Language Flashcards
What is Language?
A way of imparting information and communicating with each other
Communication
An aspect of language; enables us to express or convey thoughts and ideas
Input Modalities
Language Comprehension;
comprehending and absorbing what we hear or read
Output modalities
Language production;
verbal or written language
Four Aspects of Language
Phonology, Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics
Phonology
The study of individual sounds that make up the words we produce.
Phonemes
The smallest unit of sounds that contributes to meaning
Example: Shin = /Sh/ + /I/ + /N?
Speech Perception
An natural ability to be able to distinguish where one phoneme finishes and the other one starts.
Syntax
The set of rules that a language follows in order for people to be able to comprehend that language
Descriptive Grammar
Regularities that are used by native speakers of a particular language. Not to be confused with prescriptive grammar.
Grammar
A language governed by a complex set of rules.
There is an emphasis on the structural rules so other people can understand us. Even dialects follow some form of specific grammar
Phrases and Sentences
Rules that determine the order that words should go in, how the sentence is made up with the different components of grammar, etc.
Language Acquisition Device
A study by Chomsky in 1965;
Suggests that we have in-born structures in our brain (LAD) that organises the language we can hear.
Morphemes
Smallest units of language that can carry meaning.
2 types of morphemes:
Content morpheme - e.g. colours
Function morpheme - e.g. and, “-ing”
Pragmatics
The combination of world knowledge (context) and word knowledge that makes communication more successful.
Broca’s area
Located in the the posterior area of the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere;
Language centre of the brain;
Damage to Broca’s area
Good comprehension (input modality), but struggles with language production (output modality)
Wernicke’s area
Found in the posterior area of the temporal lobe, in the left hemisphere of the brain;
Associated with the processing of language inputs
Damage to Wernicke’s area
People can speak but they often don’t make sense; speech is incoherent e.g. poor grammatical structure or syntax
Language and Early Infancy: 7 months
Crying and cooing;
Child’s attempt to interact with the world;
Communication in its earliest form
4-6 months
babbling using all sounds;
repetition of all the small sounds they are able to make
6 - 9 months
babbling becomes more focused to the “home language”;
Child discards the other sounds not attached to their home language;
May be affected by multilingualism
10 - 12 months
First words develop;
words are more recognisable but individual
18 - 24 months
Child begins to use meaningful two-word phrases like “ all gone” or “more milk”
2 - 3 years
Child begins to use 3-word phrases in the correct order but does not necessarily use correct inflection
Example: “we goed shops”
4 - 5 years
Child can speak with nearly complete syntax; adult form of grammar
5 - 7 years
Child is able to use and understand more complex language including past and future tenses, make believe scenarios, and humour
9 years and older
Understand almost all forms of home language(s)
FOXP2 gene
Researchers studied the KE Family and found that carriers of the gene develop a genetic language impairment wherein there are scattered activations throughout the brain to draw on all possible language activations to compromise for their difficulty on coherence.
Motherese
Child-directed speech characterised by high pitched tones and exaggerated intonation to parse speech signals for infants.
Child-directed Speech
Fernald did a study in 1985 to prove that infants have a preference for CDS even if the voice wasn’t coming from their own mothers.
Importance of babbling and cute gibberish at 7 - 12 months
Babbling is an important stage in the language development and should be encouraged by parents in order to ensure speech development is not delayed. It also helps parents detect speech impairments at an early age.
The one-word speaker
Children can understand more words than they can produce. First words are commonly content words and are usually produced around 12 months.
The two-word speaker
At around 24 months, the child is starting to grow their vocabulary. This stage is the beginnings of syntax. Their language still lacks function words, but the combination of content words build-up their sentence context.
Later stages of language learning
Steven Pinker describes this as “all hell breaks loose,” due to the sudden explosion of vocabulary. At about 5 years old, a child would already know 10-15,000 words.
Genie case
Patient was born in 1957; Grew up in an impoverished environment; Discovered at 13 years old.
Her case was enabled the researchers to conclude that the period between birth and 13 years old is critical for language development.
Isabelle case
1938.
Discovered at 6 years old, researchers found out she cannot speak because she was brought up by a deaf mother who didn’t expose her to any spoken language. By age 7, she had a massive language explosion after being taught.
The original of language: a gradualist view
Corballis believes that language is not uniquely human - there is mental continuity between humans and animals.
Broca’s Aphasia
Speech is slow, laboured, and ungrammatical. Many content words, but few function words;
They have relatively good auditory comprehension, but problems become more evident when syntax is complex.
Wernicke’s Aphasia
Speech is fluent, but semantically empty. They are unable to explain clearly, often using lots of output modalities which are mostly quite empty and irrelevant to the context.
They often use neologism when they can’t think of particular words.
