What is language?
A system of symbols used to communicate
Combines meaningless elements into structures that convey meaning
What are the components of language?
- Form
- Phonemes - smallest sound unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinct meaning, e.g., the ‘s’ in ‘soar’ and ‘r’ in ‘roar’ are different
- Morphemes -smallest unit that contains meaning, e.g., run, cat, cats
- Syntax - grammar of the language - Content
Semantics - the meaning of words or language - Use
Pragmatics - the rules of using a language in a situation or across contexts
What is the debate about nature vs. nurture in language acquisition? Nature part:
Nature?
Innately human characteristic?
For animals:
- Bees have some sort of communication ways
- Birds (a few) can also pronounce words and understand semantics
- Dogs (some) can learn new words and understand meanings
These species can learn meaning of words but they don’t know syntax, how to put words in different order to convey a meaning
However, chimpanzee Kanzi knows how to combine words and know their meanings (seem to understand syntax).
Though he never acquired language like a human does.
What is the debate on the nature vs. nurture of language acquisition? Nurture part:
- Do we need exposure to learn a language?
E.g., exposure to English or Mandarin during development - Importance of timing – critical period/sensitive period
- Genie, a girl who was abused by his father in LA. She didn’t get any language exposure for the first decade of her life. Language researchers found that she was able to learn words/semantics, but it was hard for her to understand the syntax (the order/rules) of language.
- Critical period: before age 7
What do children’s language acquisition look like over years?
- Much of linguistic competence is complete by childhood
- By 10-12 months, infants discriminate and produce the sounds of their languages
- Infants produce their first words at around 12 months, and by 2 years, have a vocabulary of 200-500 words
- At around 18 months, begin combining words, and by 3 years are using longer and more complex sentences
Is the language used for communication?
- Yes but not the sole usage
e.g., A child can be talking to himself during skating - Private speech- talking to oneself
What is Piaget’s idea on a child’s egocentric speech?
Piaget - egocentric speech
- Reflection of children’s egocentric thinking
- Monologues - running discourse
- Collective monologues - when two individuals are speaking together, but not for the purpose of each other
- No desire to influence his hearer or to tell him anything
- When children move away from egocentric speech, they will start social speech *6-7
What about Vogotsky’s idea of private speech?
Vygotsky - Private Speech
- Drives thinking, makes cognition gets better
- Helps with children’s self-regulation and planning
- Research found that private speech is used more in difficulties tasks
- Speech from others to private speech to inner speech (talking to oneself in the head)
What is needed for successful conversations?
- Linguistic competence is needed to understand what the other person’s talking about
- Turn-taking (Take turns to talk)
- Taking related turns
E.g., not replying to what you said, instead says something irrelevant
Poor in early childhood, but steadily improves
What is linguistic competence?
Being able to use and understand language form (sounds, words, structure)
What is communicative competence?
Being able to use and understand language to effectively communicate, across contexts and for different purposes
What is effective in creating successful conversations?
- Repairing miscommunication
- Young children (1-3 yrs) initially tend to repeat failed communication
- Older children (3-5 yrs) are more likely to repair failed communication
- Throughout development, increase in giving/responding to verbal and non-verbal feedback
How do we do language adaptation?
- As young as 4, children will adjust their language to younger vs. older children, to children vs. adults
- Registers: styles of language associated with particular settings/roles
- even young children seem to adapt their registers while playing
What are dialects?
Forms of language that vary with regions or groups of people
- example: Canadian English, Australian English, British English, etc.
- All equally good, and “accurate” forms of language
- African American English (AAE)/Black English
- It is an equally good/accurate English. Historically associated with stigmatization
- Characteristic form and rules, distinct vocabulary
- Young children show ability to code-switch, and adjust dialect for the context
- Use by Black children appears to decrease once beginning formal schooling – correlated with academic success (may be due to teacher preference or children’s own perspective-taking ability)
What is the prevalence of bilingualism?
Greater than half of the world’s population, 20% of Canadians
- Simultaneous/Crib Bilinguals: learning 2 languages from birth
- Sequential Bilinguals, learn 1 language first and the second one
What are some of the challenges in studying bilingual language development?
- Bilingual communication
- Code-switching/code-mixing
- By 2-4 years, bilingual children appear to appropriately apply languages based on their conversational partner
- Conversations
- Some evidence that bilingual children are better able to detect conversational violations (doll who did not respond to the sentence may be perceived rude by young bilingual children)
Bilingualism: good or bad?
- In the 1920s-1950s, studies presented bilingual individuals as scoring lower on IQ/Cognitive assessments (maybe due to immigrant social status)
- In 1962, a hallmark study more evenly matched bilingual & monolingual samples, and found that bilingual children were better in cognitive abilities
What are the cognitive advantages of bilingualism?
- Perspective taking (theory of mind)
e.g., bilingual kids are better at taking perspective of others by looking at the size of toy cars - Executive function – planning and managing cognitive abilities
- Able to switch between rules and shifting tasks - Five-year-olds (who are not bilingual) may have more trouble getting the colour-shape game correct.
Note: Benefit of bilingualism is not for everything, such as IQ.
Only at switching tasks (cognitively) and theory of mind
The extent of these advantages is still debated.
What are some other languages beyond speech? e.g.m sign languages
Signed languages (over 300):
- Share the properties of language (phonemes (small bits of meaning), syntax (grammar), etc.)
E.g., change the position of the finger may change the meaning
- Children exposed to signed languages – similar patterns of acquisition to spoken language.
Start babbling and hand movements similarly
Combining signs at a similar age
- Gesture: also used for communication but doesn’t have a system
Pointing for babies as early as age 1
Thumbs up
Talking on the phone
Pantomine, using gestures to act things out
Beat gesture - to emphasize your points (kids start 2-5)
How does gesture reflect thoughts?
A “window” into what children know
# of gestures – vocabulary (nouns)
- Gesture-speech mismatches
Sometimes we say one thing with words but do different things with hands
It may be meaningful, showing that children are at verge of learning - Children who produce mismatches benefit most from instruction on that task
- Teachers seem naturally giving more instructions to children who are doing gesture-speech mismatch.
How do gestures change thought?
Gestures help “lighten the load” in difficult tasks – when children gesture during learning, they remember more.
In addition to regular math lessons, researchers use gestures to teach children
Children learn more and get the questions right more often.
Novack et al. (2014) Paper Key Ideas
examining the impact of gesture vs. physical action
Why does gesture promote learning?
Physical action?
Abstract representation?
They taught children to use physical action, concrete gesture, or abstract gesture
- Examined the effect on learning, and on generalization
Findings: children are doing fine in the initial trainings whereas the further problems are harder for them to do. Only children who were trained with abstract gesture could do the further questions.
All action – good for learning
Abstract gesture – best for generalization
