Chapter 10 Readings (very detailed and helpful) SCIENCE OF BEHAVIOUR Edition 4

Chapter 10: Language Excluding page 305 (from What happens if) to page 308 (concepts they denote) Prologue Do Animals Have Language? Researchers believe some animals can learn languageWashoe, a female chimpanzee, was one year old when she began to learn sign language; by the time she was four, she had a vocabulary of more than 130 signs Chimpanzees lack the control of the tongue, lips, palate, and vocal cords that humans have and cannot produce the variety of complex sounds that characterize human speech Humans clearly learn language more readily than chimpanzees do Languages: flexible systems that use symbols to express many meanings Most species can communicate with one another, but they dont have language From the studies of primates learning sign language, true verbal ability is a social behavior Psycholinguistics: a branch of psychology devoted to the study of verbal behaviour SPEECH AND COMPREHENSION Perception of Speech speech does not come to us as a series of individual words; we must extract the words from a stream of speech peoples earliest attempts at written communication took the form of stylized pictures Recognition of Speech Sounds: the auditory system performs a complex task in enabling us to recognize speech sounds like our ability to recognize faces visually, the auditory system recognizes the patterns www.notesolution.comunderlying speech rather than just the sounds themselves using fMRI, researchers found than some regions of the brain responded more when people heard human vocalizations (both speech and non-speech) than when they heard only natural soundsregions in which there was a large diff. were located in the temporal lobe, on the auditory cortex when it comes to analyzing the detailed info of speech, the left hemisphere plays a larger role phoneme: are elements of speechthe smallest units of sound that allow us to distinguish the meaning of a spoken word (i.e. the word pin consists of three phonemes: p+i +n voice-onset time: the delay bw the initial sounds of a consonant (such as the puffing sound of the phoneme p) and the onset of vibration of the vocal cords voicing is the vibration of vocal chords distinction bw voiced and unvoiced consonants permits us to distinguish bw p and b the delay in voicing that occurs when you say pa is very slight: only 0.06 second phonemic discriminations begin with auditory processing of the sensory differences, and this occurs in both hemisphereshowever, regions of the left auditory cortex seem to specialize in recognizing the special aspects of speech o some areas responded to both natural and unintelligible speech, while others responded only to speech that was intelligibleeven if it was highly distorted perception of a phoneme is affected by the sounds that follow it o we recognize speech sounds in pieces larger than individual phonemes (i.e. when sound was followed by ift, the participants heard the word gift) morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning in language syntax of a particular language determines how phonemes can be combined to form morphemes (i.e. the word fastest contains two morphemes, fast, which is a free morpheme, bc it can stand on its own and still have meaning, and ist, which is a bound morpheme) bound morphemes cannot stand on their own and must be attached to other morphemes to provide meaning www.notesolution.com