What are the core properties of human language?
Reference, intentionality, productivity, duality of patterning, displacement, interchangeability, decontextualization, generic application, perspective-taking, and cultural transmission.
What is duality of patterning?
Languages have a finite set of meaningless units (phonemes) that combine in rule-governed ways to produce a very large number of meaningful units (words).
How does honeybee communication compare to human language?
Bees show displacement (communicating distant food location/direction) but lack productivity, interchangeability, cultural transmission, duality of patterning, and true intentionality.
What were the key limitations of Nim Chimpsky’s language learning?
Utterance length didn’t increase, longer utterances were repetitive, signing was context-dependent (mainly to get rewards), and usage was imitative rather than spontaneous.
What did vervet monkey alarm calls demonstrate, and what do they lack?
They show reference (3 distinct calls for 3 predators) and displacement (playback studies). They lack productivity, cultural transmission, duality of patterning, and full intentionality.
What did Kanzi learn, and what were his limitations?
Kanzi learned lexigrams and could comprehend novel spoken sentences. However, his symbol use was instrumental (to get things), he lacked true intentionality, and his syntax was only on par with a 2-year-old.
What is Pinker’s nativist proposal for language evolution?
Language itself was the target of natural selection — it evolved gradually via multiple genes affecting language-specific components (speech perception/production, word learning, syntax). It is unique to humans and domain-specific.
What is Tomasello’s constructivist proposal for language evolution?
Language emerged from a uniquely human, evolved ability to understand others as having mental states (theory of mind/shared attention). Grammar arises through cultural-historical grammaticalization, not innate structures. Language is built from domain-general capacities.
What is FOXP2 and why is it relevant to language?
FOXP2 is a gene whose mutation causes language difficulties in production and comprehension. Humans share two mutations since diverging from chimps. Knockout in mice/songbirds causes abnormal vocalizations — evidence for a genetic basis of language.
What does Broca’s aphasia tell us about language in the brain?
Damage to Broca’s area (left hemisphere) causes difficulty initiating speech and producing grammatical words. It also affects signed language, suggesting it’s not modality-specific but language-specific.
What do split-brain studies reveal about language?
Language is primarily a left hemisphere (LH) function. When the corpus callosum is severed, stimuli presented to the right visual field (LH) can be named, while those to the left visual field (RH) cannot.
Is left-hemisphere language specialization present from birth?
Yes — infants show LH > RH activation for speech sounds from birth. Lateralization increases with age, and aphasia almost always follows LH damage in children (Woods & Teuber, 1978).
What factors besides biology might explain decline in second language learning with age of immigration?
Different learning environments (adults vs. children), differences in L1 dominance/proficiency, self-consciousness, and cultural identification.
What did the Hakuta et al. (2003) census study find about the critical period?
Using data from 2 million immigrants, proficiency declined with age of immigration, but there was no clear discontinuity — challenging a sharp critical period cutoff.
