topic 7 (language) lecture one (language basics) Flashcards
what is a phoneme?
a speech sound
how many phonemes does the english language have?
46
what is a morpheme?
the smallest language unit that carries meaning
e.g stems, prefixes or suffixes
what is syntax?
the grammatical rules of language
what is the basic structure of english syntax?
SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT
what is the difference between semantics and pragmatics?
semantics is involved in the meaning of words without considering the contexts
pragmatics analyses the meaning in relation to the relavent context
roughly how many words do children understand by age 6?
13000
roughly how many words do people understand by age 18?
60000
how does discriminating sounds differ between babies and adults?
babies discriminate sounds that adults cannot
this discriminality begins to dissapear in months
what did Noam Chomsky postulate in 1959 as a neural basis of language?
- he postulated an innate neural circuitry dedicated to language
- he called this the language aquisition device
what is some evidence suggesting that language is innate?
- stages of language aquisition are relatively invariant across cultures
outline the case of GENIE
13-year-old girl discovered by a social worker on 4th November 1970 in Los Angeles, California.
Genie had been confined to a small room often tied to a potty chair for most of her life.
Her father is said to have forbidden Genie’s mother and brother to speak to her.
Genie was able to learn language over time but struggled substantially with grammar.
This delivered support for the Critical Period Hypothesis proposed by Lenneberg (1967).
what is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
Language affects thought.
- in the strong form this is linguistic determinism and in the weak form this is linguistic relativity
