Lec 25 Language 1 & 2 Flashcards
Critical period evidence 1: Isabelle
critical period case study; hidden away by deranged mother; minimal attention, never spoken to; discovered at 6, had no language; cognitive development
Critical period evidence 1: Genie
critical period case study; discovered at 13; went through 1- and 2-word stages almost immediately; fast/varied verb acquisition, w/ plural and possessives; eventually plurals, possessives; never beyond 2.5 year old level
no ok: too old
Critical period evidence 1: Chelsea
critical period case study; born deaf, mistakenly diagnosed as retarded; raised at home, no exposure to sign language or speech training; otherwise healthy and normal; age 31, test shown merely deaf, can hear well with hearing aids; acquired a sizable vocabulary; no grammar –> day, “breakfast eating girl,” “banana the eat”
not ok: too old
Critical period evidence 2: second language learning
in the first stages: adults are better than children at learning; long-term outcome: children»_space; adults
evidence: Johnson & Newport (1989)
- native Chinese & Korean speakers (came to the US at varying ages)
- immense exposure to English for > 5 years
- judge whether a sentence is grammatical
- -> age of exposure matters, number of years of experience does not
acquistion of language late in life
deaf children’s ASL
- native learners: children of deaf signing parents
- early learners: first exposed to ASL 4-6
- late learners: first exposed to ASL after 12
all fine of basic word order; on subtleties such as inflection, though, natives > earlies > lates
agrammatism
appears in Broca’s aphasia patients; have difficulty using grammatical constructions; also shown in comprehension
e.g., Q: The horse kicks the cow: which image? –> patients performed poorly (at chance); correct answer specified by grammar –> impaired in Broca’s
Wernicke’s aphasia
damage to the temporal cortex; damage to the superior temporal gyrus; first described by Wernicke; poor speech comprehension and production of meaningless speech (speech is fluent and unlabored; appears grammatical: include functional words, complex tense, and subordinate clauses; uses few content words: sentence doesn’t make sense); doesn’t understnad questions, can’t say names of things (make up words/sounds) –> similar to symantic dimensia; comprehension impaired even when assessed with pointing responses; patients appear unaware of their deficit –> unlike Broca’s (bothers them); follow social conversations, remain sensitive to facial expression, tone of voice, pauses between sentences, etc. –> knows when supposed to answer
articulation fluent and production appears grammatical; lost content words; no longer comprehend the meaning of words/sentences
cooing
first basic stage of language development; occurs in the first few months; small range of meaningless sounds; simple “goo” sounds; gurgling
babbling
second basic stage of language development; amount 6-8 months; large range of meaningless sounds; no linguisitic intent: just playing with the apparatus; even deaf children babble, in sign!; gradually becomes more like talking
single words
third basic stage of language development; about 10-12 months; girls first; names (mommy, dada), objects (sppon, doggy), actions (eat, push), greetings (bye-bye) –> concrete words; parents typically know all the words; no “function words” (a, is, to); no inflections (plural, tense)
word utterances
fourth basic stage of language development; about 2 years; e.g., “mommy sock,” “no eat”; consistent word order –> “mommy throw” and “throw ball” BUT never “ball throw” or “throw mommy”
deaf isolates do not go beyond this stage
complex utterances
fifth basic stage of language; after 2 years; vocab takes off –> parents can no longer keep track, a 5 year old know ~10,000 words, between 2 and 5 they average ~ 10 words/day (almost 1/hour); steady growth of grammatical complexity –> 5 years = roughly adult grammar, longer + also more complex (e.g., embedding)
specific language impairment
a syndrome in which individuals seem to have normal intelligence but problems in learning the rules of language; general intelligence ok; hereditary; can hear, no motor apparatus impairment, not autistic
e. g., the “wug” test:
- This is a wug. Oh, look, here are two of them; there are two ____.
- typical 4 year olds blurt out “wugs!”
- individual with SLI responds “wug… wugness, isn’t it? No. I see. You want to pair… pair it up. [Next is “zat”.] Zackle?”
evidence for the domain specificity of language acquisition
double dissociation
-dissociation between language and general intelligence: impaired language ability, preserved intelligence –> SLI, aphasia
-preserved language ability, impaired intelligence –> Spina Bifida, William’s syndrome
-language separate from other cognition
acquistion of language late in life
deaf children’s ASL
- native learners: children of deaf signing parents
- early learners: first exposed to ASL 4-6
- late learners: first exposed to ASL after 12
all fine of basic word order; on subtleties such as inflection, though, natives > earlies > lates
second language learning
in the first stages: adults are better than children at learning; long-term outcome: children»_space; adults
evidence: Johnson & Newport (1989)
- native Chinese & Korean speakers (came to the US at varying ages)
- immense exposure to English for > 5 years
- judge whether a sentence is grammatical
- -> age of exposure matters, number of years of experience does not
independent of critical period
basic word-order, basic vocab –> can use memory
dependent on critical period
finely tuned phonology (e.g., accent-free speech), inflection systems, subtle syntax (e.g., negation, wh-questions)
pidgin
not a real human language; a communication system; makeshift languages used to ease communication in multilingual communities
e. g., Hawaii in the 1870s
- laborers came to sugar plantations from China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, etc.
