Lecture 3 & 4 Flashcards
Williams Syndrome
- Spontaneous deletion of
small segment of 7th chromosome - average IQ = 55
- poor coordination
- hoarse voice
- “Pixie” or “elfin” face, heart and aorta problems,
hyperacute hearing. - Extremely friendly, “affinity” for music.
- Low intelligence, high linguistic capacity
Specific Language Impairment (SLI)
- Normal intelligence, specific linguistic issues
- Apparently affecting 8-9% of the population
Why does Eric Lenneberg claim that language happens to everybody?
- No conscious decision is involved
- All human communities have language
- Little direct instruction needed
- Language emerges in spite of many deficits
- independent of general intelligence
What is tense development in SLI?
- Typically developing
children use tense
consistently by age 4 - Children with SLI lag
up to age 8
Who is Christopher? What is his story?
- A language savant studied by Neil Smith and Ianthi Tsimpli
- Brain damaged but with remarkable gift for language
- Unable to pass the false belief task (traditionally used for diagnosis of autistic children)
- Unable to learn logically possible artificial languages that violate principles of natural language
Emerges at the
same rate and end up with the same result
regardless of teaching or intensive practice
Biologically determined behaviors
If Language acquisition is a biologically determined behavior, what does this mean?
It shouldn’t be
much affected by correction. Nor should it reduce
to simple imitation.
What is evidence for language acquisition being a biologically determined behavior?
- Quantity/quality of correction varies but children
get to the same place anyway - Children are pretty impervious to direct
correction.
What is motherese?
slower, exaggerated pitch, hyperarticulated, more
“careful”
- children may prefer it
- it is not needed for acquisition
- grammatically complex
What does linguistic knowledge comprise?
- units (phonemes, morphemes, words…)
- rules for combining them
Rules of language are
what?
generalizations about patterns
How do children acquire a language?
by hypothesizing rules
and then trying them out.
A human child’s brain does what?
- Follows its own agenda in acquiring language.
- observes adult language, but pays little attention to
correction and it does not simply imitate.
When do you need environmental input in regards to critical periods?
You need environmental input at the right age,
within the critical period.
What are the steps in acquisition?
Step 1: Hear adult language.
Step 2: Hypothesize a rule R 0 to account for some
aspect of adult language.
Step 3: Speak using rule R 0.
Step 4: Go back to Step 1, but this time try to
improve rule R 0, replacing it by R 1, to better fit adult language
What is the wug experiment?
A test designed to investigate the acquisition of plural-formation and other rules of grammar. A child is presented with an imaginary object and is told, ‘This is a wug’. Then a second instance is presented, and the child is asked what the two are called. The correct answer is wugs, pronounced with a voiced /z/ sound, as in dogs, because the plural-forming letter follows a voiced consonant /g/. After a voiceless consonant such as /t/, the plural-forming letter should be a voiceless /s/, as in cats, and after a sibilant, an additional syllable should have a voiced /z/, as in verses.
What does it mean by “two steps forward, one step back” in regards to children’s language acquisition?
Sometimes the child seems to
have things right,
but later gets them wrong,
and later gets them right
again. The correction parabola shows this.
What does NOT facilitate language acquisition for all human children?
imitation and correction
What does language consist of?
units (phonemes, morphemes,
words etc.) and rules for combining them
How do children infer rules?
by generalizing from data
Language acquisition happens to all human children under _______________.
normal circumstances
When does language acquisition start?
extremely early; in the womb
How does language acquisition start in the womb?
unborn children hear their mother’s language
and notice general properties
What happens to language acquisition after birth?
After birth, children rapidly develop a sense for what distinctions
matter for the language(s) they’re exposed to
refers to the phenomenon where infants initially perceive a wide range of speech sounds but gradually learn to categorize them into distinct categories based on the sounds present in their native language
Categorical Perception
How are /r/ and /l/ used in English compared to Korean?
in English, they are used as separate phonemes. In Korean, they are used as one phoneme
How do we test infants?
Measuring sucking rate. Higher sucking rate for novelty.
