Topic 7- language Flashcards
What is language?
A system of spoken and written communication with communication involving both speech production and comprehension. Not all language is verbal; in fact, not all language is human.
Speech and language are one of the hallmarks of humanity which allows us to function in society. We use language to exchange thoughts and ideas, to teach and to learn, to inform and support and for many other reasons. The fact that babies learn language as quickly as they do has led scientists to the conclusion that the human brain must have developed an expertise for language processing throughout the course of evolution.
Human communication is very complex and not always verbal- e.g. sign language and body language
We also have written language which we read and write.
What are phenomes?
Human language is made up of many elements. The most fundamental elements are phonemes or language sounds and there are actually more phonemes than letters in the alphabet. For example, the letter c can be associated with a different sound depending on its positioning in a word as in the case of ace and cat. Phenomes are the smallest element of language.
Changing a single phoneme can alter the meaning of an entire word such as in the example of bat with a b and pat with a p.
Each phoneme has unique characteristics which distinguishes it from others. The main difference between ‘bat’ and ‘pat’ is the onset of the sound with a difference of about 100 ms. This can change the entire meaning of a word.
Just seeing a different mouth movement can alter our perception of a sound which emphasises the importance of vision in the speech chain; this is called the McGurk effect.
What are morphemes?
Morphemes are the second smallest language unit and the special thing about them is that they carry meaning. For example, the prefix morpheme dys- in dysfunction has a meaning making the word negative whereas the affix -ed turns something into past tense whilst -ing turns something into a verb.
What is syntax?
This is the grammatical structure of a language so in English for example we have the subject-verb-object structure.
The crucial thing here is that even though a sentence may be grammatically correct it may be complete nonsense such as the sentence ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’- the sentence is grammatically correct whereas ‘sleep colourless furiously ideas green’ is not but neither of them are meaningful.
Another interesting feature that we can do with syntax is to introduce ambiguity- when Groucho Marx said ‘I shot an elephant in my pyjamas’ it was meant for the audience to consider two options option a that the elephant is in his pyjamas and option b that the elephant was wearing his pyjamas. This syntactically correct sentence has two potential meanings and it is only through context that this can be resolved.
Explain the semantics of a sentence.
We need to consider semantics which is the meaning of the sentence. This is where we can distinguish between a syntactically correct sentence which is nonsense from a sentence which conveys something meaningful.
Pragmatics addresses how we use different words within the context of a sentence to convey meaning. For example, the word ball can mean many different things, it can be an item a fancy event or the part of your foot depending on the context in which you use the word.
We also use intonation or prosody to convey meaning- so if I’m ok I might say Hey. if I’m happy I might say Hey! And if I’m sad or sympathetic I might say Hey… in this way the same word can convey very different meanings within a sentence.
How does the vocabulary of children grow?
Language is a cognitive ability that is fostered across cultures and the way we learn them is almost universal.
Our vocabulary grows across the lifespan with children learning around 13000 words by age 6 and teenagers learning around 60000 words by the time they are 18.
Remarkably, babies are very good at discriminating sounds that adults cannot which allows them to adopt two very different languages with ease and no consequences of an accent in later life but we lose this discriminability within the first year of life.
Explain what Noam Chomsky postulated about the development of language?
That we have an innate neural circuitry which is dedicated to language involving a network of different areas which have evolved in order to facilitate speech comprehension and production. He called this the language acquisition device.
Whether this is true and language is indeed innately human is an unresolved debate in the literature but the universality of language acquisition and children’s ability to apply grammatical rules in novel and sometimes wrong contexts as is the case with irregular past tense verbs indicates that there is at least some truth to this argument
What did the case study of Genie teach us about language?
Genie Wiley was a 13-year-old girl that was discovered in 1970 by a social worker. Genie was severely neglected and not exposed to any language or just minimal language growing up. Whilst she is reported to have developed some communicative abilities, she struggled a lot with learning grammar which supports the idea that there is a critical period for language acquisition which ends around the age of 7.
What did Sapir Whorph propose about language?
‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world’
The different ways in which different cultures use language shapes their cognition to a significant degree- language may not shape your whole being but certainly shapes what you pay attention to.
What is broca’s area?
Broca’s area is the underlying structure responsible for language production.
