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Language
• The Premise of this lecture is that Language is what distinguishes humans from animals. All of us have it, none of them do. Is this just species-centrism, or is it accurate? In order to answer that question, we need to look at what language is.
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Animal Signaling systems
• Animal signaling systems. White tailed deer, Monkeys, Bees etc. Characteristics of signal system: invariant-fixed mapping, unstructured, uncreative, unproductive....
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Behavioral View of Language
• Language as sets of words: Simple behavior, responses to stimuli. Not so.Skinner: (de)mands & (con)tacts. control via echo, text, intraverbal or autoclitics (descriptive or functional--frames "the x's car". Chomsky's scathing attack led to alternative view
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Language Can be Described as Complex Heirarchy of RulesStart with phonology: Phoneme (40 out of
200 sounds)Made up of distinctive features (8) ex.
-place (7) [bl, ld, d, a, p, v g] -manner (6) of artic. stop, fric,
affric, nas, lat, semivowelexample: /p/ /t/ /k/:: /b/ /d/ /g/ + VOT experiment 20msec
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Word/Morpheme Level (Meaning)
• 50,000 Morphemes
• 200,000 Words
• You can say a lot….but still limited
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Syntactic Level
• Rules of ordering/inflection convey meaning. (“Dog bites cat” and “Cat bites dog” mean different things while using same words!
• Language as “packaging” job is to convey underlying propositions
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Ambiguity in Speech
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Resolving Ambiguity
Social agreement, context, intention Grice (1975): Maxims of Conversation 1. Quality: Tell the truth! (Avoid falsehoods *and*
statements for which you have no evidence)2. Quantity: Include what is necessary to express
information, and nothing extraneous.3. Utterances will be related to the topic at hand4. Manner: Avoid ambiguity, use common ground
(Clark)
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Properties of Language- Productivity
• We can say sentences we’ve never heard before– “I hate you, Mommy!”
• We have a limited set of words and structures that can be recombined.
• Generativity:– “He said that she told them that he thought
that we heard that they reported that…”
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Pragmatic Level
• Language in social use within a community
• It’s all automatic and mostly effortless despite its complexity
• Enormous complexity and rapid online processing!
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Ambiguity in Speech• Humor:
– Last night I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. What he was doing in my pyjamas, I’ll never know”- Groucho Marx
• Garden Path Sentences– The horse raced past the barn fell. – The prime number few.
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Resolving Ambiguity
Social agreement, context, intention
Grice (1975): Maxims of Conversation 1. Quality: Tell the truth! (Avoid falsehoods *and* statements
for which you have no evidence)
2. Quantity: Include what is necessary to express information, and nothing extraneous.
3. Utterances will be related to the topic at hand
4. Manner: Avoid ambiguity, use common ground (Clark)
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Hockett’s Defining Characteristics
A. displacement: bees do it vy limited (flagpole ex).B. productivity: say anything "palimony" bees cant' do
flagpole-no vertC. creativity: (cont. of above?) (not one of Hockett's)D. interchangeability: any speaker can understand any
messageE. discreteness: small separable units of soundF. duality of patterning: small set of building blocks--
>infinite wordsG. traditional transmission: knowledge passed onH. arbitrariness: no natural relationship necessary
between word & ref.I. semanticity: (cont. of above) ie. arbitrary
assignment of word--ref.J. vocal=auditory channel, specialization: unimp.K.
broadcast xmission, direct. reception, rapid fading, total feedback
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Animals Learning Human Lang.
• Porpoises/whales/
• chimps/gorillas
• parrots!
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Language/thought/impact
• Whorf/Sapir hypothesis
• Roesh and the Dani (BW-R-GYB-BR-PPOG-L)
• Why is language so important? --Cultural cumulation (and not oysters on rocks or termites on sticks!)
• Schactel
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Development:Why study?
