Language

Cognitive Developmental Theory

(Piaget) Cognitive developmental theorists believe that language acquisition has to do with a child's ability for thinking symbolically, which develops near the end of the sensorimotor period.

Inventory of Polychronic Values (IPV)

10-item scale that measures the extent to which cultures like to multitask.

Stages of language learning

7 months: babbling 1 year: first word 2 years: several hundred words Kindergarten: several thousand words Fifth grade: 50,000 words College: 200,000 words

Lexeme

A meaningful linguistic unit, such as a word or two words that make one meaningful unit

Morphemes

A string of one or more phonemes that has meaning. (prefix, suffix, syllable, etc.)

Allomorph

A variation on a single morpheme. For example, the plural usage of "s" can sound like "iz", "s", or "z"

Michael Argyle and Janet Jean Fador

Affiliative conflict theory: when communicating, people use cues to increase or decrease levels of intimacy (eye contact, closeness, etc.)

ERP

An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event. ERPs are measured by means of electroencephalography (EEG).

Mowrer's language theory

Behaviorist approach to language: Children learn language because they want to be valued in their family and community

Area responsible for language production and its location

Broca's--front of the left hemisphere, near the motor cortex

Different types of aphasia

Broca's: Difficulty with production, though they know what they want to say Wernicke's: Fluid production, nonsense, and they can't understand language properly

Deep Structure vs. Surface Structure

Chomsky differentiated these Deep Structure: how an idea is represented in the fundamental, universal grammar common to all languages. This is content and more memorable that surface structure (i.e. the exact words). Surface Structure: how ideas are expressed in a specific language.

Linguistic Competence

Chomsky distinguished Linguistic Competence and Performance Competence: Knowing the language

Linguistic Performance

Chomsky distinguished Linguistic Competence and Performance Performance: Doing something with the language

Language Acquisition Device

Chomsky: Every language is an example of the same set of underlying procedures that are hardwired into our brains. Children are born with a knowledge of rules of syntax that determine how sentences are constructed.

Generative Grammar

Comsky's idea that grammar is a set of rules that dictate all the sentences of a language.

Fodor

Created the modularity position, which holds that language is independent from other cognitive systems, like perception. The way we learn language is different from other cognitive processes. The jury is out.

Binet and Simon

Developed the first intelligence test

Kinesics

Forms of nonverbal communication via the body such as gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, and posture. Studied by Birdwhistell.

Nelson

Found that language really begins to develop with the onset of ACTIVE SPEECH rather than during the first year of only listening.

McGurk Effect

Hearing something different than is actually said because you are reading lips that say it another way.

Pragmatics

How context adds to meaning

Transformational rules

How we can change one structure of sentence into another. Example: Is Mel Gibson a duphus? Mel Gibson is a duphus.

Cranberry Morpheme

In linguistic morphology, a cranberry morpheme (or fossilized term) is a type of bound morpheme that has no independent meaning or function, but nonetheless serves to distinguish one word from the other. -ing is not a cranberry morpheme because even though it isn't a full word, it does have a function. Example: mit in permit, commit, transmit, remit, and submit

Hemisphere differences

In most people, the left hemisphere is dominant for language. This is where Broca's and Wernicke's areas are.

Aprosodia

Inability to identify or use emotion in language. Flat speech.

Consequences of being bilingual

Increased cognitive functioning

Inflectional Morpheme

Inflectional morphemes serve as grammatical markers that indicate tense, number, possession, or comparison.

Gardner

Investigated gesture language in chimps

Rumbaugh

Investigated symbol language in chimps

Chomsky

Language Acquisition Device that includes a universal grammar. This is the nature-based approach to language. He also coined the term "poverty of the stimulus", which describes a lack of information provided for a kid to learn language. This lack of information must mean that people have an innate ability--LAD

Whorfian hypothesis

Language determines the way we think and perceive the world. There is more evidence against this than for it. People who don't have words for colors can distinguish them as well as people who do.

Linguistic Relativity

Language influences thought. Whorf found that Inuits, who had many words for snow, changed how they saw snow. Evidence is mixed. Language may have influence on thinking, but doesn't affect our underlying understanding of concepts.

Learning Theory

Learning theorists believe that language is acquired through conditioning or modeling.

High-vs. Low-context cultures

Low-context: social norms are spelled out verbally (US, Germany) High-context: norms are assumed to be known

Bound Morphemes

Morphemes that add meaning or grammatical information to another morpheme (e.g. -ing)

Behaviorist approach to language aquisition

Mowrer and Skinner. Language is an example of instrumental conditioning (operant conditioning). Kids learn through positive reinforcement. BUT current psychologists don't see enough examples of reinforcement that could lead to conditioning when a person is speaking.

