Phonology
Deals with sounds
Morphology/semantics
Deals with meaning
Syntax
Grammar
Pragmatics
How to use language to communicate within one’s culture
Phonemes
The smallest units of sound
Morphemes
The smallest units of meaning
Language Development
Newborns are speechless, but 5-year-olds are about as good at language as adults are
Young children are amazing language learners; adults are terrible
- Perceptual and memory limitations lead young children to extract smaller bits of language than adults do
- Allows children to ignore complexity; extract regularities
Children with damage to language areas often bounce back, adults do not
Newborns Prefer Speech
- Prefers speech to non-speech, their own mother’s voice to another mother’s
- Prefers natives vs foreign language
Themes of Language
- Nature vs Nurture
- Cross-cultural similarities/differences
- Individual differences
Language and Brain
Language lateralized to left hemisphere
Broca’s Aphasia
- Difficulty producing
- Understanding fine
Wernicke’s aphasia
- Difficulty understanding and producing understandable speech
- Producing fine
- Deaf individuals can have some aphasias - not specific to modality
The Development of Speech Perception
Babies don’t talk for awhile, but they are perceiving language all the time
Cannot learn full-fledged language without being exposed to it
The Learning Environment
- For hearing infants, perceiving native language(s) begins in the womb
- After birth, overhearing adult speech and hearing Infant Directed Speech (IDS)
Infant Directed Speech (IDS)
- IDS is very common
- Seems almost automatic
- Infants prefer IDS to ADS, even in unfamiliar language
- Not universal, some cultures don’t speak to infants at all/ use IDS
Prosody
The characteristic rhythm, tempo, cadence, melody, and intonational patterns with which language is spoken
Speech Sounds
The phonemic differences that make up a language
Categorical Perception of Speech Sounds
Voice onset time (VOT): the length of time between when the air passes through the lips and when the vocal chords start vibrating
Universal Perceivers
Studies show that young babies discriminate the phonemes of all the world’s languages (adults do not)
- Older babies by 10-12months fail to discriminate between speech sounds not in their native language
Perceptual Narrowing
- Younger infants seem to have more competence
- Once young babies know what they’re learning, it makes sense to focus effort only on that language
Role of Input
- Babies start out with some broad capacity to learn any language, eventually abilities specific to native language facilitated, others are lost
Hearing Language
Stress pattern: which syllable in a word is stressed
By 6 months, babies prefer well-formed sentences or phrases
Stages of Language Production
Reflexive sounds (crying, grunting) - birth
Social sounds (cooling, laughter) - 6 weeks
Intentional vocal play (babbling) - 6-10 months (avg 7months)
First words: 10-15months (avg = 13 months)
Vocabulary spurt: 14 - 25 months (avg = 19 months)
Simple sentences: 18-32 months (avg = 24 months)
Pre-Linguistic Speech
Reduplicated babbling (“ba-ba-ba-ba-ba”) - 6-10 months
Variegated babbling (“ba-goo-ba-goo-ba-goo”) - 11 months
The Holophrastic Period
- Usually by a year
- One-word utterances
- Holophrases: whole ideas expressed in one word
- Overextension: use of words you have for lots of things
Between 12 and 18months they quadruple their vocabulary
Individual Difference: Style of Acquisition
A set of strategies that infants use in starting to speak
Huge differences across SES
Input quality matters
Parents who talk more to their kids have bigger vocabularies
