PSYC20008 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Heredity, Brain Damage, Active Child
10 May 2018
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Lecture 9 Language
- Steven Pinker:
- Parents don’t teach children to speak, children who grow up without speaking
parents with other children → can develop sign language just by spontaneously
interacting
- When children do have parents → pay more attention to their peers
- If someone move from one country to another, they may never master the new
language → but their children will pick it up much better than they do from interacting
with other kids
- Rules of grammar are not learnt from school and editors etc → far more sophisticated
rules of grammar in normal conversation
- Child knows how to analyse speech coming from other people
- “Symbols” & Language: systems for representing thoughts, feelings, knowledge, and
communicating them to others; the creative and flexible use for symbols is a capacity
that sets us apart from other species
- By 5 years children have mastered the basic structure of their language, whether
spoken or manually signed (deaf children)
- Language comprehension - understanding what others are saying
- Language production - actual speaking
- Language comprehension precedes language production
- There are four required components for learning language
- Phonological development: the acquisition of knowledge about phonemes, the
elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning
- Semantic development: learning the system for expressing meaning in a language,
beginning with morphemes, the smallest unit for meaning in a language
- Syntactic development: learning the syntax or rules for combining words; grammar;
analysis of structure of languuage (varies from culture to culture, from area to area;
complicated but all children by 5yo have an understanding of the syntactic structure
of their language)
- Pragmatic development: acquiring knowledge of how language is used, which
includes understanding a variety of conversational conventions; understanding
conventions of language (changes with time); nice (50-60 years ago) ⇒ bordering on
insult that’s nice; nice (nowadays) ⇒ good; conventions about how words are used
in different contexts and situations is pragmatic development; quite difficult for
children
- Language development is about mastery of the components: language generativity,
semantic development, pragmatic development
- Language generativity: basis of generativity allowed you to generate novel utterances
and for those utterances to be understood by speakers of your language
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- Aspects of syntax: all languages have this embedded in them; every sentence
produced/could produce was likely to be unique and novel
- Semantic development: meaning of concepts/words; long term developmental
process similar to pragmatic development
- Language generativity:
- Phoneme: The basic unit of sound used to produce language
- Phonological development: the acquisition of knowledge about the sound systems of
one’s own language
- Morpheme: the smallest unit for meaningful sound, usually one or two phonemes
- Semantic development: learning to express meaning in language; includes word
learning
- Syntax: the rules for the ways in which words can be combined to make sense
- Syntactic development: learning the rules for combining words in a given language
- Pragmatic development: acquiring knowledge about how language is used, such as
the rules of conversation (interview situation vs dinner situation; for children in
classroom vs at home); adults have metalinguistic knowledge (how to speak in
different contexts), knowledge about the properties of language and language use,
that children do not have; e.g. when ask why some children don’t talk → teachers
think child is just shy, children are often beginning to show good awareness of
metalinguistic knowledge (would say
I’m not quite sure how to say it although they have the words, acquiring confidence
in language development as a speaker is important psychological move forward)
- Language is a species-specific behaviour; only humans acquire language in the
normal course of development, although some primates have been taught to sign
and recognise words (many primates are good at symbolic processing)
- Language seems to be localised in the brain; For 90% of right-handed people,
language is primarily controlled in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex
-
- In normal language development, motor cortex, auditory cortex, Broca’s area, and
Wernicke’s area become interconnected and wired
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- In children with dyslexia, not good wiring across the areas; don’t know why wiring
goes wrong but can change
- Until the 1940s and 1950s, general view that learning language was like any other
form of learning
- Behaviourist traditions - form associations between sounds and meanings → how
language occurred
- But various experiences (mainly failures) led to the realisation that something
different was going on with language
- There seems to be a critical period (between the ages of 4/5 and puberty) during
which language develops readily and after which language acquisition is harder and
less successful
- Evidence: the effect of language deprivation during the critical period, effects of
damage to language areas in the brain (children recover more readily than adults),
ages at which a second language is acquired
- Chomsky in 1966 wrote a book called aspects of the theory of syntax → started
attention on how to view language
-
- In all the cases, could be due to that they were isolated (lack of social interaction), or
had disabilities (severe disabilities)
- Brain damage: differences in recovery rate and extent of recovery in patients with
aphasia: children recover faster than adults, more likely than adults to show full
recovery (support for critical period hypothesis)
- When damage occurs before puberty → brain might rewire itself, sometimes one part
of the brain can stand in and take over another part of the brain, flexible rewiring of
brain
- Brain is connected by wiring → can damage pathways between critical areas and still
get the effects
- Even in adults, brain continues to grow its interconnections
- Differences in progress in language acquisition before vs after puberty re:brain
damage
- Not dealing with normal brains
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find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Parents don"t teach children to speak, children who grow up without speaking parents with other children can develop sign language just by spontaneously interacting. When children do have parents pay more attention to their peers. If someone move from one country to another, they may never master the new language but their children will pick it up much better than they do from interacting with other kids. Rules of grammar are not learnt from school and editors etc far more sophisticated rules of grammar in normal conversation. Child knows how to analyse speech coming from other people. Symbols & language: systems for representing thoughts, feelings, knowledge, and communicating them to others; the creative and flexible use for symbols is a capacity that sets us apart from other species. By 5 years children have mastered the basic structure of their language, whether spoken or manually signed (deaf children) Language comprehension - understanding what others are saying.