• Child is father to the man
• Analysis of complex system
• Heredity --environment issues
• Heritability = Vg/Vt (variance)
• Why difficult? --right experiment
• Role of culture & socialization: Rosseau/Victor of Aveyron
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Development: Basic Models• Basic issue: heritability (nature-nurture
interactions)• --no development: small adults!• --progressive differentiation• --instinct (maturation alone --> devel.)• --readiness (maturation is a pre-req for
learning)• --critical period (maturation is a pre-req but
opportunity disappears)• --stages and waves
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Language Development
• Taught? -not an easy issue• Course of development--
– infant conversations– babbling (back to front, front to back)– one word– two word– Then syntax, and off and running– vocab. learning plus nuances (5000+ by
age 5)
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Language• Children develop language fast and
effortlessly
1 year: 1 year: 1 word1 word
2 years: 2 years: 300 words300 words
3 years: 3 years: 1000 1000 wordswords
4 years: 4 years: 5000 5000 wordswords
5 years: 5 years: 10000 10000 wordswords
18 years: 18 years: 60000 60000 words words
0
50
100
150
200
10 12 14 16 18 20 22
Age in Months
Nu
mb
er
of
Wo
rds
Sa
id
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Child Language Development
• How do children get from being completely non-verbal to being expert speakers?1. Can distinguish between vowel sounds (/a/ vs. /o/)- in
utero2. Can distinguish between all contrasts- from birth3. Categorical perception of speech sounds (8-12 months)4. Babbling: 6 months5. One word stage: ~1 year6. Two word stage: ~2 years (vocab is about 50 words)7. Multiword utterances; gradually increase in complexity
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The Innateness of Language• Behaviorism: Language is learned like
everything else– We say something, we receive feedback,
which encourages us to say it again
• BUT: We can say things we’ve never heard; we can produce new structures.
• Chomsky: Language is innate to humans– Language Acquisition Device (LAD)– Universal Grammar– Poverty of the Stimulus
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Innateness of Language?
• Chomsky’s Solution Universal Grammar: all natural languages share a
common structure that arises from the way our brain is designed to construct and process language.
• We have evolved specialized mechanisms for language because communication is advantageous
Problem - “Universal” structure could come from the constraints of the environment and communicative needs
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Arguments for Innateness• semi-dedicated brain tissue (Broca's,
Wernicke's)• critical period• early start and early development +
difficulty of task (complexity of rules, 5000+ words by age 5 + semi-complete set of rules
• overgeneralization: not mimicry • syntactic uniqueness (numerous issues)
(many instances: wild chn. animals, no-input lang. etc.)
• poor teaching and poor examples (parsing problem)
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Arguments for Innateness
• Dedicated brain regions – Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas– Damage to Broca’s area, near the motor cortex, is associated with difficulties
in producing speech
– Damage to Wernicke’s area, which is near the auditory cortex, is linked to difficulties with meaning
• FOXP2 gene
– Family missing the gene
show severe speech and
language impairments
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The Critical Period
• If language learning doesn’t occur before a certain time, language will be impaired
• Johnson & Newport (1989)– Age of Acquisition affects
ability to learn second language
• Genie & Victor ++• Pinker (NR)
– Nicaraguan sign language– Deaf children
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Critical Period?• Performance on a test
of English grammar by adults originally from Korea and China was directly related to the age at which they came to the United States and were exposed to English
• The scores of adults who emigrated before the age of 7 are indistinguishable from those of native English speakers
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The Nature of Feedback (Poverty of the Stimulus)
1. Children get little or no direct instruction.2. Children get little feedback and don’t listen to what they
get -- so why do they ever correct their errors?3. Children hear many ungrammatical structures not
identified as such -- how do they come to learn these are wrong?
4. In some cultures adults don’t speak to children.5. Children will make up a language if they are not given one
-- deaf children of hearing parents.6. Some cost (simple vs. elaborated language) to low input.
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The Language Gene
• SLI: Specific Language Impairment: Language is impaired without signs of impairment in other areas (motor, cognitive, etc.)
• The FOXP2 gene– Members of the KE family with a corruption of
this gene had SLI; the others didn’t.– The Language Gene?
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The Language Gene
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Thought Leads Language!
• Holophrastic speech
• Telegraphic speech
• “Bye bye cat” ex.
• Kid’s translations of adult speech
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Verb Learning• Two types of past
tense verbs:– Regular: talked, liked,
hated– Irregular: ate, went,
was
• U-shaped curve of language learning– Early: correct usage– Middle:
overgeneralization– Late: correct usage