Moon, Cooper, Fifer

Newborns recognize their native language rather than a foreign one because they heard it in the womb. 2-day-olds suck harder to the pacifiers when hearing their native language.

Derivative/Derivational Morpheme

Parts of speech that are added to a lexeme to change meaning or part of speech. For example, "ly" or "ance". Something like "-er" is not a derivational morpheme if it is just put there so the word can be compared to something else. For instance "wise and wiser" still mean wise, but you just needed to at the "r" to compare it to something else. They are both adjectives, so it's an inflectional morpheme.

Meta-communication

Qualities of speaking that are used to impart difference in meaning. Paralanguage is a type of meta-communication, but meta-communication can also be something like context.

Vygotsky and Luria

Russia's best-known psychologists, studied the development of word meanings and found them to be complex and altered by interpersonal experience. Also, they asserted that language is a tool involved in (not just a byproduct of) the development of abstract thinking.

Garden-Path sentences

Sentences that suggest one interpretation that turns out to be wrong

Syntax

Set of rules for the construction of a language

Fernald

She studied a universal way that parents speak to kids called motherese, which help the kids mark word and sentence breaks.

Constituents

Smaller units within a sentence (like phrases) that are processed as one thing

Null Morpheme

Something that performs the function of a morpheme but doesn't have any sound. For example, making sheep plural, you added a null morpheme.

Generativity

Speakers can produce sentences to represent new ideas that they haven't been exposed to, so learning language cannot be 100% imitative. This can cause mistakes called overregularization (e.g. I "swimmed" in the pool).

Categorical perception of speech sounds

Speakers of some languages can here the differences between some phonemes but not others. Infants are born with the ability to understand all phonemes. By 10 months, most phonemes they still recognize are the ones they will be able to recognize as adults.

Labov

Studied "Black" English (now known as Ebonics) and found that it had its own complex internal structure. It is not simply incorrect English.

Osgood

Studied semantics, or word meanings. He created SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL CHARTS, which allowed people to plot the meanings of words on graphs. The results were that people with similar backgrounds and interests plotted words similarly. This indicates that words have similar connotations (implied meaning) for cultures or subcultures.

Grammar's 3 types of rules

Syntax: Word and order inflection Semantics: Meaning Phonology: Sound structure

Semantic Marking

The reception of a message is changed by paralinguistics (tone, inflection, volume)

Lemma

The simplest form of a lexeme. In the lexemes run, ran, running, the lemma is run.

Phoneme

The smallest unit of sound. There are 45 phonemes in English.

Chronemics

The study of time in communication

Proxemics

The use of space/touch/distance to convey communication. This is one form of paralanguage (the other being kinesics)

Evans and Levinson

They challenged Chomsky's language acquisition device by researching many languages and finding that they didn't have consistent features (some didn't even have nouns and verbs)

On-line Measure

This measures an ongoing process. In psycholinguistics, this is typically sentence processing. Experimenters review someone's eye movements to study parsing. They can also study neural responses obtained from ERPs through EEGs to measure what information is available at different times of reading.

Off-line Measure

This measures the outcome of a process. In psycholinguistics, this is typically sentence processing. Experimenters interrupt someone and then measure the performance of what a person understood to measure parsing.

Brown

Thought determines language

Prosody

Tone inflections, accents, and other aspects of pronunciation that carry meaning. Prosody is the icing on the cake of grammar and meaning. Infants can more easily differentiate between completely different sounds than between different expressions of the same sound.

Haptic communication

Touch-based communication

Morpheme Exchange Error

Two or more morphemes exchange places. For instance, instead of "The buses are headed to the park", "The bused are heads to the park"

Telegraphic Speech

Two-word stage in language learning

Propositions

Units of meaning in a sentence created by morphemes that have a subject and a predicate

Paralinguistics

Verbal: Non-words that convey meaning (laughing, crying, hesitations, whistling, "uh huh") Nonverbal: Silent things that convey meaning (facial expressions, posture, motions). This includes both Kinesics and Proxemics. "Para" means "besides".

Area responsible for language comprehension and its location

Wernickie's--next to the auditory cortex

Parsing

Words in a spoken or written message are transformed into a mental representation of the meaning of the message

Amygdala's influence in language

non-verbal communication