Ling 201 – Psycholinguistics
Jirka Hana – May 22, 2006
Overview of topics
1. What is Psycholinguistics?
2. Language and Brain, Aphasias
3. Language acquisition
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What is Psycholinguistics?
Psycholinguistics – The study of mental aspects of language, especially its acquisition, storage, production, understanding; relation between language and thought.
psycholinguistics: Greek psyche (mind) + Latin lingua (tongue)
Cf. psychology, linguistics
2
Language and Brain, Aphasias
Brain contains several language centers (in most of the people in the left hemisphere), for
example:
• Broca’s area – responsible for
– articulation (moving one’s tongue, jaw, etc.)
– expressing grammatical functions – expressed by morphemes (plural) or words
(determiners)
• Wernicke’s area – “lexicon”; responsible for understanding and selection of words
2.1
Aphasias
Aphasia – loss or impairment of the ability to articulate ideas or understand spoken or
written language, resulting from damage to the brain caused by injury or disease.
aphasia: from Greek aphatos (speechless) : a (not) + phatos (spoken)
Cf. amoral ; fable, fabulous, fate, infant (not speaking), prophet, symphony
Every aphasia is slightly different (depending on the severity and exact location of the
damage) but people with damage in the same center show similar problems.
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2.1.1
Broca’s aphasia
Agrammatic speech – telegraphic, no function words, no morphological inflection, with a
lot of pronunciation errors. Word order usually correct. The sentences have meaning.
An example of agrammatic speech – a patient with Brocca’s aphasia trying to describe a
picture of a child taking a cookie:
B.L.: Wife is dry dishes. Water down! Oh boy! Okay Awright. Okay ... Cookie is
down ... fall, and girl, okay, girl ... boy ... um ...
Examiner: What is the boy doing?
B.L.: Cookie is ... um ... catch
Examiner: Who is getting the cookies?
B.L.: Girl, girl
Examiner: Who is about to fall down?
B.L.: Boy ... fall down!
2.1.2
Wernicke’s aphasia
Fluent but meaningless speech. It is normal from the grammar point of view (normal intonation, inflection, preposition, auxiliaries, etc.), but they have problems with content words
(esp. nouns), they also often create new words.
Patient with Wernicke’s aphasia trying to describe a picture of a child taking a cookie:
C.B.: Uh, well this is the ... the [dødøy] of this. This and this and this and this. These
things going in there like that. This is [sen] things here. This one here, these two things
here. And the other one here, back in this one, this one [gøs] look at this one.
Examiner: Yeah, what’s happening there?
C.B.: I can’t tell you what that is, but I know what it is, but I don’t now where it is.
But I don’t know what’s under. I know it’s you couldn’t say it’s ... I couldn’t say what
it is. I couldn’t say what that is. This shu– that should be right in here. That’s very
bad in there. Anyway, this one here, and that, and that’s it. This is the getting in here
and that’s the getting around here, and that, and that’s it. This is getting in here and
that’s the getting around here, this one and one with this one. And this one, and that’s
it, isn’t it? I don’t know what else you’d want.
2.1.3
Other aphasias
• Alexia – inability to read. Looks like more severe dyslexia, but has different reasons.
Alexia – result of a brain damage; cannot be corrected by training.
Dyslexia – result of innate structural brain difference; with special training, can be
almost always overcome.
• Agraphia – inability to write.
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For more, see:
• William H. Calvin and George A. Ojemann: Conversations with Neils Brain
http://faculty.washington.edu/wcalvin/bk7/bk7.htm
• Oliver Sacks: The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (Ch. 9) and An Anthropologist
on Mars
• The Secret Life of the Brain at PBS
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/brain/
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Child Language Acquisition
3.1
Theories of Language Acquisition
• Imitation Theory
• Reinforcement Theory
• Active Construction of a Grammar Theory
3.1.1
Imitation Theory
“Children learn language by hearing and imitating what they hear”
However:
• Many things they say, they never hear around.
a my pencil, two foots, Cowboy did fighting me., Cat stand up table.
• Even when they try to imitate what they hear they are unable to reproduce many
sentences.
Parent: He’s going out
Child: He go out.
Parent: That’s an old-time train. Child: Old-time train.
Parent: Where can I put them?.
Child: Where I can put them?
3.1.2
Reinforcement Theory
“Children figure out what’s correct because parents reward proper uses of language and
discourage improper uses.”
However:
• Parents seldom correct the form of child’s utterances, usually just content.
