One student’s summary of topics covered in Ling 301
Fall, 2007
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Aspects of language and communication that are taught and not taught
Infant's vocal tract from birth to 3 months
What babies learn in utero (intonation patterns, recognize native language, mother's
voice)
Recognizing faces upon birth (skewed drawings of faces vs normal ones)
Characteristics of vocal play, practicing pitch and loudness
Eye gaze as the precursor of communication
Heart rate/sucking slows when hearing something familiar, quickens with new sounds
Loss of all phonemes not in native language by 9 months
Babbling around 7 months in hearing and deaf children (mimicking, turn-taking)
Variegated babbling
Parentese (high pitch, elongated vowels, eye contact)
Segmentation and differentiating phonemes, how children learn to expect a pause after
lowered pitch
Headturn preferences, how we prefer things we are familiar with
Pointing as a reflex and later as a tool
Critical period hypothesis and being a language user
Learning consonant clusters of their native language
The holophrastic stage, overgeneralizing (slippers=pajamas), referential object naming,
pretend play
Protowords used consistently show that the realization that sounds mean specific things
has occurred
Children understand words 5 months before they use them, need 50 words in
comprehension before production
Factors that influence a child's vocabulary, environmental, biological, general abilities
How we learn new words, the Gavagai problem
Basic, superordinate and subordinate categories of words and how frequency of the word
effects our semantic verification time
Children start with one referent to extend words to classes of objects
The beneficial assumptions of whole object, taxonomy, mutual exclusivity and type
Fast mapping in relation to the Lep study
Telegraphic speech, words are in correct order, omission of agreement, articles, pronouns,
auxillary verbs, etc.
Overgeneralization
Overt correction on forms seems to hinder language learning, the Blocking Principle
Children recognize correct forms of speech before producing them
Lack of invariance
Acoustic cues and voice onset time
Speech is perceived with acoustic information, semantic context and syntactic structure
Top-down processing -- using semantic and syntactic information to distinguish
individual words in speech
Bottom-up processing -- using acoustic information to encode speech signals
The phoneme restoration effect, how we mentally replace missing sounds
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Rapidspeech, shortening of vowels, dropping off last consonants
Models of speech perception (motor theory, cohort and TRACE models), neural nodes
transmit understanding
The internal lexicon, "net of knowledge"
Word knowledge is comprised of phonological, syntactic, morphological and semantic
features
Sense vs. reference, truth value and possible word semantics
Semantic relationships (synonymy, coordination, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy)
Denotation vs. connotation
Process by which we activate our word knowledge is called lexical access (interactive
and discrete)
TOT state resulting from dense phonological neighborhoods
Hierachical models vs spreading activation models
Levels of spreading activation, search models, logogen models, cohort models
Cognitive economy and typicality effect in relation to word retrieval
Parsing strategies (garden path and constraint satisfaction) and syntactic ambiguity (local
and standing)
All parsing is purely syntactic, late closure and minimal attachment
We store meaning more accurately than structure
Context effects (gating, shadowing)
Lexical bias effect (creating real words through errors)
Speech errors (word exchange, phoneme exchange, etc.)
Speech production, conceptualization, formulation, articulation
Speech errors indicate 2 levels of formulation (functional and positional levels)
Contralateral control in the brain in relation to language
Left hemisphere & language, right hemisphere (semantics, understanding discourse,
intention, metaphor)
Anatomy of the brain (frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, temporal lobe)
Major language areas are Broca's and Wernicke's areas
Brain mapping techniques, assumptions (fractionation, transparency, subtraction)
Aphasias (Broca's, Wernicke's and Conduction)
Anomia, unable to retrieve names for words, from damage to angular gyrus
Pure word deafness, can't hear language or comprehend, from damage to auditory nerve
Most aphasiacs can swear because it is emotional language probably stored in right side
of brain
Reading, logograms ($@%)
Reading is not innate, how we learn to read (phonetically, phonologically,
orthographically ?)
The 2 best indicators of successful reading, phonological skills and ability to recognize
letters
Stages of phonological skill development (syllable segmenting, separate onset and rimes,
recognition of individual phonemes)
Frequent words accessed directly rather than by sound like less frequent words
Eye-tracking and reading, saccades, fixations, varies by script
We focus just to the left of the center of words when we are reading, unless they are short
or frequent which can be recognized while looking at other words
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Automatic and attentional processes, reading is automatic
Signed languages are independent language systems, HOLME
Multiple morphemes can be conveyed simultaneously in sign
Genetic language disorders
Developmental disorders, caused by hearing loss, mental impairment, motor impairment
Specific language impairment, no other developmental delays, trouble with inflectional
morphology (often fail wug tests)
SLI, literal interpretations, trouble giving/receiving requests, difficulties grasping
emotional states, clarification, narratives
Mental impairments, Down syndrome, Williams and Fragile X
Stuttering, genetic component, vocal chord tension heightened, appears in stressful
moments
Developmental Dyslexia, failure to attain basic phonological skills that underlie reading
Autism and autism spectrum disorder (aspergers, CDD, Rett's, PDD), impairments in
social reciprocity & communication, behavioral rigidity
Causes, genetic component, abnormality of brain pattern, neurological conditions
Bilingual types (simultaneous, early sequential, late bilingual and heritage speakers)
Usually one language is weaker than another
Bilingual language development, similar language spurt to monolinguals, slower
mass/count distinction, weaker grammatical gender
Fusion hypothesis vs. Separate development hypothesis
Words in different languages hinder and help each other
Early vs. late bilinguals, early bilinguals show same pattern of activation in both
languages in Broca's area while late bilinguals have more scattered patterns of activation
Early and late bilinguals look the same in Wernicke's area
Age of acquisition in relation to proficiency in bilingualism
Brain structures in relation to slow/fast language learners
Semantics transfers before syntax
Learning L2 changes neural patterns, more activity in a broader area, recruiting nonlinguistic areas, bilinguals are denser with altered structures
Bilinguals make more mistakes in phoneme monitoring and picture-naming tasks. You
cannot turn on the other language, it even cause more mistake in other language
Zipf's law used to be telling of specific cultures, what words are used most
Linguistic Relativity/Linguistic Determinism: Color, spatial terms, gender, and grammar.