PSY210H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Animal Communication, Steven Pinker, Pragmatics
Document Summary
8:39 am: what is language, a system that relates sounds (or gestures) to meaning (p. 307) Generative: comparisons to non-human animal communication systems. Some share few traits w/ human lang, but none share all. Newborns prefer speech to non-speech and mother"s native tongue to unfamiliar tongue: low-pass filtered speech available in third trimester, high amplitude sucking paradigm. Newborns discriminate virtually all possible sounds used in lang (adults don") Infants sensitive to restricted set of sounds by 12 mths: video: janet werker (attunement to native lang, video: pat kuhl (mandarin exposure study) Parental reports shows: vocab growth slow at first, naming explosion (18-24 mths, overextension/underextension errors, comprehension typically precedes production. Infant experiments shows: parental report underestimates vocab knowledge, some comprehension present at 6 mths of age. How do children learn words: gavagai example, constraints, whole object, mutual exclusivity, word learning strategies, perceptual salience, eye gaze + pointing, grammar. Support for nativist perspective: linguistic universals, critical periods, pidgins/creoles, non-human animal studies.
