Note BSEE 24

Structural Linguistics and Behavioral Psychology

School of thought

• A set of ideas or opinions that a group of people share about a matter

Structural or Descriptive School of linguistics (1940 - 1950)

Structural Linguistics

• study of language based on the theory that ==language is a structured system of formal units== such as sentences and syntax (sentence structure).
• ==Describe and identify human== language and its structure
• Postulated that languages is different from each other and no assumptions could apply across it.
• Humans acquire second language by knowing its grammar structure

Advocates of Structural Linguistics

Leonard Bloomfield

• Led the development of structural linguistics (1930 - 1940)
• Father of American distributionalism
• Concentrate only on observable
• American Linguist

Edward Sapir

• America Jewish anthropologist-linguist
• One of important figures in development of discipline in linguistics
• Classified indigenous language and determine how culture affect the language
• German Pomerania/ Northern Poland

Charles Francis Hockett

• American Linguist
• Represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism/ distributionalism/ taxonomic structuralism
• Differentiate human language to non-human languages and determine it unique features

Charles Carpenter Fries

• American Linguist and teacher
• Grammar as a tool for communicating meaning
• Creator of Aural-Oral method
  • Aural - through to the ear
  • Oral - through the mouth

Freeman Twadelli

• Pointed that advocates only analyze the physiological nervous system disregarding the mind, soul, and spirit.
• The advocates didn’t look beyond the observable; they just describe the language.

Behavioral Psychology

• Founded by Pavlov and Skinner
• Only observable and measurable
• Analyzing the observable means using intuition that should not be regarded since it is immeasurable

Behavioral Models

Classical Conditioning

• Pavlov
• Stimuli - evoke/ reason for involuntary response

Operant Conditioning/Instrumental

• Skinner
• Increase = reinforcement; decrease = punishment, behavior

Rote Learning

• Repetition/memorization of information

Instrumental Learning

• Almost same ng operant
• voluntarily

Generative and Cognitive Psychology

• Addresses what the first theory is lacking

Generative Linguistic

• Noam Chomsky (1964)
  • Human language cannot be examine through observable stimuli
  • Not only in describing language but also gives an explanation on different aspect (why is that person do, think, act like that?)
• Ferdinand de Saussure
  • There is difference between parole, something that we can observe or performance, and Langue. more on competence, unmeasurable, beyond observable.

Cognitive Psychology

• Claim that meaning, understanding, and knowing is significant data for psychological study
• Instead of focusing on behavioral models, they tried to discover the reasons behind those actions.

Constructivism

• We construct what we know base on what we experienced either observable or not observable.
• combination of linguistic (language), psychological ( our mind and action), & sociological (the way we connect to people/ socialize)to grasp our knowledge/ language acquisition.

Two Branches of Constructivism

Cognitive Constructivism

• Constructing own representation of reality
• Only yourself is needed to acquire knowledge
• Not teacher-directed; there are developmental process on acquiring knowledge.
  • Sensorimotor (0-2)
  • The child begins to interact with the environment
  • Preoperational Stage (2-6)
  • The child begins to represent the world symbolically
  • Concrete Operational Stage (7-11)
  • The child learns rule; allowing logical reasoning but cannot use abstract reasoning.
  • Formal Operational Stage (12- adulthood)
  • The adolescent can transcend the concrete situation and think about the future

Social Constructivism

• Need to socialize to construct a knowledge
• Lev Vygotsky’s ZPD
  • A child need more knowledgeable one (MKO) to develop more