Language (ch 11) pt 1 Flashcards
Properties of language:
-Communicative (express feelings, thoughts, ideas, experiences, etc.)
-Arbitrarily symbolic
-Regularly structured (follow certain rules)
-Structured at multiple levels (components can be combined to form larger units)
-Dynamic/generative
Expressive Language
Encoding & production of language output (Broca’s area → communicating)
Recepetive Language
Comprehension & decoding of language input (Wernicke’s area → listening)
Phones
The smallest distinguishable unit of all possible human speech sounds (born with ability to recognize all languages).
Phonemes
The particular speech sounds that users of a particular language can identify (subset of phones).
Morphemes
The smallest unit of sound that denotes meaning within a particular language.
Content Morpheme
The sounds that convey the bulk of the meaning.
Function Morpheme
Add detail & nuance to the meaning of the content morpheme or help the content morpheme for the grammatical context.
Lexicon
Describes the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a person’s linguistic repertoire.
Syntax
The way in which users of a particular language put words together to create a sentence.
Language & Nurture
Children’s speech patterns and vocabulary reflect the patterns and vocabulary of the persons in their environment & conditioning (Skinner → disproved because children say things they’ve never heard of/had reinforced).
Motherese
child-directed speech.
Language & Nature
Humans have an innate “Language Acquisition Device” (LAD) that is coded in the genes & which facilitates language acquisition (Noam Chomsky).
LAD Evidence
Able to acquire language at a rapid rate, able to discern flow of auditory stimuli at the beginnings & endings of words even though there are no silences between them, deaf children acquire sign language in the same order/rate as hearing, and are able to understand variable pronunciation.
