Untitled Flashcards Set

HESP 150 FULL NOTES 

Book pages 1-8

Questions to Contemplate

1. What are the drawbacks of simply memorizing the most current theories in psycholinguistics

It is contingent on the idea that the info that you have will always be correct but science is ever changing. It’s better to learn how to find out what's more right

2. Assemble your team of researchers

Language typologist (A) Biologist and theoretical linguist (b)

Book pages 9-63

Hockett's Design (Charles Hockett)

Web activity 2.1 Considering animal communication

Example 1 Arbitrariness, Semanticity (maybe communication)

Example 2 Semanticity (and communication)

Example 3 Productivity, Semanticity, Arbitrariness 

Example 4 Arbitrariness, productivity, semanticity, 

Theory Skills that support language 

1. Those that are necessary to get language off the ground but aren’t really specific to language.

2. Traits that evolved particularly because they make language more powerful and efficient.

Categories of language related abilities 

• The ability to understand communicative intent 

• A grasp of linguistic structure

• The ability to control voice and/or gesture 

Questions to contemplate 2.1

1. Why is it easier to make the case for the genetic determination of vervet calls or honeybee dances than it is for human language? For bees and vervet monkeys they communicate for survival and to adapt whereas for humans communication is largely social

2. Which of Hockett's design features of language would you be most surprised to see a chimpanzee master and demonstrate? Duality of patterning because that would indicate the beginnings of language forming.

Joint attention - The awareness between two or more individuals that they are paying attention to the same thing.

Questions to contemplate 2.2

1. The alarm call of a vervet and the naming of an object by a human are both socially motivated behaviors. Do they require comparable degrees of social attunement? Vervet calls are genetic,simple, and are for survival. Although social, vervet calls require less degrees of social attunement than humans naming objects 

2. In what ways does a human toddler appear to be so much more socially intelligent than an adult chimpanzee? Why is this?

Syntax - In a given language, the set of rules that specify how meaningful linguistic elements are put together so that their meaning can be clearly understood.

Recursion - “nesting” of related clauses or other linguistic units within each other

Universal grammar - an innately understood system of combining linguistic units that constrains the structural patterns of all human language.

Resistance to universal grammar

• Underestimating input in learning ability

• General cognitive knowledge

• Animal Evidence

• Language diversity

• Solving communication problems 

3 skills that contribute to human language

1. Ability to use and understand intentional symbols to communicate meanings 

2. Ability to combine linguistic units to express a great variety of complex meanings

3. A finely tuned delivery system through which the linguistic signal is transmitted

Web activity 2.2

Questions to contemplate 2.3

1. What limitations would a language suffer from if it didn't have duality of patterning? If it lacked recursion?

2. What are some arguments for universal grammar in why are some Researchers Skeptical of the notion

Slides

Unit 1.1 

Page 8 Language: Crash Course Psychology #16

Language - A set of spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to communicate meaning. Humans have a use of complex grammar which is what sets us apart from animals.

Phonemes - short distinctive sound units

Morphemes - the smallest units that carry meaning

Grammar - a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others.

Receptive language - The ability to understand what’s being said both to and about us. 

 without exposure to other languages a child will lose the ability to both hear and create particular tones and sounds that aren't part of his or her household language

BF skinner - “Language is a product of associative principles and operant conditioning”

Chomsky - Innate learning (UG) - all human language contain nouns, verbs, and adjective and humans are born with an innate ability to acquire language and even a genetic predisposition to learn grammatical rules

Page 9

Language - the human communication method, system

Linguistics - the study of that system 

Psycholinguistics - how we know what we know

language doesn’t have to be spoken it can be gestural, its used to connect people

Speech - the actual sound or gesture

Speech disorder vs. Language disorder

Speech -trouble making sounds

Language- trouble understanding components of lang or producing it.

Speech communication chain is the general idea of how communication works:

Think - semantics - syntax and morphology (grammar use) - phonology - articulatory phonetics - speak - perceive - decode - connect

Linguistic competence is our hidden knowledge of rules and how language works

Linguistic performance is what we produce and comprehend

Components of language

Syntax - Structure of language 

Semantics - meaning of language (ambiguity)

Morphology - smallest unit of meaning (structure of words)

Phonology - patterns of sounds

Phonetics - properties of sound

Pragmatics - how we use language socially

Receptive language - Ability to understand and comprehend language 

Expressive language is the ability to produce it.

50 min Steven pinker

2/18 Slide notes

Quiz time.

D. I will jumped on the trampoline 

P400 semantic p600 syntactic anomaly can be weird doesn’t have to be in grammatical 

Assumptions about language 

Words help distinguish between concepts

Linguistic determinism - language determines thought  

Whorf hypothesis - languages influences, may give biases but you aren’t married to those perceptions.

Babies eventually tune out all of the sounds or allophones that they arne’t hearing in their environment. This is how their experiences with phonetics are shaped.

Kay and kempton used the mussel color chart to test whether language influence whether we can differentiate close colors.

Winawer - gave subjects a timed test to see if the subjects

Is it possible to stop language from influencing how you think about things in your every day life by taxing the linguistic system in the studies they used a memory task  (Gilbert)

right visual field meant people were faster to identify color name because it goes to the LH (linguistic processing hemisphere)

Language does not determine 

whenever you add a cognitive load to a linguistic task it makes that task harder to complete. 

This idea extended to how people parse events 

The difference is describing events only was present when they had to describe the event after.

Thinking for speaking use different processing tactics than speaking for remembering. 

Different types of bilingualism determined by the age of acquisition 

Sequential bilingualism (from birth English and then 6 years later you learn another language) Starting with a first language and then following up with another language.

The critical period (period) 

passively bilingual your receptive language skills exceed your expressive language skills 

code switching - mix two languages at the same time 

reasons for code switching might be time, or you have access, your audience is also bilingual 

\Video 

Code switching vs code mixing 

Code mixing is what young kids do when they are learning multiple languages (unconsciously)

evaluating bilingual or multilingual speaker you need to make sure that you’re accounting for all of their vocabularies in all the languages that they speak. 

You want to look at an errors that they would make in both languages. For example are they making ungrammatical sentences in both languages or in only in their second language. 

Language difference vs language disorder. 

Language difference is where you would work closely with an ESOL teacher to improve and get a boost to learn a second language.

You want to make sure they are code switching because they don’t know that word 

accents are made by differences in the pronunciation of the vowels.

accents usually occur or coincide with second language acquisition 

positive transfer is when you take an aspect of L1 that is also in l2

negative is when an aspect of l1 isn’t in L2

fossilization can be due to the age of the L2 learner. 

English and German have phoneme overlap 

Facilitation positive 

Inhibition negative 

working memory is a big influence on how well you learn a second language 

context is how exactly you are learning a language

both languages are always on at the same time which is proven by code switching 

our lexicon or all the words in our lexicon are either related in semantics or phonetics (meaning or sound)

 phonolofical cohorts are worts that are related through sound 

yes bilinguals do experience interference on two different levels 

interference just means it will take extra time to sort through all those extra words

Compound bilingual coordinate bilingual subordinate bilingual 

 the benefits of a bilingual brain mia

major benefit to bilingualism is cognitive 

complications involved with bilingual 

• slower lexical access (looking for a word) 

Dialect is systematically different than other variety of the same language 

slang is stylistic choice