syntactically impoverished, w/ no word order; no function words (aux. verbs, inflections, articles)
kids who grow up learning the pidgin become creoles
creole
kids who grow up learning pidgin; they invent a new language, based on pidgin, but with many more grammatical properties; uniform word order, complex syntax, function words
creolizing = changing pidgin into new human language
Example = Simon (deaf)
- parents were late ASL learners (also deaf, inconsistent grammar), provide Simon with only ASL input –> only learned from parents
- Simon’s own ASL is refined, expanded, grammatical –> version more complex than parents
- *a single child can create a whole new language!
evidence that human language to a child is an instinct
phonology
1 of the 5 elements that all human language has; basic sounds (and signs); different languages choose different subsets; no real boundaries between words –> children have to learn to segment speech as part of language learning; segmentation usually helped by top-down processing –> s(___)tence, can link this together.
evidence that specific language impairments are heritable
SlI runs in families BUT immeresed in an environment with bad linguistic input
Twin Studies:
- concordance rates: the degree to which “if one twin is impaired at certain language tasks, the other is also impaired”
- identical twins: 75% concordance rate
- fraternal twins: 45% concordance rate
morphology
1 of the 5 elements that all human language has; morphemes = smallest meaningful units (dog, complain, -s, -ed); Saussure: “the arbitrariness of the sign”; the average English speaker knows about 60,000 morphemes; word learning is a hard problem (whole-object, mutual exclusivity, taxonomic assumptions –> Lecture 2)
syntax
1 of the 5 elements that all human language has; grammar of the language (word order, phrase structure, rule); infinite use of finite media (a combinatorial system –> infinite # of sentences can be made with limited # of words; not exclusive to language: muisc, DNA); the infinite mechanism: recursion
ambiguous sentences
syntax; there are different rules to interpret the same string of words; e.g., newspaper headlines
recursion
a property of rule systems that allows a symbol to appear both on the left side of a definition (the part being defined) and on the right side (the part providing the definition); recursive rules within syntax, for example, allow a sentence to include another sentence as one of its constituents, as in the following example: “Solomon says that Jacob is a great singer”
discourse
of the 5 elements that all humans language has; linguistic context for a sentence; including: shared communication history between speakers and listeners; can have different descriptions for the same image
tangram-card study: language processing is not isolated from linguistic context –> why it might be difficult to communicate even if you speak the same language –> different background, learning
pragmatics
1 of the 5 elements that all human language has; close to TOM; how do we understand the intended meaning even when it is not expressed directly?
Gricean Maxim:
- the maxim of quantity: be as informative as is required, but not sure (Parent: did you finish your homework?; Child: I finished my algebra; Parent: Well, get busy and finish your English too! –> parent’s conclusion is drawn from what the child said = the maxim of quantity)
- the maxim of relevance: make your contribution relevent
Non human communication systems
no phonology (sounds), morphology (words), syntax (put pieces together); no arbitrary names; no recursive syntax
Laterality
speech is lateralized to the left hemisphere in 90% of the population –> true for 96% of right handed people, 85% of ambidextrous people, and 73% of left handed people; critical in surgical situations (test for language laterality: fMRI, or more reliably, the Wada test –> disable one hemisphere vs. the other)
left hemisphere
brain hemisphere more specialized for the analysis of sequences of stimuli and for high-frequency (details) input –> things that change rapidly
brain damage in this hemisphere = when drawing details left out, outline only; other hemisphere does work
Right Hemisphere
brain hemisphere more specialized for the analysis of space and low frequency (global) info
brain damage in this hemisphere = when drawing show details, not outline; other hemisphere does work
Broca’s aphasia
damage to the left frontal lobe (Broca’s area); described first by Paul Broca (1861); have slow, laborious, and nonfluent speech; semantic OK, can understand –> difficulty retrieving words; impairments not limited to motor function (patients find it easier to say content words than function words –> “a”, “the”, little words with grammatical meaning); agrammatism (have difficulty using grammatical constructions); impaired at grammatical processing (in both production –> slowly produced sounds AND comprehension); can interpret based on content words and semantics (e.g., understands “the man swats the mosquito” not “the horse kicked the cow”
difficulty with articulation; agrammatism (in comprehension and production); retain content words
