PSY210H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Speech Perception, In Utero, Cognitive Development
Lecture 7 – Language Development
What is language
- A system that relates sounds or gestures to meaning
- It has arbitrary units and is therefore symbolic
o Structured and meaningful
o Shows displacement – one can communicate about events distant in time and space
o Generative (infinite number of messages can be created)
Components of language
- Phonology
o PHONEMES: the basic units of sound
▪ / p / vs / /
o MORPHOLOGY: rules for how sounds form words
▪ Past tense adds -ed
▪ Plurals add s
o SEMANTICS: meaning of words and parts of words
▪ Free morphemes: dog
▪ Grammatical (bound) morphemes: -s at eist itself with eaig
o SYNTAX: rules for word combination
▪ The cat chased the dog. The dog was chased by the cat.
o PRAGMATICS: knowledge of how language is used to communicate
▪ Conversational conventions
▪ Social conventions (ex. speaking quietly in the library, speaking slowly to someone
who is not a native English speaker)
Theories of Language Development
- Learning perspective
o Environment (nurture) drives language development
o Genie
▪ Tied to a potty chair during the day and strapped to bed at night, not allowed to talk
▪ Discovered at age 13, could not speak or walk properly
▪ Never learned to use language effectively after wards
o Criticisms?
▪ Fails to explain how quickly language is learned
▪ Commonalities among language, ex. in communities that have never been exposed
to other languages
- Nativist perspective
o Biology (nature) drives language development
o Noa Chosks Language Acquisition Device (LAD)
▪ learig is soethig that happes to the hild plaed i a appropriate
eiroet
o Support for nativists perspective
▪ Linguistic universals
• All languages have nouns and verbs, open class words (ex. new verbs)
▪ Critical (or sensitive) periods
• Learn language very effectively early on in life
• Learn 2nd language bw 3 and 7 – can learn on the same level as native
speaker, drops off after 8-10
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