Today’s Lesson 5/27/2015
• Clark Doll Study lesson is due today
• Check textbooks for numbers.
– TURN IN TEXTBOOKS ON FINAL EXAM
DAY
• Final Exam Review
– Chomsky/ Skinner debate
– Reading
• Open book quiz on language acquisition
Language
• “The jewel in our crown of cognition.”
- Steven Pinker
Language
• Spoken, written or
gestured words and
• The way we combine
them
• Humans have more
than 5000 languages.
www.delta.edu
Building blocks of spoken
languages
• Phonemes-basic
sounds
• Morphemes-the
smallest units of
sound that carry
meaning
• Grammar-a system of
rules for
communication
http://www.lil-inspirations.com/images/baby
Phonemes
• Phonemes are the basic sounds of a
language
• English has about 40 phonemes.
• Typically, consonant phonemes carry
more information than vowel phonemes:
ppl cn rd ths txt wtht vwls
Morphemes
• The smallest unit of language that carries
meaning.
• In English, most morphemes are combinations
of two or more phonemes.
• Some morphemes are words, others are only
parts of words.
• Prefixes, suffixes, “s” to indicate a plural all are
morphemes.
• In English, 40 phonemes combine to form more
than 100,000 morphemes.
Practice #1
• The word "chimps" contains
________ phoneme(s) and
________ morpheme(s).
a. 5; 2
b. 6; 2
c. 1; 5
d. 2; 6
Grammar
• Grammar is a set of rules that enables us to
communicate.
• Semantics is a set of rules we use to derive
meaning.
• Syntax refers to rules we use to order words.
Examples:
– In English, adjectives come before nouns: white
house;
– In Spanish, nouns come before adjectives: casa
blanca.
Systematic Nature of language
• Memorize this sequence:
3, 9, 2, 7, 8, 1, 2, 4, 3,
• Or this sequence
3 9 27 81 243
Practice #2
• Adding -ed to the word "laugh"
means that the action took place in
the past. This illustrates one of the
rules of English:
a. semantics.
b. algorithms.
c. syntax.
d. phonemes.
Language Development
• The average high school graduate knows
80,000 words.
• You know words no one ever consciously
taught you.
• You only use about 150 words for most of
what you say.
Babbling stage
• At 4 months, infants can
read lips, and they prefer
to look at a face that
matches a sound.
• In the babbling stage, the
infant utters various
sounds, even those that
do not occur in a
household language.
• Nature enables a wide
variety of phonemes.
/www.operation-ukraine.org/
Infant speech
• At 10 months, the
infant utters
phonemes within their
native tongue.
• Infants gradually lose
the ability to
discriminate sounds
they never hear.
www.media.collegepublisher.com
Language development
• Around the first birthday, the child enters
the one-word stage.
• In the one-word stage, an inflected word
can equal a sentence. (Doggy!)
• Around the second birthday, the child
enters the two-word stage of telegraphic
speech.
• Telegraphic speech is like a telegramomits auxiliary words but follows syntax.
Summary of language development
Practice #3
• Vocal sounds that are not included in
one's native language first begin to
disappear from usage during the
________ stage of language
development.
a. one-word
b. two-word
c. telegraphic
d. babbling
Skinner explains language
• Learning principles:
–
–
–
–
Association
Imitation
Reinforcement
According to Skinner,
humans learned
language when “the
vocal musculature
became susceptible to
operant conditioning.”
ocw.mit.edu
Chomsky explains language
• The rate at which infants
learn is too rapid to
explained by learning
principles.
• Human languages are
dialects of the “universal
grammar” in which are
brains are pre-wired.
• Chomsky called this
capacity our “language
acquisition device.”
Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky
www.youtube.com
Cognitive neuroscientists explain
language
• The language
capacity is a blanker
slate than Chomsky
believes.
• It involves gradual
changes in neural
connections and a
knack for soaking up
connections.
Research examples:
• 6-month old infants
look at the named
parent when a
synthesizer says
“mommy” or “daddy”
• 7-month old infants
detect familiar English
words, and listen
longer to sentences
with familiar words.
Nature and Nurture
Learning a second language
• Those who learn a second language as an
adult speak with an accent.
• Also, mastering grammar in a second
language is more difficult as an adult.
• Chomsky would say the grammar switches
are thrown during a child’s developing
years (0-7).
Practice #4
• Which language theorist would have been
most likely to emphasize that children
master the rule for forming the past tense
of regular verbs like "push" before they
learn common past tense constructions of
irregular verbs like "go"?
a. Skinner
b. Whorf
c. Chomsky
d. Frisch
Second language learners’ brains
• Brain scans reveal
that adults who
learned a second
language early in life
use the same patch of
frontal lobe tissue.
• Those who learned
their second tongue
after childhood
displayed activity in
an adjacent area.
Hypothesis of linguistic relativity
• Benjamin Whorf (1956) promoted the
linguistic relativity hypothesis.
– “Language itself shapes a man’s basic ideas.”
– Does language determine the way we think?
– Does language influence the way we think?
Gender in language can influence our thinking.
• Relativism
• Reality
It pays to increase your word
power!
• A study of bilingual children in Canada
who had been taught French in immersion
classes showed increased aptitude
scores, math scores, and appreciation of
culture.
• Sign language has benefited deaf people
in profound ways-once considered
incompetent for challenging work, the deaf
can now become fully literate.
Thinking without language
• We often think in
images.
Examples:
– Which is the hot
water handle?
• In physical
activities, mental
rehearsal can
sustain one’s skill.
http://www.cosmofineart.com/Holland_piano_rehearsal
Practice #5
• To simulate the learning of the
statistical relationships among
language terms, researchers are
likely to make use of:
a. telegraphic speech.
b. the framing effect.
c. computer neural networks.
d. the representativeness heuristic.
Practice #6
• Your ability to recall which direction you
turn the faucet handle in your bathroom in
order to get cold water best illustrates the
importance of:
a. algorithms.
b. the framing effect.
c. thinking without language.
d. the representativeness heuristic.
e. the belief perseverance phenomenon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK_K_
F9iP3M
• Skinner Chomsky