Language

 Formal system of communication

 Spoken, written, and/or gestures (ex. ASL)
 Between 5,000 and 6,000 languages, worldwide
 Most languages also have many dialects
Properties of Language
 Semantic
 There are separate units in a language and these
units have meaning
 Phoneme: think in terms of sounds
 Morpheme: think in terms of meaning
 Generative
 Combing language in novel ways
 Displacement
 The property of language that accounts for the
capacity to communicate about matters that are not
in the here-and-now
 Phonemes

 In a spoken language,
the smallest distinctive
sound unit.
 English has about 44
phonemes.
 chug has three
phonemes ch, u, g.

Phones make sound.

Morphemes
 The smallest unit of meaning.
 Most are combinations of 2 or more
phonemes
 Can be words like a or but.
 Can also be parts of words
like prefixes or suffixes…
 “ed” at the end of a word means past
tense.

 How many morphemes does monkey

have?
 Two – monkey and key
Structure of Language
 Grammar
 The rules of a language
 Syntax
 Specifies how words can be arranged
 Semantics
 Specifies how meaning is understood & communicated

 Transformational grammar
 Any one thought can be expressed in different ways
Language Acquisition
 Birth
 Cooing, crying, gurgling
 4-6 months
 Babbling
 12 months
 First words
 2 years & up
 Telegraphic speech – help mum
 Overextension – Dad for all adult men
Language Acquisition
 No one disputes the stages of language
development

 But there are two main questions in terms of

what it all means
 Is language acquisition a product of nature or
nurture?
 Which comes first – language or thought?
…the answers…
 Is it nature or nurture?
 Skinner vs. Chomsky
Skinner: Children learn language the
way animals learn mazes
Chomsky: The brain is hard-wired for
learning language
…the answers…
 Is it nature or nurture?
Skinner:
Constructivist/emergent/empiricist
theories:
 languageis LEARNED by building up
knowledge from the environment
Children imitate sounds and practice
what they hear. Correct structures are
positively reinforced. Language
acquisition is, thus, a process of habit
formation.
…the answers…
 Is it nature or nurture?
Problems with Skinner’s ideas:
Do children hear perfectly formed language?
How can children learn language perfectly if their
input is not perfect?
If we only learn what we hear, how to explain the
creation of complex, unique sentences /
structures?
jump jumped
bring bringed
“Jump me down, Daddy!”
“Take me a bath!”
Sanks for the trip to the park

 F: Auntie Rachel, her really loves her bana

 You’re right, she loves her banana: Ms.
Vaessen
 F: Her’s chewing her bana. Her dropped her
bana.
 Oh no, did she drop her banana?: Ms.
Vaessen
 J:Finn! Don’t shove it in her face! She
doesn’t want it in her face!
…the answers…
 Is it nature or nurture?
Chomsky:
 Language is ‘a distinct piece of the biological
make-up of our brains … distinct from more
general abilities to process information or
behave intelligently’ (Pinker, 1994, p. 18)
 Language acquisition device (LAD) - a
mechanism with access to the grammatical
rules of all human languages (Universal
grammar - UG)
…the answers…
 Is it nature or nurture?
Chomsky:
Input in a specific language triggers the
LAD. Children discover basic structures
of the language to be learned by
“comparing” their innate knowledge of
Language with the structure of the
particular language.
The good and and of Chomsky’s ideas
 Good points:
 explains why language is learned relatively quickly
 explains how language is learnt despite poverty of the
stimulus
 Bad points:
 very little evidence for adultlike grammatical
knowledge in young children (Braine, 1976)
 cannot explain why children make grammatical errors
(e.g. doggie go walkies) even after extensive language
exposure
…the answers…

 More proof for the nurture side:

 Critical period
 Duringthe first few years of life, we are most receptive to
language learning
 Extreme examples: Victor & Genie
Victor - the “wild boy of Aveyron”
 Found naked in the woods in 1798, aged
about 11 or 12 yrs
 There was a failed earlier capture when he
was about 6 yrs old
 Insensitive to noise and pleasing smells
 Made only gutteral sounds
 Did not imitate
 Attended only to objects he wanted
 Rocked to and fro
 Appeared profoundly melancholy but
responded with outbursts of laughter in
sunlight
 Ate acorns, potatoes and raw chestnuts
Jean Itard and “wild boy of Aveyron”
 Itard (the physician who worked with him)
devised a careful behavioural program.
 Within 9 months Victor could match letters of
the alphabet.
 Within 5 years he could distinguish emotions,
became genuinely affectionate, loved helping
people and used objects imaginatively – but his
spoken language never progressed beyond
meaningless monosyllables.
 Described by Itard as “an almost normal boy
who could not speak”.
 Itard later devoted his life to the education of
deaf and mute children.
Genie - a modern “feral child”
 Until her discovery at the age of 13, she lived
in a state of severe sensory and social
deprivation. Strapped to a potty-chair or tied
to a bed by a psychotic father, she was beaten
if she vocalized and her father spoke only in
grunts.

 When she reached 18, Genie was returned to

the care of her mother, where she stayed only
a few months.

 She then lived in six different foster homes

and now lives sheltered accommodation (is
institutionalized) in Southern California.

 She is severely delayed, has little useful

speech and displays many seemingly autistic
symptoms.
Whorf’s Linguistic Determinism

 The idea that language

determines the way we think
(not vice versa).

•The Hopi tribe has no past

tense in their language, so
Whorf believes that is why they
rarely think of the past.
 If language can influence thought, then words are tools
that can be used to socialize our children, sell products,
mold public opinion, and stir the masses. People in power
are aware of this connection and choose their words
carefully. As has been colorfully documented, the result
is ‘doublespeak’ – language that is designed to mislead,
conceal, inflate, confuse, and distort meaning. Thus we
are told that a new tax is a ‘user’s fee’, that companies
that fire employees are merely ‘downsizing’, that
recession is ‘negative economic growth’, that civilian war
deaths are ‘collateral damage’, and that plastic handbags
are made of ‘genuine imitation leather.’ Even more
common are the euphemisms we all use to talk about
touchy subjects. Thus, we say that people who died
‘passed away’, that pornographic movies are ‘adult
films’, and that we need to use the toilet in a ‘restroom’.
…the answers…
 What comes first – thought or language?
 Both:sometimes children use words to
communicate what they already know and
sometimes they form concepts to fit the
words they hear
Linguistic Relativity

Hyde, 1984
• Wudgemaker story: “he” “she” “he or she” “they”
• 140 males and 170 females from the 1st, 3rd, and
5th grades and from college participated in a task in
which they told stories in response to a cue
sentence containing "he," "he or she," or "they." Ss
also supplied pronouns in a fill-in task
• Results indicate that 12%, 18%, and 42% of the
stories were about females when "he," "they," and
"he or she" were used, respectively.
Neurological Approach to
Language
 Aphasia refers to a disorder of language
usually produced by injury to specialized
brain areas – Broca’s area (impaired
speaking) or Wernicke’s area (impaired
understanding).
Damage to Broca’s area
 Nonfluent speech, short phrases, pauses, makes errors,
repetitious errors in grammar, omits function words
(verbs - Telegraphic speech)
 Poor repetition
 Somewhat good comprehension
Damage to Wernicke’s area
 Problems in comprehending speech – input or
reception of language
 Fluent meaningless speech, word salad (a
confused or unintelligible mixture of
seemingly random words and phrases), errors
in producing specific words
Which one involves damage to Broca’s
area? to Wernicke’s area?
Which one involves damage to Broca’s
area? to Wernicke’s area?
Broca’s
Wernicke’s