Chapter 1 - How do we Acquire Knowledge ● children need to be taught language in an explicit and conscious way. This is false. There are language communities in which no conscious language teaching goes on, but language acquisition proceeds normally ● In Samoa, for example, adults do not view infants and small children as conversational partners, nor do they feel a responsibility to model their speech so that children can more easily learn it. Instead, the children simply overhear speech between adults. Likewise, the adults do not listen to the speech of the children. It’s as though the children’s talk is not part of the larger language community. ● Conscious language teaching, then, is not necessary for first language acquisition. ● Children in these communities must be learning solely by mimicking, so maybe mimicking is suffi cient for language acquisition. That idea, however, is also wrong. There have been instances where infants have grown to adolescence in environments with almost complete linguistic deprivation ● Wild Boy of Aveyron. In 1799 a feral boy was found living in the woods of Aveyron in the south of France. His habits included eating off the floor and making noises that resembled canine sounds. All indications were that he had been raised by wild animals. ● Girl named Genie grew up without any language, could not learn language past a certain level and in adolescence stopped talking altogether ● Mimicry is not sufficient in language acquisition ● Again, the language mechanism has a pathology independent of any other brain function. ● At the beginning of this chapter, I claimed that language acquisition starts in the womb. Around the seventh month of gestation, the auditory system is formed and, except in an instance of a hard-of-hearing or deaf fetus, functions well enough to be able to listen to the world outside the womb. It’s not surprising, then, that (hearing) newborns come into the world recognizing the voices of their mother and of those people who constantly surround their mother. Surely the newborns are not consciously trying to acquire language ● An experiment done with the authors child had it among Korean speaking women but the child only reacted clearly with a smile when someone spoke english to it. studies on children even younger than Robert show that English Speaking children can pick out English from French and other languages vice - versa. ● ● The children shows an increase in heartbeat and and brain activity when they understand a language studies have shown that children exposed to ordinary talk acquire speech at the same rate as those exposed to large amounts of motherese (A term used in the study of CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION for the way mothers talk to their young children. Its features include simplified grammar, exaggerated speech melody, diminutive forms of words such as doggie, and a highly repetitive style) ● ● In multilingually raised children, the children tend to speak in the foreign language to the parent who predominantly speaks it. Ex: Niko speaks German to his mother. Niko’s mental lexicon as drew, and this won’t change until Niko’s language mechanism has gotten suffi cient evidence to make the switch from drew to draw. Due to multi lingualism. ● While some bilingual children have indeed been reported to take slightly longer with native language fluency than the average monolingual child, this delay does not have any negative consequences in the long run. If anything, bilingual children have advantages over monolingual children. They have better mental flexibility and cognitive control that persists through late adulthood and may delay the onset of dementia by as much as four years. ● They (children) glean the linguistic rules of English from sentences spoken by native speakers, who have a coherent grammar, not from the sentences spoken by their parents, who might well have an incoherent grammar in English. ● The phenomenon, also called cryptophasia (Greek: “secret” + “speech”), describes a language developed by twins in early childhood which they only speak with each other. Invented languages spoken by very few people are also referred to as autonomous language or idioglossia. ● Innateness of Language: The innateness hypothesis supports language nativism and several reasons and concepts have been proposed to support and explain this hypothesis. In his work, Chomsky introduced the idea of a language acquisition device (First proposed by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s, the LAD concept is an instinctive mental capacity which enables an infant to acquire and produce language. It is a component of the nativist theory of language. This theory asserts that humans are born with the instinct or "innate facility" for acquiring language.) to account for the competence of humans in acquiring a language. ● first language acquisition: which studies infants acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages. ● bilingual language acquisition: Chapter 3 ● Important difference between acquiring a first language - a process that happens naturally to any child who is not linguistically deprived - and learning a second. ● ● Acquiring and Learning have different definitions Scholar debate whether or not the cognitive faculties that are employed in second language learning are distinct from those employed in first language acquisition ● Person learning second language has already acquired first language, so the mechanism in the brain has already had a certain linguistic parameters (like word order) ● ● One has to learn the linguistic rules of the second language (target language) Errors occur by applying rules of first language to second, like verb, noun order ● Younger children are less proficient in learning second language better among adolescents in classroom setting First language learning typically