What are the stages to testing infants?
Stage 1 Familiarization:
play a syllable until the baby is bored
Stage 2 Test:
one group hears a novel syllable, and the control group keeps hearing the same syllable
What does experience with language do to speech perception?
alters speech perception permanently
tongue curled so tip is behind alveolar ridge
Retroflex
tip of tongue on teeth
Dental
They impose structure and derive underlying rules on their linguistic input that goes beyond what is present in the input
what children do when acquiring language
What do all human languages share?
fundamental properties, they are all equal in a deep way
What is the equality in acquisition?
All human languages are acquired by children in similar ways
What is the equality in complex rules?
All human languages have complex rules for phonology, morphology, and syntax
What is the equality in Expressiveness?
All languages are equally capable of expressing complex thoughts
At one point, what did many people believe about modern hunter gatherers?
At one point many people believed that modern hunter gatherers might speak simpler languages. THEY DONT
What is the forbidden experiment?
Isolating infants from language to study the origins of language or human nature
What are the 3 case studies of language?
- Children without early exposure to language
- Pidgins
- New sign languages
explain the case of genie
- Discovered in LA in 1970 at 13.5 years old
- Confined in closet since infancy
- Punished for making sounds
- Received little linguistic stimulation.
explain pidgin languages
Various historical contexts led to groups of people with no common languages having to work or trade together
* Lacking a common language, a so-called
pidgin language emerges
What are the features of pidgins?
- Relatively simple grammar
- Vocabulary often limited to specific areas of use
- Significant reliance on context
Another kind of contact language
Creoles
Where did creole evolve from?
typically evolve in colonial settlements
Where did pidgins evolve from?
typically evolve in trading contexts
Usually secondary, non-native languages for their users
Pidgins
- Native language of a population
- Inherit a great deal of grammar from their parent languages
- Much more grammatical complexity than
traditionally thought
Creoles
Background of Nicaraguan Sign Language
- Up to Sandinista take-over in 1979, deaf children were at home, isolated from other deaf people
- Deaf children had typically come up their own
home-sign systems to communicate with their
families - The Sandinista created first schools for the deaf
- Some efforts were made to teach the children
lip reading and speech, but without much success
What happened first to NSL?
Shared conventions about some of the home signs quickly evolved
* Result: something like a pidgin; Lenguaje de Signos Nicaraguense (LSN)
What happened second to NSL?
The younger children (4+) that entered the
schools observed their older peers communicating in LSN
* Their own use of it quickly took on a new life of its own
* They soon exhibited a far richer morphological and syntactic system, which evolved into
Idioma de Signos Nicaraguense (ISN)
(Nicaraguan Sign Language; NSL)
What’s a new direction in language?
Laboratory languages:
* Experimental approaches in which participants
construct miniature languages in the lab!
* Change happens much more rapidly than in natural languages
* We can control factors we can’t control in the real world
What are the complex structure of all fully fledged languages?
- syntax
- morphology
- phonology
Forming sentences out of words
Syntax
Forming words out of morphemes
Morphology
Forming morphemes out of phonemes
Phonology
How do languages very in how complex they are?
languages vary in how much/what kind
of complexity is present on each level
Explain dialects
Every variety of language is a dialect; Their status is purely social
What is an example of a dialect?
African-American Vernacular English; AAVE has a complex grammatical system, which
in some ways diverges substantially from
standard English
Are all human languages equally capable of expressing language?
YES
what is a famous counter-hypothesis to All human languages being equally capable of expressing complex thought?
Linguistic relativity
Language determines thought!
linguistic relativity
Who is Benjamin Whorf?
He believed that the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world
What is a worry about language vocabulary?
other languages may have simpler, less complex vocabularies than English?
Vocabulary is closely linked to ______________? what does this mean?
Vocabulary is closely linked to culture. Complex
areas of culture have complex vocabularies
What do languages do when culture changes?
languages readily add new words
How are language rules and language vocabulary different?
rules of language change more slowly
how are all languages more similar deep down than people tend to assume?
because all human languages are acquired
in the same way, by children with human brains
