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PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE. Heather Ferguson. OVERVIEW. Definition of language Stages of language perception Stages of language production Theories of language acquisition Critical period hypothesis Case study Bilingualism. WHAT IS LANGUAGE?.

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PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

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  1. PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE Heather Ferguson

  2. OVERVIEW • Definition of language • Stages of language perception • Stages of language production • Theories of language acquisition • Critical period hypothesis • Case study • Bilingualism

  3. WHAT IS LANGUAGE? ‘The systematic, conventional use of sounds, signs, or written symbols in a human society for communication and self-expression.’ David Crystal

  4. STAGES OF LANGUAGE PERCEPTION • At birth • Already prefer the sounds of their mother’s voice • Can discriminate between mother’s native language an other languages

  5. Discriminating sounds • Adult speakers have difficulty discriminating between language sounds that are not phonemic contrasts in their native language • Young infants do not demonstrate this difficulty initially • They can discriminate any contrasting phonetic sounds in the world’s languages

  6. How can we possibly know that? Are /s/ and /ç/ different sounds for you, baby?

  7. Testing Infants • Some helpful things infants do for experimenters: • They look longer at new stimuli compared to familiar stimuli • They suck faster when exposed to new stimuli

  8. Testing Infants • Habituation-dishabituation method • Habituate infant on one stimulus • Show new, different stimulus • Does the infant react to the new stimulus as new? • Habituation-dishabituation measures • Time looks to stimulus • High-amplitude sucking paradigm • Does the infant start sucking faster on a pacifier (that’s hooked up to a monitoring device)?

  9. Testing Infants ba ba ba ba ba ba

  10. Testing Infants ba ba pa ba ba ba

  11. Limited-time Offer • However, infants can only discriminate all phonemes for a limited period of time • At 4 to 6 months phonetic sensitivity diminishes. • By 12 months, infants are very poor at distinguishing foreign contrasts • The (speech) perceptual system is being reorganized around these time periods (4-6 months & 10-12 months)

  12. Theory • Exposure and habituation to the sounds of the target language impedes an infant’s ability to perceive phonetic contrasts that the native language does not make • There are innate language abilities that are lost due to experience with a first language • One is born with all language sounds available, but sound distinctions are lost as sound system develops

  13. Phonemic Organization Account • Loss of perceptual ability is related to development of phonemic categories for the first language- phonemic organization

  14. Infant-directed Speech • 7-week-old infants prefer infant-directed speech (‘motherese’) to adult-directed speech • Regardless of gender of speaker • Older infants show this preference as well, but younger infants are more responsive, both in terms of attention and affect

  15. STAGES OF LANGUAGE PRODUCTION • The larynx • At birth- the larynx is relatively high, and entire vocal tract is quite different from adults • At 3 months- larynx begins to descend (won’t reach adult location until ~3 years old) • At 4 months- the vocal tract begins to resemble an adult vocal tract

  16. Infant Speech Production • Because of their maturing vocal tract, some sounds are genuinely difficult for young children to produce

  17. Stage I (0-8 weeks): Basic biological noises • Reflexive • Hunger, pain and discomfort resulting in crying • Vegetative • Sucking, swallowing, coughing, burping • Airstream mechanism and vocal folds used to produce pitch patterns in a rhythmical fashion

  18. Stage II (2-5 months): Cooing and laughing • Cooing sounds develop alongside crying • Quieter, lower-pitched and more musical than crying • Short-vowel-like sounds preceded by a consonant-like sound produced at the back of the mouth • No rhythm or intonational contour • Laughing sounds emerge at around 4 months

  19. Stage III (5-7½ months): Vocal Play • High-pitched segments over one second long, frequently repeated (longer in duration than cooing) • Wider intonation ranges (low to high) • Large inventory of consonant and vowel sounds, with periodic focus on particular places of articulation

  20. Stage IV (~6-12 months): Babbling • Features of babbling: • Sounds are a subset of possible sounds found in spoken language • Syllabic organisation • Reduplication • Same two sounds repeated (“babababa” “papapapap”) • Variegated babbling (~12 months) • Sounds change between syllables (“bamipabo”)

  21. Stage IV (~6-12 months): Babbling • Features of babbling: • Lack of meaning/ reference • Rhythm and intonation reminiscent of speech • Continuity of phonetic form and syllable type between a child’s babbling and first words • Infants will often seem to ‘practise’ when alone • Suggests that babbling is related more to practising speech sounds than communication

  22. Babbling & Sign Language • Deaf infants also babble • Often delayed (11-24 months) compared to hearing infants • Often different in character (e.g. fewer different kinds of consonants) • This indicates that exposure to a spoken language influences babbling • Infants (hearing and deaf) who are exposed to sign language will babble manually

  23. Stage V (9-18months): Melodic Utterance • Variations in melody, rhythm and intonation become a major feature toward the end of the first year • Begins to sound language-like

  24. First Words • Around 12 months • Focus on words related to the here and now, concrete things: • People’s names, toys, clothes, food they eat • Words for things that they can influence (one-word stage) • “ball” likely to be learned earlier than “chair” or “tree”

  25. First Words • Two kinds of errors children can make: • Overextension- refer to all four legged animals as dogs • Underextension- refer to only the family dog as dog

  26. The Mapping Problem • Child says “What’s that?” and points to: • So…how could this possibly go wrong?

  27. The Mapping Problem • Potential problems: • More than one referent could apply to the word, “teacup”

  28. The Mapping Problem • Potential problems: • More than one word may apply to a referent: • Tea? • Teacup? • Saucer? • A drink? • Cup?

