Language and Thought Flashcards
Components of language:
Phoneme → morpheme → word → phrase → sentence
Using the normal distribution IQ scores, where 100 is the average of an age group, how many of the age group scores will fall between 85 and 115?
Two thirds
Phoneme
Single unit of sound that changes meaning (example: dog vs. log), about 40 in English
Unbound vs. bound morphemes
- Unbound morphemes are words, and they can be either content (example: dog) or function (example: the)
- Bound morphemes are affixes and suffixes, and are always function (example: plural s)
What is the processing system for function morphemes/words?
Syntactic processing
What is the processing system for content words?
Semantic processing
Syntax
Refers to the structure of language → phrases and sentences
Syntax is cued by:
- Word order - who is doing what to whom?
- English word order tends to be: Subject - verb - object
Word class
Whether something is an adjective, noun, or verb
Language-relevant brain areas (right-handed people)
Left hemisphere, mostly lower edge of frontal lobe and upper edge of temporal lobe
Broca’s aphasia
Difficulty in the production of speech
Broca’s aphasia characteristics
- Issues with function words and structure, telegraphic speech
- Uses far more content than function words
- Those affected appear to understand you, but comprehension is often impaired
- Can count automatically, songs are often retained
- Production of speech more impaired than comprehension
Wernicke’s area
Left temporal lobe, next to primary auditory cortex → translates sounds into meaning
Characteristics of Wernicke’s aphasia
- Intonation, production of speech not as forced as for Broca’s aphasia
- Mixed up content words (understanding and production of them impaired)
- Can understand structure of sentence, but sentences do not make sense; ‘jargon aphasia’ - fluent, but nonsensical
Difficulties of people with Wernicke’s aphasia
- Phonological sequence processing (how you put sounds together)
- Semantic ‘word sized’ representation (dog, chase)
- Being able to map between phonology and semantics (dog vs. DOG)
Proposition
Statement that expresses an idea
Semantic roles
What roles individuals or objects, etc. occupy within a sentence
Noam Chomsky
Thought about surface structure (syntax), but also looked at deep structure (semantics); idea that syntax interacts with meaning
Early infant speech perception
- Birth: Preference for human and animal language sounds; able to perceive many basic phoneme contrasts, not restricted to sounds in the language they are growing up in
- 3 months: Discriminate between human and animal sounds
- 9 months: Perception of sound becomes categorical, specific to language they are growing up in, can detect difference between voiced vs. unvoiced sounds
High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) technique
- Attached dummy to a pressure transducer; baby sucks hard on dummy → sound produced (operant conditioning - baby knows that if they give a strong suck, they get a sound)
- Downward trend shows infants habituating to the sound/becoming bored with it
- Different sound introduced → infant sucking rate goes up; babies can detect change in sound
Infant speech sounds
- 0-2 months: Cooing
- 6-7 months: Reduplicated babbling, same syllable over and over
- 10 months: Baby’s sounds have adapted to language it hears, realise that certain sounds are meaningful and others are not
- 11‐12 months: Variegated babbling (syllables with different consonants and vowels; starting to form words)
Reasons for infants’ limited speech sounds
- Shape of the infant mouth and vocal tract
- Development of motor cortex
Protowords to words: Deb Roy
- Protoword: Combination of syllables used as a replacement for lots of words
- Marks the realisation that sounds have meaning/can be representative
Comprehension vs. production
- Word comprehension (receptive vocabulary) precedes productive vocabulary by an average of 4 months
- Initial acquisition rate for comprehension is twice that of production
- Production goes along at a slow rate before taking off at about 18 months
‘Vocabulary burst’
- Major increase in productive vocabulary acquisition rate after first 50 words are learned
- Due to: Symbolic nature of language (object has a corresponding name or term), control over articulation (developing motor abilities), easier retrieval (developing memory system)
Overextension vs. underextension of meaning
- Underextension: ‘Dog’ used only for family dog, but not other dogs
- Overextension: ‘Dog’ refers to dogs and cats
How does overextension change as vocabulary increases?
As you develop more vocabulary, your use of overextension decreases since you can retrieve more words
Holophrase
A single word that stands for an entire statement (example: ‘water’ pointing outside - want to go and jump in the puddles)
Early sentences
- 2 years - children begin to combine words
- Children have specific meaning (semantic) relations they like to convey, often early grammar tends to be quite telegraphic - focus more on semantics than syntax
- Often use pivot grammars (two-word phrases in which one is a function word and another is a content word)
When does a child’s use of syntax begin to resemble adult language?
Age 4
Language bioprogram hypothesis
- Children are innately predisposed to acquire the syntax of language
- Evidence: Creoles and pidgin (taking input from target language and adding it to innate knowledge)
Language Acquisition Device (LAD): Noam Chomsky
Hypothetical tool in the brain that allows human beings to learn a language, children are born with it
Sensitive period for language acquisition
- Ends by puberty once lateralisation occurs (language centres of the brain go into the left hemisphere for right-handers; harder for people to acquire critical components of language, particularly syntax)
- Deaf Signers (Newport, 1990): Syntax errors in sign language greater for those exposed to the language later
General learning capacities theory
- Children have highly developed pattern recognition systems
- Can pick up on abstract patterns in language - statistical learning