Psychology 100.18

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Psychology 10012 Chapter 11 Part
III Development
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Outline

• Language
• Gender Development
• Moral Development
• Study Questions
• Compare and contrast animal communication with
  human language. Use Hocketts defining features
  to underscore the distinction.

Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to
me As plurdled gabbleblothchits on a lugid
bee Groop, I implore thee, my foonting
turlingdromes And booptiously drangle me with
crinkly bindlewurdles Or I will rend thee in the
gobberwarts With my blurglecruncheon, see if I
dont Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz Hitchhikers
Guide to the Galaxy
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Language

• Hocketts linguistic universals
• Essential design features
• Semanticity
• Linguistic utterances convey meaning by use of
  the symbols used to form the utterance
• Arbitrariness
• The connection between the symbol and the concept
  is arbitrary
• We have few onomatapoeia.

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Language

• Hocketts linguistic universals
• Essential design features
• Discreteness
• Small separable set of basic sounds (phonemes)
  combine to form language

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Language
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Language

• Hocketts linguistic universals
• Essential design features
• Duality of Patterning
• Process of building an infinite set of meaningful
  words from a small set of phonemic building
  blocks

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Language

• Hocketts linguistic universals
• Essential design features
• Displacement
• A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away
• We talk about things are not in the here and now
• Displacement and bee hive communication
• Productivity
• If we were bees, we would make up a new word
• Palimony, Podcasts, Twoonies
• Traditional transmission
• Most elements of language are passed from
  generation to generation
• feral children

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Language

• Three levels of analysis
• Grammar The complete set of rules that produce
  acceptable sentences and not produce unacceptable
  sentences
• Three levels
• Phonology
• Sounds of language
• Semantic or lexical
• Meaning
• Syntax
• Word order and grammaticity

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Language

• Semantics vs. syntax
• The gorpy wug was miggled by the mimsy gibber.
• Was the wug gorpy?
• Who did the miggling?
• Was he mimsy?

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Language

• A critical distinction
• Competence Internalized knowledge of language
  that fully fluent speakers have
• Performance the actual language behaviour that a
  speaker generates
• Our speaking performance is not always a good
  indicator of language competency
• Disfluencies irregularities/ errors in speech
• Lapses in memory (er.ummm..er)
• Distractions
• Linguistic intuitions
• Which sounds better?
• I need a long, hot bath
• I need a hot, long bath

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Language

• The behaviourist approach to grammar
• - Skinners Verbal Behaviour.
• - Grammar as chaining discriminative
  responses.
• - Chomskys Rebuttal Perceived
  Grammaticality
• Grammatical sentences should contain
  words that have been paired often before
• E.g.1,
• Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
• E.g.2,
• Will he went to the newspaper is in deep end.

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Language

• Whorfs hypothesis
• Linguistic Relativity hypothesis Your language
  shapes your thoughts
• Language controls thought and perception
• The Hopi as a timeless people
• Heider (1971, 1972)
• Focal colours
• Dani Language (New Guinea)
• Two words for colours Mola (bright) Mili
  (dark, cool)
• Recognition memory influenced by focality

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FOR SALE Large dog Eats Anything, loves children

• Pragmatics
• - Making sure people understand what was
  meant not what was said.
• E.g., taking attendance.
• they wont be going to class because they want
  to be there!
• - Austens (1962) description.
• Locutionary act -gt Actual utterance
• Do you feel cold?
• Illocutionary act -gt Interpretation by
  listener
• Turn up the heat, please.
• Perlocutionary act -gt Effect on the
  listener
• Turns up the heat.

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Language

• Some Basics
• Qualitative and quantitive elements of sensory
  stimuli

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Language

• Perceiving Speech
• Phonology The rules underlying production and
  comprehension of speech.
• Phonetics The nature of linguistic sounds.
• Articulatory phonetics Placement of the mouth,
  tongue, lips, etc. used to produce particular
  sounds.
• Acoustic phonetics Physical characteristics of
  speech sounds.