cannot take place after Critical Period (5 years) ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● First language acquisition happens without conscious teaching, second language does, so the process is distinct. This means traits like motivation, confidence factor into learning it. The complexity of the input affects second language learning but not first language acquisition. For example, if a second language learner has a classroom teacher who talks in the target language at a quick rate, in complex sentences, and about complicated matters, the learner will have a harder time initially than if simpler instructions. Practice is most important for second language learning not so much first Second language learning proceeds faster if target language is used as the medium of instruction Instructional conversations are better teaching tools than memorization drills or lectures and recitations. And certainly conversations are more like the ordinary language one is exposed to in fi rst language acquisition than are memorization drills and the like. Italian idea: translations can never be perfect so translators are traitors ● Intersemiotic Translation: emphasis is on the overall message that needs to be conveyed. Thus the translator, instead of paying attention to the verbal signs, concentrates more on the information that is to be delivered. ● Interlingual Translation: can be seen as replacing a verbal sign with another sign but belonging to a different language. Most common, interpreting from one human language into another human language ● John kicked the bucket. This is an idiom: It has a literal reading (one in which John slammed his foot against a bucket) and a figurative one (one in which John died). If kicked the bucket is not understood in the target language as meaning ‘die,’ how can we translate it to preserve the dual reading? Do we abandon kicking and buckets altogether and look for some analogous idiom in the target language? TEST 2 Chapter 4 - Does Language Equal Thought? ● ● ● It may be possible to describe our thought processes through some representational system Does language construct a mental world that cognitively fences us in? “I cannot hear myself think” - People think in specific languages and can even be broken down into certain accents like Boston accent. 1st Argument Though Does not require language by giving you instances of thought that couldn't possibly have been formulated in the brain in terms of language Thinking about being a toddler. There are 5 scenarios i've witnessed, 3 normal , 2 wonderful, children did not use spoken or sign language. Then I bring out their relevance as a group of the central question. 1. Boy plows plastic truck across frozen grass. Another boy comes, watches and then throws handful of dirt on the first boy. 2. My grandniece is coloring vehemently, and she rips the paper with the crayon. She takes another piece of paper, tapes it over the rip, and continues coloring. 3. A girl in the grocery store reaches for candy at the checkout aisle. Her mother says she can’t have it. The girl throws a tantrum. Her mother’s cheeks flame, and she gives the girl the candy. These scenarios give evidence of reasoning on the part of the child and thus of thought. Also consider case of someone who is deaf or hard hearing. This child does no adequately hear and is not detected until the child is older. Lessons in speech reading (lip reading) and/or lessons in vocalization in the form of teaching a child sign language. Longe before deaf children have access to linguistic input they do think as is obvious from their thought behaviour. There is no possibility however that it was in a specific language. Like the girl Genie in chapter one who had limited language ability and abandoned it altogether. Another way to argue that thought is not equivalent to specific language is to consider our vocabulary. If a language has a word for a concept and another language lacks that word for a concept does it follow that the given concept is mentally accessible to people of the first language and inaccessible to the people of the second? Ex of this: The US had a voting thing called a chad, though no one knew what it's was named they we're familiar with the concept. In these types of situations it seems rather obvious that the concept of an object can be understood without a word for that object, but what about a situation in which the concept concerns the identification not of a concrete object but rather of an abstract One? Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people who speak different languages as their mother tongues have different thought processes. Although most Italians and Americans do not practice this behavior regularly, the fact that people of both cultures understand the concept and occasionally practice it shows that understanding the concept is independent of having a vocabulary item in one’s language that denotes it. Schadenfreude means derive joy from pain , English has no such word but we are familiar with the concept. Vocabulary differences are not the only differences in languages.Some scholars have argued that a certain population cannot reason in the same way as another population because of syntactic differences between the languages of the two populations. Instead of reporting on that literature. We known that animals think but do not speak in human language Or even language at all. There should be a way to design an experiment where we could measure the speed of silent language. If we cannot determine if silent language has the characteristics of thought (like speed) we have an unsupported position. Signs take twice as long to produce as words, so do deaf people think twice as slow since they use hand signals. Moreover some deaf have mastered spoken languages. Ergo this chapter sums up that thought is thought and language is language.
