What Is Language?

Question 1

What is language?

Answer 1

Language is the unique property of the human cognitive system that differentiates us from the rest of the animal kingdom

Question 2

How many languages are spoken in the world?

Answer 2

6,000 (Anderson,2009)

Question 3

What is the most spoken language?

Answer 3

Chinese (>1 billion people)

Question 4

What is English used as?

Answer 4

“Lingua Franca”

Question 5

What are the main properties of language?

Answer 5

Symbolic: uses written signs, sounds, and gestures to refer to objects, events, ideas, and feelings
Structured: rules govern how words may be combined
Creative: symbols can be combined in an infinite number of ways
Meaningful: each word is associated with an idea or concept

Question 6

What is language?

Answer 6

A code used to communicate with others

Question 7

What is speech?

Answer 7

The oral expression of language

Question 8

What are phonemes?

Answer 8

They are the smallest unit of sound that can change the meaning of speech (save-gave)
Combined in certain ways (according to phonological rules) to fork words

Question 9

How many phonemes does the English language have?

Answer 9

English has more than 40 phonemes which can only be combined in a certain number of ways

Question 10

What are morphemes?

Answer 10

They are the smallest meaningful units of language:
Includes word stems (dog and run)
Prefixes “un”
Suffixes “-ing -ed”
Rules and how they should be interpretations e.g. Past tense (ed) or plural (s)

Question 11

Higher units of analysis?

Answer 11

Words: stand alone and still have meaning, unlike many morphemes
Syntax: words can be combined to form phrases and sentences, according to a set of rules known as syntax
Semantics: concerns the meaning of an utterance or phrase
Pragmatics: the relationship between context and meaning

Question 12

What is a lexicon?

Answer 12

All the words we know (mental dictionary)

A catalogue of words which is essentially the vocabulary of a person

The average student has a vocabulary of between 50,000-100,000 words

Question 13

Why is the Broca’s area important?

Answer 13

It is the area of the brain that is responsible for speech production

Question 14

Why is the Wernicke’s area important?

Answer 14

It is the part of the brain that is responsible for speech comprehension

Question 15

What is the process from language from perception to production?

Answer 15

Visual cortex - Wernicke’s area - primary auditory cortex - Broca’s area - Motor Cortex

Question 16

Where is language typically lateralised?

Answer 16

It is typically lateralised to the left hemisphere

Question 17

When does the language development phase end?

Answer 17

It doesn’t, it continues throughout your life

Question 18

In post-natal - 6 years, what are the stages of language development?

Answer 18

Post- natal: cooing (interactional vocalisation) - physical limitations in the vocal tract
4-12 months: Babbling (putting together vowels and consonants) - phonological development
-2 years: babbling to word production (1/2 word) -semantic/syntactic development
-6 years: vocabulary from 8,000 to 14,000 - pragmatic development

Question 19

What are three ways of studying language?

Answer 19

Linguistic Anthropology

Linguistics

Psycholinguistics

Question 20

What is linguistic anthropology?

Answer 20

Study of how language influences social life, represents and transmits cultural knowledge

Question 21

What are linguistics?

Answer 21

Study of the rules of language, meaning of written and spoken language

Question 22

What are psycholinguistics?

Answer 22

A branch of psychology: the study of the processes of language acquisition, comprehension and production

Question 23

What tools or methods can be used to investigate language?

Answer 23

MRI, NIRS, EEG

Question 24

What is habituation?

Answer 24

They can differentiate between language and recognise their mums voice

Question 25

What did Hepper et al (1994) find in pre-natal language perception?

Answer 25

A foetus can differentiate langue from other sounds. They can also recognise and prefer the voice of their mother

Question 26

What did Mehler et al (1988) find in their post natal language perception experiment?

Answer 26

Infants of a few days old can control their behaviour to activate the playing of their mothers voice by sucking on a dummy connected to a computer

Question 27

What did the selective looking experiment look at?

Answer 27

Pre-verbal language comprehension

Question 28

What were the findings of the study?

Answer 28

Children look at the screen that matches with the sentences, showing to understand “who” did “what” to “whom” (Gleitman, 1990)
Prevernalmchudlren understand the logic of a sentence

Question 29

What is aphasiology?

Answer 29

It is the study of language impairments after a stroke, illness (dementia), tumour, injury

Question 30

What are some methods of investigation used to look at brain damage?

Answer 30

Test of receptive grammar (participant points to picture representing the sentence)
British picture vocabulary scale (child points to the picture that matches the spoken word)

Question 31

What is are some methods of investigating animals language?

Answer 31

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs):

Computer simulations of language processing

Question 32

What does the neuroconstructivist approach use?

Answer 32

They converge different methods (behavioural, neuroimaging, genetics, computational)

Question 33

What does the neuroconstructivist approach look at?

Answer 33

They look at the developmental trajectories of language development and it is studies with typically and atypically developing children