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Language

• The Speech spectrograph

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Language

• Articulatory Phonetics
• Three ways in which consonants differ.
• 1. Place of articulation (7)
• Examples
• Bilabial --gt /p/
• Glottal --gt /h/
• 2. Manner of articulation
• Examples
• Stops --gt /p/
• Fricatives --gt /s/
• 3. Voicing
• Vibration of vocal chords

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Language

• Voicing

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Language

• Is speech special?
• Specialized neural mechanisms?
• Categorical perception
• Voice onset-time and distinguishing /d/ from /t/

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Language

• A bottom-up approach
• The search for invariant features

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Language

• Problems with a bottom-up approach
• Phonemic information is presented in parallel
• Coarticulation
• E.g. Cf. /M/ in Tim vs. /M/ in mad
• We perceive them as the same, but they are
  different
• We perceive the same sound differently according
  to the context
• Insert a silence between /s/ and /i/ --gt ski
• Insert a silence between /s/ and /u/ --gt spew
  

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Language

• Perceiving conversational speech
• Two main problems
• 1) There are no physical boundaries between words

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Language

• 2) Speech is sloppy
• Misheard Lyrics

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Language

• Top-down processes and speech perception
• Phonemic restoration effect (Warren, 1970)
• Their respective legilatures
• Found a eel on the axle
• Found a eel on the shoe
• Phonemic perception
• The McGurk Effect

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Language

• Sentence comprenension
• Miller Isard (1963)
• Participants shadow sentences
• Grammatic Bears steal honey from the hive.
• Semantically incorrect Bears shoot honey on the
  highways.
• Ungrammatic Across bears eyes honey the bill.
  Results
• Gram. Nonsem. Nongram.
• No noise 89 79 56
• Mod. Noise 63 22 3

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Brain Language

• Neuropsychology of language
• Aphasia Language deficits resulting from
  brain-related disorders and injury.
• Very common
• 40 of all strokes produce some aphasia
• Brocas Aphasia
• Paul Broca - studied patient Leborgne
  (A.K.A.Tan)
• Treated for leg injury
• Died a few days later
• Autopsied brain
• Discovered Brocas area
• Left Hemisphere dominance for language

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Brain Language

• Neuropsychology of language
• Brocas Aphasia

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Brain Language

• Neuropsychology of language
• Brocas Aphasia
• Production Deficits
• Problems in producing fluent language
• Range from Tan,tan,tan, to short phrases
• Lack function words and grammar
• May retain idioms (fit as a fiddle) or songs
• Proximity to motor cortex
• Dysarthria loss of control over articulatory
  muscles
• Speech Apraxia Unable to program voluntary
  articulatory movements.

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Brain Language

• Neuropsychology of language
• Brocas Aphasia
• Comprehension deficits
• Unable to analyze precise grammatical information
• The Boy ate the cookie
• Who ate the Cookie?
• Boy ate cookie
• Implied grammar (cookies dont eat boys)
• The Boy was kicked by the girl
• Who kicked whom?
• Boy kick girl

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Brain Language

• Neuropsychology of language
• Wernickes Aphasia
• Carl Wernicke, 1870s
• Production deficits
• Sounds fluent (e.g., foreign language)
• Neologistic (invented words)
• Semantic substitutions
• E.g.
• I called my mother on the television and did not
  understand the romers by the door.

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Brain Language

• Neuropsychology of language
• Wernickes Aphasia
• Carl Wernicke, 1870s
• Comprehension deficits
• Do not recognize the incomprehensibility of
  their own sentences
• Do not comprehend written or spoken language
• Here and gone again
• Aphasia improves over time
• Anomia Losing the ability to retrieve words
  (nouns)

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Brain Language

• Neuropsychology of language
• Classical localization model (Lichtheim, 1885
  Geschwand, 1967)
• Damage to main areas
• Brocas Aphasia
• Wernickes Aphasia
• Damage to connections
• Conduction aphasia
• Transcortical sensory aphasia

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Brain Language

• Conduction aphasia
• Damage to the arcuate fasciculus
• Production deficits
• Problems producing spontaneous speech
• Problem repeating speech
• Sometimes use words incorrectly
• Comprehension
• Can understand spoken/written words
• Can hear their own speech errors, but cannot
  correct them

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Brain Language

• Neuropsychology of language
• The Big picture