PSYC 2500H Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Chief Operating Officer, Language Processing In The Brain, Noam Chomsky
26 Jun 2018
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Chapter 11: Development of Language and Communication Skills
Chapter 11: Development of Language and Communication Skills
-Language: a small number of individually meaningless symbols (sounds, letters, gestures) that can be
combined according to agreed-on rules to produce an infinite number of messages
-Human languages are flexible and productive
-Communication: the process by which one organism transmits information to and influences another
-Vocables: unique patterns of sound that a prelinguistic infant uses to represent objects, actions, or events
The Five Components of Language
-Researchers have concluded that five kinds of knowledge underlie the growth of linguistic proficiency
-Phonology
oPhonology: sound system of a language and the rules for combining these sounds to produce
meaningful units of speech
oPhonemes: the basic units of sound that are used in a spoken language
oNo two languages have the same phonologies
oChildren must learn how to discriminate, produce, and combine the speech like sounds of their
native tongue in order to make sense of the speech
-Morphology
oMorphology: the rules governing the formation of meaningful words from sounds
oUsing prefixes, past tense, suffixes
-Semantics
oSemantics: the expressed meaning if words and sentences
oMorphemes: smallest meaningful language units
oBound morphemes: morphemes that cannot stand alone but that modify the meaning of free
morphemes
oChildren must recognize that words and ground grammatical morphemes convey meaning
-Syntax
oSyntax: the structure of a language; the rules specifying how words and grammatical markers are
to be combined to produce meaningful sentences
oChildren must acquire basic understanding of the syntactical features of their native tongue
-Pragmatics
oPragmatics: principles that underlie the effective and appropriate use of language in social
context
oSociolinguistic knowledge: culturally specific rules specifying how language should be structured
and used in particular social contexts
-Becoming an effective communicator also involves interpreting and using nonverbal signs
Theories of Language Development
-Linguistic universals: an aspect of language development that all children share
The learning Perspective
-BF Skinner argued children learn to speak appropriately because they are reinforced for grammatical
speech
-Other social-learning theorists add that children acquire much of their linguistic knowledge by carefully
listening to and imitating the language of companions
-Caregivers teach language by modelling and reinforcing grammatical speech
-Analyses of conversations between mothers and children reveal that a mother’s approval or disapproval
depends far more on the truth value (semantics) of what a child says than on the statements grammatical
correctness
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oThese findings cast doubt on the notion that parents shape syntax by directly reinforcing
grammatical speech
The Nativist Perspective
-Human beings are biologically programmed to acquire language
-Chomsky argued language is incredibly elaborate and far too complex to be either taught by parents, as
Skinner proposed, or discovered via simple trial-and-error process
-Chomsky suggested humans come equipped with a language acquisition device: the innate knowledge of
grammar that humans were said to possess, which might enable young children to infer the rules governing
others speech and to use these rules to produce language
-Universal grammar: in theories of language acquisition, the basic rules of grammar that characterize all
language
-Other nativists make similar claims
-Dan Slobin does not assume children have any innate knowledge of language, but he thinks they have an
inborn language-making capacity: hypothesized set of specialized linguistic processing skills that enable
children to analyze speech and to detect phonological, semantic, and syntactical relationships
-For nativists, language acquisition is quite natural and almost automatic, as long as children have linguistic
input to process
-Also consistent with the nativists viewpoint is the observation that language is species-specific
Brain Specialization and Language
-Damage to brain areas can cause loss of speech function(s)
-Broca’s area: structure located in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex that controls
language production
-Wernicks area: structure located in the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex that is
responsible for interpreting speech
-Apparently left hemisphere is sensitive to some aspects of language from birth
-In first day of life, speech sounds already elicit more electrical activity from the left side of an infants’
brain
The Sensitive-Period Hypothesis
-Lenneberg proposed languages should be most easily acquired between birth and puberty
-Sensitive-period hypothesis: the notion that human begins are most proficient at language learning before
they reach puberty
-Right hemisphere of a child’s relatively unspecialized brain can assume any linguistic functions lost when
the left hemisphere is damaged
-By contrast the brain of a person who is past puberty is already fully specialized for language and other
neurological duties
-So, aphasia may persist in adolescents and adults because the right hemisphere is no longer available to
assume linguistic skills lost from a traumatic injury to the left side of the brain
-Suggested that may be learning a new language after puberty is tougher since sensitive period for language
learning is over
Problems with the nativists approach
-Challenge the nativist cite as support for their theory
-Others say nativists don’t really explain language development by attributing it to a built-in language
acquisition device
-Some claim nativists overlook the many ways in which a child’s language environment promotes linguistic
competencies
The Interactionist Perspective
-Interactionist theory: the notion that biological factors and environmental influences interact to determine
the course of language development
Biological and Cognitive Contributors
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-What is inborn is not any specialized linguistic knowledge or processing skills but rather a sophisticated
brain that matures very slowly and predisposes children to develop similar ideas at about the same age-
ideas that they are then motivated to express in their own speech
-Infants first words center heavily on objects they have manipulated or on actions they have preformed
-Words like gone emerge during second year about the same time infants are mastering object permanence
and beginning to appraise the success or failure of their problem-solving activities
-Like nativists, interactionists believe children are biologically prepared to acquire a language
oNot LAD or LMC but rather powerful human brain that slowly matures
-Elizabeth Bates believes that grammatical speech arises out of social necessity: as children’s vocabularies
increase beyond 100 to 200 words, they must find ways to organize the linguistic knowledge
Environmental Supports for Language Development
-Interactionists stress that language is primarily a means of communicating that develops in the context of
social interactions as children and their companions strive to get their messages across
Lessons from Joint Activities
-As adults’ converse with young children, they create a supportive learning environment that helps the
children grasp the regularities of language
Lessons from Child-Directed Speech
-child-directed speech: the short, simple, high-pitched (and often repetitive) sentences that adults use when
talking with young children.
-parents gradually increase both the length and the complexity of their simplified child-directed speech as
their children’s language becomes more elaborate
Lessons from Negative Evidence
-parents provide child with negative evidence which means respond to grammatical speech in ways that
subtly communicate that an error has been made and provide information that might be used to correct
these errors
-expansion: responding to a child’s ungrammatical utterance with a grammatically improved form of that
statement
-recast: responding to a child’s ungrammatical utterance with a non-repetitive statement that is
grammatically correct
-parents are likely to respond to grammatically appropriate sentences by simply maintaining and extending
the conversation
The Importance of Conversation
-exposure to speech is not enough, children must be actively involved in using language
The Prelinguistic Period: Before Language
-prelinguistic phase: the period before children utter their first meaningful words
Early Retractions to Speech
-newborns seem to be programmed to tune in to human speech
-by 3 days old, infant recognizes mothers voice
-one-month old babies are as capable as adults of discriminating consonant sounds such as ba and da and ta
and by 2 months, recognize that as a particular vowel
-very young infants are actually able to discriminate a wider variety of phenomes than adults (adults lose
phonemic distinctions not important to their native language)
Importance of Speech Cues
-“hey there” “look at mum!”
-often successful at affecting a baby’s mood or behaviors (comfort, etc.)
-2-6 months old infants frequently produce vocalization of intonation they heard in response
-During second half of first year, infants become increasingly attuned to the “rhythm” of a language
Producing Sounds: The Infant’s Prelinguisitic Vocalizations
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