Transcript Lang-Langdev

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.
Animal Signaling systems
• Animal signaling systems. White tailed
deer, Monkeys, Bees etc.
Characteristics of signal system:
invariant-fixed mapping, unstructured,
uncreative, unproductive....
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
Language Can be Described as
Complex Heirarchy of Rules
Start 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, semivowel
example: /p/ /t/ /k/:: /b/ /d/ /g/ + VOT
experiment 20msec
Word/Morpheme Level
(Meaning)
• 50,000 Morphemes
• 200,000 Words
• You can say a lot….but still limited
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
Properties of LanguageProductivity
• 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…”
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!
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.
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)
Hockett’s Defining Characteristics
A.
B.
displacement: bees do it vy limited (flagpole ex).
productivity: say anything "palimony" bees cant' do
flagpole-no vert
C. creativity: (cont. of above?) (not one of Hockett's)
D. interchangeability: any speaker can understand any
message
E. discreteness: small separable units of sound
F. duality of patterning: small set of building blocks-->infinite
words
G. traditional transmission: knowledge passed on
H. 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
Animals Learning Human Lang.
• Porpoises/whales/
• chimps/gorillas
• parrots!
Language/thought/impact
• Whorf/Sapir hypothesis
• Roesh and the Dani (BW-R-GYB-BRPPOG-L)
• Why is language so important? -Cultural cumulation (and not oysters on
rocks or termites on sticks!)
• Schactel
Development:
Why study?
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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
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
Language Development
• Taught? -not an easy issue
• Course of development-–
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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)
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
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)
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.
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?
The Language Gene
Thought Leads Language!
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Holophrastic speech
Telegraphic speech
“Bye bye cat” ex.
Kid’s translations of adult speech
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