Broca’s area
- speech formation
- left hemisphere
Wernicke’s area
- speech understanding
- rear part of temporal lobe
aphasia
- impairment in speech production and/or comprehension
Linguistic relativity hypothesis
- language determines our thinking
- can only think through language
- not true (people without language have thought)
ex. if a certain language has only a few words for colour = can’t understand other colours
- but actual people can discriminate/perceive different colours
influences of language (current view)
- influences how we think
- how efficiently we categorize experiences
- how much detail we attend to, perceptions, decisions, conclusions drawn
Language influences…(3 things)
- perceptions
- decisions
- conclusions
sexist language
- includes words, phrases, and expressions that unnecessarily differentiate between females and males or exclude, trivialize, or diminish either sex
- can influence perceptions
ex. in a psych study, people read two sentences:
“He is committed to understanding man’s understanding of others”
“They are committed to understanding people’s understanding of others”
People thought that psych was better job for men when they read the first sentence
Animal communication
Waggle dance: what is it and what 3 things are communicated
When bee finds food it returns and does and does dance to let other bees know about the food
- direction of food
- shows path relative to the sun based on angle - distance to food
- the length of the dance, from beginning to end - quality of food
- vigor of the dance, more vibration = better food
Animal communication
3 ways ants communicate
- chemical communication
- pyrazine and pheromones - body language
- touching
- trophallaxis - auditory communication
- call to other ants (ex. via scraping to indicate distress)
Hockett’s design features
- “humans are the only species with language”
- “vocal auditory channel”
- language is produced through the vocal tract and transmitted as sound, language is perceived through the auditory channel
- animals do this, but also use other ways (ex. chemicals (dogs peeing) and vibrational (rabbits stomping) - displacement
- language can be used to communicate things not present in time and space
- some animals can do this (waggle dance) - learnability
- users of one language can learn to use a different language
- some species can learn what vocalization of other species means (ex. bird recognizes the alarm call of other birds and knows a predator is near)
primate vocalizations
vervet monkeys
their communication shows:
- have 3 different types of vocalizations depending on the predator
their communication shows:
- semanticity: language has meaning
- arbitrariness: language word form has no relation with its meaning
- meaningful associates between language and teh world = arbitrary
primate vocalizations
vervet monkeys
their communication does not show:
their communication does not show:
- displacement: using language to talk about things not present in space/time
- productivity: language can be used to say things not said before but it’s still understandable – diff word order to make new phrases
- cultural transmission: how humans learn; monkeys = genetically wired to make these vocalizations
can language be taught to apes? how?
- ASL
- apes can use hundreds of words and arbitrary symbols
- they are able to make comments about their world and request food/objects
- use displacement – communicate about objects no physically present
- use productivity – use symbols they know in new combination = productivity
Can animals acquire language
kanzi example + characteristics of language they show
- plastic sheet symbols = words
- use for communications
understood difference between “make snake bite dog” and “make dog bite snake”