Broca had a patient who he named Tan because he could only produce the word tan whilst alive but no meaningful sentences beyond that. He could understand what he was asked perfectly well as indicated by the non-verbal responses he gave. He also was reported not to have any physical issues with the underlying anatomy related to speech as he could produce sounds post-mortem. Broca found that Tan had substantial damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus; this gave indication of the role of this structure which is now called Broca’s area.
Broca’s aphasia is a non-fluent type and results from damage to a part of the brain called Broca’s area, which is located in the frontal lobe, usually on the left side. Some patients will be able to produce some words but not in a way that is meaningful or productive in terms of conversation.
Not all language is verbal but it appears that the underlying brain mechanisms are quite similar- in a study Petitto and colleagues found that deaf subjects activate the same area Broca’s area when signing as compared to hearing individuals.
What is Wernicke’s area?
Wernicke’s area is responsible for language comprehension.
Wernicke reported patients who could speak fluently but what they said carried no meaning. Furthermore, the patients could also not understand what was being said to them. Similarly to Broca he observed their brains for damage post-mortem and found this in the posterior part of the left hemisphere in the superior temporal gyrus near the primary auditory cortex.
One of the core differences between these two types of aphasia is that whilst patients with Wernicke’s aphasia are unaware of their deficit people with Broca’s aphasia are aware which is very frustrating for those patients
Explain how Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas work together?
These two brain areas do not operate in isolation but rather in a wider system leading to a whole set of different conditions.
All of this operates within a system so if we hear a word to be repeated it is processed by the auditory cortex which links to Wernicke’s area where we make sense of speech sounds through the arcuate fasciculus. Wernicke’s area then communicates with Broca’s area which is responsible for generating the content of the speech output this is then communicated to the motor cortex for the physical speech output this very simple way of looking at. This process encompasses what is referred to as the Wernicke-Geschwind Model
Explain early research into bilingualism.
18th and 19th century philosophy saw monolingualism as an ideal. This was also supported by the first set of empirical studies enquiring into the non-verbal cognition of bilingual children and young people conducted by Saer in the early 1920s. He administered several measures of intelligence and behaviour to children and university students and reported that English monolingual participants from rural areas scored higher than Welsh-English bilinguals on various measures of general intelligence. The author concluded that bilingualism causes mental confusion which manifests itself in a variety of areas and that this cannot be better accounted for by factors other than language use.
Initially these findings were supported by other papers as well however, research from the first half of the 20th century was later argued to have contained substantial methodological flaws, including taking an unsuitable theoretical approach to the concept of intelligence, testing bilinguals in their weaker language and not making use of statistical analyses, most importantly, they did not specify whether the groups were matched on a variety of aspects, most notably socioeconomic status.
Four decades after the initial findings a study conducted by Peal and Lambert was published. This study is considered to be the major turning point for the views regarding bilingual cognition.
The authors administered a variety of intelligence measures to ten-year-old monolingual and bilingual children in Canada. Their findings revealed that, after carefully controlling for language of task administration, age, gender, intelligence, and SES, bilingual children outperformed their monolingual peers on measures of verbal and non-verbal intelligence. The authors concluded that the bilingual experience granted the children in their study a form of mental flexibility and, in turn, a more diversified set of mental abilities.
What is one of the only consistently reported disadvantages faced by bilingual children?
Today, one of the only consistently reported disadvantages that bilingual children are thought to have is a disadvantage in vocabulary size and lexical access. Not surprisingly, bilingual children are found to have a smaller vocabulary size in each of their languages as compared to monolingual children however their combined vocabulary appears to be either of equivalent size or bigger.
A study using the British Picture Vocabulary Scales which is a naming task the differences in vocabulary size seem to be most marked when children are very young but this normalises over time. This also coincides with the finding that some bilingual children may experience a slight delay in language learning initially but this does not persist over time.
What does the most current research now argue about bilingualism?
The vast majority of research now actually argues that bilingualism confers a benefit to wider non-verbal cognition. Research suggests that a bilinguals two languages are always active simultaneously so in other words someone’s German is currently active as they are speaking English.
This was found through lexical decision task research in which participants have to determine whether a word is a word in a given language or not. What research found is that when words had the same meaning across bilingual participants’ languages, these words are called cognates, they were processed more quickly whereas if the words existed in both languages but had different meanings which are words called homographs they were processed more slowly than other words. This activation is thought to require active cognitive control over the language and through that strengthen non-verbal cognition.
