LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT SWIMS

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not the longest word in English, it is:

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT What is the shortest word in English? I am!

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT “sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick”

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT Cognitive psychologists study memory, language, problem-solving, decision-making and reasoning → remember, cognition – which refers to all the mental processes related to thinking, knowing, remember- ing, communicating – made a ‘comeback’ in the 1950s

LANGUAGE STRUCTURE Language refers to written, spoken, or signed symbols/words and the rules for combining these symbols/words to communicate meaning → language is built from basic sounds which are combined into meaningful units, which are combined into words, then phrases, then sentences

LANGUAGE STRUCTURE Phonemes are the smallest distinctive sound units in a language (phones(sound)/phonemes); phonemes aren’t the same as letters (example: ch is a phoneme) → English uses about 40 of over 100 basic identified phonemes * Censenent phenemes generelly cerry mere enfermeteen then de vewel phenemes

LANGUAGE STRUCTURE Morphemes are the smallest units that carry meaning in a given language (m = meaning); may be a word (luck) or part of a word (un-luck-y: prefix/root/suffix) → a word’s meaning is based on its morphemes; semantics is the study, rules, and understanding of the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences

LANGUAGE STRUCTURE Finally, syntax is the set of rules for combining words into grammatically correct sentences (noun and verb phrase) → Consider the sentence: “Stephanie kissed the crying boy” Semantics tells us why “Crying, Stephanie kissed the boy.” has a different meaning Syntax tells us why “Kissed the crying boy Stephanie” is incorrect

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Infants (in fantis “not speaking”) at 3 months can distinguish phonemes from different languages and by 7 months can recognize word forms → after the first few months, babies begin the ‘babbling stage’, making non-language-specific sounds corresponding to phonemes

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT → around their first birthday, babies begin uttering sounds that correspond to words and communicate meaning (the ‘one- word’ stage) → by 18 months babies’ vocabularies begin to explode and by the age of two they can utter basic verb/noun sentences (“want juice”), aka telegraphic speech * baby’s receptive vocabulary (comprehension) matures quicker than their productive (speech)

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Language is learned by trial and error, as shown by overextension (applying a word in too broad a way – juice for all beverages) and/or underextension (juice only for orange juice)

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Overgeneralization (called ‘overregularization’ in your book) is common after the third year when children incorrectly use grammatical rules in cases where they don’t apply → first the correct word is learned (feet, went), then as grammar is learned mistakes are made (foots, goed), and then mastery brings the correct word back

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Overgeneralization shows kids actively work to learn grammar in small steps → by school-age, kids gradually gain the ability to reflect on the use of language (metalinguistic awareness), such as double-meanings What kind of lights did Noah have on the arc?

fLoOd Lights!

BILINGUALISM Bilingual children generally have smaller vocabularies in each of their languages than monolingual children, but have equal or larger combined vocabularies → bilinguals may lag in processing speed and verbal fluency, but the effort to focus on one language and resist distractions results in better attentional control

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Language acquisition theories center around the good old nature vs. nurture debate → Our behaviorist buddy Skinner predictably proclaimed language was learned via environmental factors: correct responses are positively reinforced and shaped to perfection

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Noam Chomsky disagreed with Skinner and proclaimed humans to have an inborn capability to learn language: we learn language just as birds learn to fly → this nativist theory says we have a Language Acquisition Device – LAD - (brain/neural structures) allowing us to quickly and easily learn

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Because the LAD idea is vague and undefined, others have proposed interactionist theories of language acquisition: nature and nurture both contribute

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT: WHICH COMES FIRST? Benjamin Lee Whorf’s linguistic determinism (relativity) hypothesis suggests that language determines how we think → bilingual people may think and describe themselves differently in each language

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT: WHICH COMES FIRST? Cross-cultural comparisons of color perception have given credence to Whorf’s theory: cultures’ that don’t distinguish between blue and green think about them differently than those that do

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT: WHICH COMES FIRST? → debates on Whorf’s ideas are focused on his original extreme version or a less extreme version that says language doesn’t determine, but it does influence thought

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT: WHICH COMES FIRST? Semantic slanting: deliberately choosing words to create specific emotional responses → “pro-life” rather than anti-choice/“pro-choice” rather than anti-life or pro-abortion → “collateral damage” from “air support” for civilians killed by bombing raids → “Nothing is certain in life except negative patient care outcome and revenue enhancement.”