Chapter 6 PSY213

Language

Symbols

• Used to reflect our thoughts, feelings, and knowledge and to communicate them to others

Language development

• Requires comprehension = understanding

• Requires production = speaking

Components of Language

• Generative = finite sets of words to create infinite ideas

Phonemes

• Unit of sound

  • The letters in the words

• English has 45

• World has 200

Morphemes

• Smallest meaning of the words

• Dog = one meaning - dog

• Dogs = 2 meanings - dog AND plural s = multiple

Syntax

• Rules about how words can be combined

• Combinations of words from different categories

• The order

Pragmatics

• Understanding of how language is typically used in a specific cultural context

Sign Language

• Uses all of these

What is required for language

• Human brain

  • Species specific behaviour = only humans can acquire language normally

  • Species-universal = most people learn language

• There have been animals who can learn words but lack the syntactic structure

  • Kanzi bonobo ape

    • 350 words knew

  • Washoe gorilla

  • Bunny the dog

  • Alex the African grey parrot

Brain-language Lateralization

• For right handed people, language is mostly left brained

• Left Hemisphere

  • Processes linguistic stimuli early on in life

  • Also used in sign language

Sensitive periods

• Until age 5 the brain will learn many languages quite easily

• After that it becomes more difficult

• Genie

  • Didn’t learn language

  • Tried teaching her after 13 years

  • Only able to learn simple language like a toddler

• Learning language after puberty uses different neural mechanisms

  • Also true for deaf people who don’t learn sign language until older

Bilingualism

• Can be learned in the womb

• Can discriminate the speech sounds from each language

• Language mixing = adding words from other language in when you don’t know it

• Perform better on measures of cognitive control

Human environment

• Exposure

Infant directed speech

• Speak with higher pitch, slower speech, shorter utterances, word repetition, more questions

• Enhance vowels

• Facial expressions

• Helps them learn tone and expression

• Not universal

  • Kwara'ae Solomon islands

  • Don’t speak to babies since they believe they don't understand them

  • Held facing outwards to immerse them

Process of language acquisition

• Speech perception

  • Figuring out the sounds

  • Begins in the womb

• Prosody = characteristic rhythm and intonational patterns of language

  • Learns this in the womb

Categorical perception of speech sounds

• Putting sounds into categories

  • Ex - P and B look to make the same sound but use different vocal strains

  • Uses Voice Onset Time (VOT)

  • If it’s a longer sound we perceive it as B

Developmental changes in Speech perception

• Perceptual narrowing

  • As we start to categorize things more, we lose certain distinctions

  • Can discriminate languages easily as toddlers

  • After 10-12 months we lose distinction of other languages as we become specialized in our own

Word Segmentation

• Learning where words end and begin

• The visual aspect of language

• Listen for syllables

  • First syllables are more likely to be stressed - hints it’s the start of a word

    • Ex - often (OFF-ten)

• Distributional properties

  • Statistical learning

  • Listen for sounds that occur together more likely

Preparation for production

• 6-8 weeks

  • Begin to coo

    • Ahhhh - ooooh - squeal - smack

  • Learning to use their vocal cords

• 6-10 months

  • Babbling

  • Start using consonants

    • Babababa - papapapa

  • Or start using hand movements (ASL)

Manual babbling

• Babbling with hands

• Seen in babies immersed in ASL

Early interactions

• During babbling - babies will pick up on conversational cues

  • Bidirectional communication

• Intersubjectivity = joint attention

  • Learns conversational queues with joint attention

  • Pointing helps them communicate

First words

• Babies know words and language but cannot produce it

• At 6 months babies would look at the right picture of the fruit you named

  • Knows the fruit and the word for it but cannot produce the word

• First words usually around 10-15 months

• Over-extension

  • Using one word to mean lots of other things since their vocabulary is small

  • Ex - calling all 4 legged animals a dog

• Under-extension

  • Using one word to only mean one thing in your life

  • Ex - only YOUR dog is called dog

Word learning

• By 18 months - typically know 50 words

  • Vocabulary spurt

  • Starts to grow vocabulary and language development quickly

• SES affects word learning

  • Lower SES homes often do not read to their kids as much so they have more troubles learning to read and growing their vocabulary

Mutual exclusivity

• Expect that objects / entities will only have one name

• Bilingual children are less likely to have mutual exclusivity

Whole Object assumption

• Children expect a new word to refer to a whole object rather than part of an object

  • Ex - bunny refers to whole bunny

Pragmatic cues

• Pay attention to the social contexts to give words meaning

• Can even use emotional cues

Categorization

• Object shape

  • Will think all things of a certain shape are the same

  • Ex - call a wooden object shaped U = dax

  • Think all U's are dax - blue or red

  • BUT doesn’t think a wooden S is the same

Cross-situational word learning

• Picking up on words by when they are present with the objects

  • Ex - saying "theres a banana there" when pointing at a big bowl of fruit, child doesn’t know which one it is

  • Then next tie saying "theres a banana there" but the banana is the only same object in the bowl - they’ll pick up which one the banana is

Syntactic bootstrapping

• Using grammar to understand meaning of a new word

• Ex - the duck is cradding the bunny

• Ex - the duck and bunny are cradding

  • Depending on the grammar children will see one as the picture of the duck pushing the rabbit (cradding = pushing) and other will see it as the rabbit and duck swinging their arms (cradding = arm movement)

Technology

• Affects childrens learning ability

• Learn better when we actively engage with another person

Putting words together

• First sentences

• Telegraphic speech = two word utterances

  • Typically noun and verb

Over-regularization

• Treat irregular forms as if they're regular

  • Ex - past tense of go is goed

Private speech

• Children talk out loud to themselves

Conversations

• Children are egocentric

  • They have conversations by talking about what they want to talk about

  • Often talk to each other about 2 very different things

    • Collective monologues

Narratives

• 5 years old

• Begins to have beginning, middle, and end for their stories

Pragmatic development

• Understand how language is used to communicate

Later development

• Learn more words and meanings behind them

• Learn puns, sarcasm, jokes,

Theoretical issues

• Language development study was based on behaviourism

  • Language is taught through reinforcement and punishment

• Nativism countered this

  • We can understand and produce sentences we had never learned before

    • Ex - wented - mouses

Nativism

• Chomsky

• Says we are born with universal grammar

• Is this because of a universal environment

Computational modeling

• Manipulate both innate structrue and environment input to determine what is cruical for children's language acquisition

Connectionism

• Emphasizes the simultaneous activity of numerous interconnected processing units

Non-linguistic symbols

• Symbols used as communication even without language

Using symbols as information

• Dual representation

  • Represent mentally 2 ways at the same time

    • As a real object and as a symbol for something else

    • Ex - cigarette in mouth FIOS

  • Children find this hard - preoperational stage - they are too egocentric

Drawing and writing

• 3-4 years old start to draw