral structures as language (left lobe)

A typical language development

• Can be impaired if there are significant delays in learning language

• Makes intervention a priority(Cochlear implants)

• Maturation or lack of experience?

• Link between babbling - talking part of the brain

Morphological development

• Attaching this sounds to make meaning

• Free more phone stand alone, bound more phones attached to free morph

• Children learn rules for attaching free more foams to bound morphemes (adding " Ed" to talk)

• Mean length of utterance refers to the number of more phones per sentence this increases with age and language development

Syntactic development

• The way utterance are put together

• Syntax: the rules of grammar

• How words are arranged in a sentence

• Word order plays an important role in the meeting of a sentence

• Negatives- children initially attach words of negation to a positive sentence

  • Example: " no drink milk" or " drink milk no," evolve to " drink no milk," and then eventually becomes adult language

• Questions are initially asked using the vocal in tonal, Then around three years old "wh" words began to be used

• Passive sentences: example " the study we found was significant because," they don't contain word order queues and are more difficult to understand by young children

• Relating events within a sentence through the use of conjunction doesn't usually appear until around three years old

  • Example use and, but, because, while, that, which,

  • Most adult grammar rules are learned around five years old

Symatic development

• Semantic refers to the words meaning

• There is a major spurt in Word slash symatic acquisition that begins around 18 months of age; typically begins around 50 or so words are known

• The 1st 50 words are typically common words

• In order the most common words are

  • Objects: blankie, milk

  • Actions: up, down

  • Modifier's: more, less

  • Social words: love

  • Function words: whirling

    • Function words are very unusual

• Kids can understand things before they can communicate them

• Mama and Dada are the most common first words

• Figuring out through context clues

Overcoming these issues

• Whole object assumption-new word applies to the whole object

• Taxomic assumptions words can be generalized to a group of things

• Mutually exclusive assumption- different words refer to different things

• Children use these rules /constraints along with social cues to learn sensory

• Educated guess and social cues

• Children learn three to five new words per day

• By the time they were five they will have learned roughly 1000 words

Over and under extensions

• Applying a word to either A2 big category or two little category

• Some evidence that over extensions are sometimes cues for scaffolding assistance-helps a child narrow down what an animal is

  • Example: seasick coyote and calls it a dog? The child will then look around for classification about what it really is

Natural language categories

• NLC's are groupings of words along with semantic gradient

  • Example: German shepherds are dogs, dogs are canines, canines are mammals etc

• Younger children have difficulty understanding most global and super ordinary categories (food, people, and animals seem to be common exceptions)

  • Example dogs and cats are different, cats and dogs are more similar than dogs and horses

Pragmatics development

• Refers to how language is actually used particularly in social situations

• Different speech styles are used in different situations

  • Example: first date, at grandmas, with close friends

• Social language can be an important factor in an individual's identity

• Language has different meaning but so does our use of language in different contexts and environments

Communitive competence

• In younger children, ecocentrism slash ToM can hinder conversations because of a lack of other people's perceptions and thoughts

  • Example: they may not understand the child

  • Having a conversation without really having one:

  • " my dad is a policeman"

  • " I like big dogs"

  • " my dad found a robber"

  • " my dog is black"

• Piaget calls it collective monologues

• Tends to go away after ToM is developed but is a more persistent issue for children autistic children

• They don't understand what is going on inside anyone elses head

  • This is a competency issue their skill in communicating it is low because they do not understand perspective

• Meta communication understanding once communication improves communication competence

• Preschoolers with poor meta communication may not recognize the poor quality of their messages

• Verbal repairs indicate meta communication awareness which happens around four to five years old

  • Understanding you said something wrong

• Not aware of what the audience is receiving versus what they're trying to say

Theories of language development

• Some theoretical perspectives on language include

  • Learning theory

  • Chomsky/nativist

  • Social interactionist

Learning theory

• Operant conditioning (skinner)

• Adults shape their speech through reinforcement

  • Saying Mama and then Mama comes over

• Imitation (Brenda)

• Criticisms: grammar not shaped; early errors in creative not limited

  • Making their own errors: calling a cat a dog

Nativist/Chomsky theory

• Well admitting that environmental input was necessary Chomsky rejected the idea that language development was solely driven by the environment

• Propose that surface structure of language was what we hear when people talk but there is a deep structure that underlies all languages

  • Wrapping of all the languages is different but the structure remains the same between all languages

• Deep structure is universal to all languages spoken or not

• The ability to detect, understand, and use deep structure is an innate species specific ability

• In humans, the language acquisition device (LAD) processes incoming stimuli and detects underlying patterns

  • The same fundaments

Nativist theory

• Children have to be able to extract the information

• Leneberg added several supports

  • Complex language is only used by humans

  • Common to all healthy humans (exception: Jeannie and Tommy)

  • Its development is difficult to derail

  • Develops in a practical sequence

  • Portions of the brain and throat appear specialized for language (Adams apple)

  • Some language disabilities are genetic

  • Development requires little formality

  • Similarities in all human language grammars even those that aren't verbal

  • Children's ability to create a creole language from a pigeon language in one generation

    • Creole: making of a whole new language

    • Pidgeon language: Mixing languages into one combination

  • Adults use of IDS in many isolated cultures

  • Even the most intense training of AI doesn't produce human grammar

• Koko the gorilla

  • No vocal cords can't speak

  • Teach them how to use sign language

  • Taught him almost 1000 words (the average 5 year old knows roughly 5000 words)

  • They have a capacity for language but not remotely closely to the complex language humans use

  • Because of complex cultural environment an complex genetic inheritance we can engage in the most complex communication on the planet

Critical period

• Lenneberg Propose that there is a critical period for language development

• Language deprivation in childhood produces non optimal language development despite intensive learning efforts

  • Example Jeannie or victor

• Different grammatical competency based on the age of language acquisition

• Children show better language planning after I.H. Damage

  • Is a part of the brain that is associated with language

Why is there a critical period?

• Newport's " Less is more" theory suggests that young children's cognitive immaturity limits the amount of linguistic information they can process at once

• This automatically breaks down and simplifies the language making it easier for them to learn (less interference)

• Computer simulations agree with this finding

Social interactionists

• Retain some nativist concepts but emphasizes the social environment

• Bruner note that IDS/CDS optimizes language learning by emphasizing contrast differences and meanings while maximizing the attention through posture and gestures

• Not innate/passive

• Highly interactive

  • Children do not learn language passively

  • Example: when Dora asks questions it is passive learning and children are not learning from it

  • Children learn best from imitating, learning is the best example on how children need to interact with culture to learn

Gender differences

• Mixed evidence of woman having linguistic advantage

• In part due to a learned/cultural difference in that girls are given more intense exposure to language

• Very early differences in language acquisition suggests that women may have innate differences

  • Girls mumble words earlier than boys