  29. The Mapping Problem • Apparent solutions: • Whole object bias- children prefer to attach new labels to the whole object • Mutual exclusivity bias- children prefer to have only one name for an object

  30. Early “Multiword” Utterances • By about 15months babies have a vocabulary of about 20- 25 words • Two years • Vocabulary rapidly increases to 100’s of words • Child constructs primitive sentences- two-word stage (“no eat, throw ball”)

  31. Early “Multiword” Utterances • Thirty months • Utterances progress beyond 2- word stage and show basic propositional structure (telegraphic stage) • Functional words appear (“the, in, of”) • Children overgeneralise rules (“goed”) • Five years old • Basic structure of language is in place • Vocabulary of 10000- 15000 words

  32. THEORIES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION • Nativist Theories • Language is entirely innate • Learning Theories • Language is entirely learned • Cognitive Theories • Language development is related to other cognitive developments • Social Interactionist Theory • Language is acquired through communicative interaction

  33. NATIVISM • Emphasizes a child’s inborn capacities for language • Language is acquired through a genetic program • Language acquisition is distinct from other cognitive processes

  34. NATIVISM • Noam Chomsky- the language acquisition device (LAD) • Children are born with a basic understanding of language and a mental capacity to learn it quickly • Brain is ‘over- connected’ at birth. Connections that are not used die or become dormant, and new connections based on experience form • There is a specific time period of function

  35. NATIVISM • Universal grammar: • Children are pre-programmed with a kind of default language which can be altered with exposure to a specific language • Key assumption: • Infants develops language even when other cognitive skills are low

  36. Evidence in Favour of a Pre-determined Biological Language System: • Other primates don’t learn language simply by being treated like human infants • Gua (chimp, 1993) • Raised alongside a 9½month-old boy for 9 months • Never spoke but learned to comprehend spoken requests • Viki (chimp, 1951) • Raised alone from 3 days- 7 years old • Capable of picture recognition, sorting of pictures and objects into conceptual categories • Understood large number of words and phrases • But, comprehension contextually determined

  37. Evidence in Favour of a Pre-determined Biological Language System: • Children with other cognitive deficits still learn language • Language skills can persist even in cases of profound mental retardation

  38. Evidence in Favour of a Pre-determined Biological Language System: • Poverty of the stimulus • Language input to children is ill-formed and incomplete (motherese) • Children don’t receive explicit rules about what not to do • They don’t get it even if you do tell them

  39. Evidence in Favour of a Pre-determined Biological Language System: • Creoles • Pidgins develop in language contact situations (mostly colonial) • (Pidgin = a language that has been constructed from two or more shared languages for communication between communities. A pidgin is not a mother tongue) • Creoles develop from children exposed primarily to pidgins • (Creole = a language that has developed from a mixture of languages) • Children are, in essence, filling the gaps of pidgins

  40. Evidence in Favour of a Pre-determined Biological Language System: • Evidence for critical period of language acquisition

  41. THE CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS Eric Lenneberg, 1967

  42. THE CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS • Lenneberg theorized that… • The acquisition of language is an innate (you are born with it) process • Biological factors limit the critical period for acquisition of a language to a ‘window of opportunity’ from roughly two years of age to puberty • If a child does not learn a language before the onset of puberty, the child will never master language at all

  43. Bird Song and the Critical Period Hypothesis • Some birds (like Sparrows) have courtship songs • Songs have dialectal variation • Individual song is a version of other songs it hears during the ‘critical period’ of first 100 days of life • Bird learns song by trial and error (babbling) • When deprived of song input early in life, they fail to produce a normal song

  44. THE CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS • The critical period and the human brain… • Lenneberg believed that after lateralization (a process by which the two sides of the brain develop specialized functions), the brain loses plasticity • Lenneberg claimed that lateralization of the language function is normally completed at puberty, making post-adolescent language acquisition difficult

  45. CASE STUDY The story of Genie

  46. The Story of Genie • Read about Genie and decide for yourself… • How does Genie’s language development relate to Lenneberg’s theory? • What is the strongest evidence in support of the Critical Period Hypothesis • Was Genie’s early language deprivation the ONLY thing that contributed to her abnormal language development?

  47. The Story of Genie • Main points… • From 20 months- 13 years old Genie was not allowed to make noise and was not spoken to (father barked or growled at her) • When found could not speak or understand words (except name and ‘sorry’) • Over time, vocab increased and she learned to speak in 2/ 3- word sentences • BUT, speech has remained garbled and she has never mastered grammar needed for language

  48. Genie and the Critical Period Hypothesis • At first, a number of researchers thought that Genie would prove Lenneberg’s theory wrong as… • 1 year after her escape she was producing 2/ 3- word sentences • She could distinguish between singular/ plural nouns and positive and negative sentences • Genie’s language resembled that of a normal 18- 20 month old child

  49. Genie and the Critical Period Hypothesis • BUT, • As time went on, Genie’s vocab did not ‘explode’ as is the case with normally developing children • Four years later… • She still had not mastered grammar • She could not ask questions properly (“where is may I have a penny”) • She confused pronouns, using ‘you’ and ‘me’ interchangeably

  50. Genie and the Critical Period Hypothesis • Has Genie supported Lenneberg’s theory? NO! • Why? • Genie’s personal history was so disastrous that it is not clear why she did not make progress with her language • It is possible that Genie did not master language because she had passed the ‘critical period’ • BUT, other explanations are available

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