9 - Language and Thought Flashcards
Christopher, the English boy
learns languages really well, knows sixteen, can speak French as good as a native speaker, learned Greek in three months, can decipher the rules to fictional languages that advanced linguistics scholars can’t. But scores below normal in intelligence tests, fails simple four-year-old level cognitive tests, can’t learn rules for games like tic-tac-toe, lives in halfway house because does not have the cognitive capacity to make decision, reason, or solve problems in a way that would allow him to live independently
language
system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules of grammar and convey meaning
grammar
a set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages
what are the three things that distinguish human language from veret monkey yelps?
- Complex structure vs simpler signaling systems, ie humans can express infinite novel sentences and express range of ideas and concepts
- Humans use words to refer to intengible things like “unicorn” or “democracy”
- Humans use language to name, categorize, and describe thing to ourselves when we think, which influences how knowledge is organized in our brains, ex: bee doesn’t think “I’m going to fly north to find more honey to impress the queen bee!”
phonemes
the smallest units of sound that are recognizable as speech rather than as random noises
phonological rules
inidicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds
morphemes
smallest meaningful units of language
morphological rules
indicate how morphemes can be combined to form rules
content morphemes
things like cat, dog, and take
function morphemes
grammatical, like “and”, “or”, “when”
syntactical rules
indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences
deep structure
the meaning of a sentence
surface structure
how a sentence is worded
how do we comprehend deep and surface structure?
process surface, extract deep, forget surface
“la-la-la” vs “ra-ra-ra”
japanese babies with pacifiers that play “lalala”. when they lost interest the sound changed to “rarara” which renwed the babies interest, which shows that they could hear the difference.
babies and babbling
all babies babble different constants in a different order (d and t sounds are babbled before the m and n sounds are heard) shows that they aren’t just imitating sounds they hear and that babbling is a natural part of language development process
deaf babies and babbling
deaf babies babble less and relatively later than hearing babies, but they still babble the constanants in the same order. And they babble with their hands at the same time that hearing babies babble with their voices.
fast mapping
children map a word onto an underlying concept after only a single exposure
telgraphic speech
devoid of function morphemes and consist mostly of content words
in which way do two year olds show a basic understanding of language rules?
their two word sentences are grammatical, for example: “throw ball” instead of “ball throw” and “more milk” rather than “milk more”
What shows that language acquisition is not simply a matter of imitation?
children overgeneralize grammatical rules they implictly learn through speech around them and use the ules to create verbal forms they’ve never heard, lik e”runned” instead of “ran”
at what age are many of the language acquisition pocesses complete?
4 to 5 years old
chinese adoptees and english development
chinese preschoolers who are adopted by English speaking parents progress through the same sequence of linguistic milestones as do infants born into English speaking families, suggesting that these milestones reflect experience with English rather than general cognitive development.
nativist theory
language devleopment is best explained as an innate, biological capacity