Parents do not say: I’ll give you a bowl of ice cream if you invert subjects with auxiliaries in all your Wh-questions
• Even if they (sometimes) do, it does not have much effect.
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A Real conversation:
Child:
Want other one spoon, Daddy.
Father: You mean, you want “the other spoon”.
Child:
Yes, I want other one spoon, please, Daddy.
Father: Can you say “the other spoon”?
Child:
Other ... one ... spoon.
Father: Say ... “other”.
Child:
Other.
Father: Spoon.
Child:
Spoon.
Father: Other ... spoon.
Child:
Other ... spoon. Now give me other one spoon?
• Children are generally consistent at any given point ⇒ they use some rules (just different than adults). This theory cannot explain the existence of such rules.
3.1.3
Active Construction of a Grammar Theory
“Children create grammars and continually modify them until they are identical to adult
grammars.”
• The most promising theory.
• Children look for general patterns, systematic occurrences in language around them,
deriving rules from them.
• At every point in time, children have a fully functional grammar (set of rules) in their
heads.
• They start with simple grammar (overgeneralize or undergeneralize) slowly increasing
complexity.
– Morphological rule overgeneralizations –
– Word meaning overgeneralizations – words denote more than they do to adults,
but there is a general characteristics which all objects share.
e.g.
– Word meaning undegeneralizations – Words denote less than they do to adults.
e.g.
This explains, why:
• mistakes children do are systematic.
• children do not respond to corrections from adults readily (it takes some time, before
they correct their internal grammars)
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3.2
Stages of Acquisition
We can distinguish several major stages in language acquisition
1. The Babbling Stage – around 6 months
2. The One-Word stage – around 1 year
3. The Two-Word stage – around 2 years
4. The Telegraphic Speech stage
The age connected with each stage can be slightly different for different children. Surprisingly,
it has nothing to do with the child’s IQ.
See also milestones in LF 9.4
3.2.1
The Babbling Stage
• Children begin to babble regardless of what linguistic environment they are growing
up in.
Even deaf children babble. Their early babbling is very similar to that of normal
children.
• Sounds like [b], [p], [m] and [a] are most common, because they are easy to produce
(normal articulator positions).
But they produce many different sounds, and many of them are not found in the
environment around them.
• There is no link between sound and meaning.
• There is no biological need for babbling.
• Children babble for social reasons. They learn to interact with others by the responses
their babbling receives.
Children who are neglected and receive no encouragement from parents stop babbling.
3.2.2
The One-Word stage
• The same sequence of sounds (“words”) begins to mean the same thing.
• Children can understand multi-word utterances, but they utter only single words.
• They use words like cookie, drink, bad, no, but never functional words like in, the, and
Language of
[ma]
[PaU]
[b2], [m2]
[da]
[SiPoU]
[sa]
[(@)sæ:]
J.P. at the age of 16 months:
mommy
[dæ]
not, no, don’t
[haI]
up
[baq], [daq]
dog
[s:]
Cheerios
[sju]
sock
[sr]
What’s that?, Look! [aI], [2I]
daddy
hi
down
aerosol, spray
shoe
shirt, sweater
light
Words generally monosyllabic (Consonant + Vowel).
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3.2.3
The Two-Word stage
• First, just putting two words next to another (each has it’s own intonation)
• Later, the two words form a simple sentence
– word-order expresses semantic roles,
– intonation contour extends over both of them.
• Virtually no syntactic markers, i.e. no inflection for number, tense, etc.
• Pronouns are rare (me being the most frequent, sometimes you, self )
Examples: hi Mommy, baby sleep, byebye doggie, here pretty, allgone doggie, ...
3.2.4
The Telegraphic Speech stage
• There is no specific three-word stage.
• Usually function words are missing (to, the, can, is, etc.)
• Almost always the correct SVO word-order (in English)
• Function words and morphemes come in gradually.
• There tends to be a specific order in which function morphemes are acquired.
• Children seem to constantly change/add rules.
J.P.’s early sentences:
25 months [dan i ts I]
[bwa tat]
26 months [manis tu hæ̃s]
[dædi goU]
27 months [aI gat tu djus]
[dõ baI mi]
[k2d@r s2ni ber]
28 months [aI gat pwe dIs]
[mamis tak mEns]
Don eat chip
block (is on) top
Mommy’s two hands
Where is daddy?
I’ve got two (glasses of) juice
Don’t bite (kiss) me
Sonny colored (a) bear
I’m playing with this
Mommy talk(ed to the) men
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