LANGUAGE

DEVELOPMENT
SAMANTHA FOOTE, KATHERINE FLEMING, JESSICA
GONZALES, LUISA RODRIGUEZ

LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

LUISA

DEFINITIONS

Language- Is a system for communicating with others using signals that are
combined according to rules of grammar and convey meaning.
Grammar- is a set of rules that specify how the units of language can be combined
to produce meaningful messages.

BASIC CHARACTERISTICS

Phonemes- The smallest units of sound that are recognizable as speech rather than
a random noise.
Phonological rules- Every language has phonological rules that indicate how
phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds.
Morphemes- Phonemes are combined to make morphemes, the smallest
meaningful units of language.
Morphological rules- Indicate how morphemes can be combined to form words.

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Behaviorist Explanations- B.F Skinners explanation. We learn to talk in the same
way we learn any other skill: Through reinforcement, shaping, extinction, and the
other basic principles of operant conditioning .
Nativism Explanations- According Noam Chomsky, language-learning capacities are
built into the brain, which is specialized to acquire language rapidly through simple
exposure to speech. This Nativist theory holds that language development is best
explained as an innate, biological capacity. According to Chomsky, the human brain
is equipped with a Language Acquisition device (LAD), a collection of processes
that facilitate language learning.
Integrationist Explanations- Although infants are born with an innate ability to
acquire language, social interactions play a crucial role in language.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
KATHERINE

DEVELOPMENT

Children learn language at a rapid rate

The two most distinct sounds in the English Language are L and R
Infants can distinguish speech sounds, but cant produce them reliably
Deaf infants dont babble as much, and the babble is delayed
Syntactical rule of language
Grammatical rule

LANGUAGE MILESTONES
Fast mapping- in which children map a word onto an underlying concept after only
a single exposure, enables to learn at this rapid pace.
Telegraphic speech- Around 24 months, children begin to form two- word
sentences, such as more milk or throw ball. Such sentences are referred to as
telegraphic speech because they are devoid of function morphemes and consist
mostly of content words.
The emergence of grammatical rules- Evidence of the ease with which children
acquire grammatical rules comes from some interesting errors that children make
while forming sentences.
Language development and cognitive development
It unfolds as a sequence of steps in which one milestone is achieved before moving
on to the next. Nearly all infants begin with one-word utterances before moving to
telegraphic speech and then to simple sentences that include function morphemes.

BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN

Bilingual children have slower cognitive development

Bilingual people have a later onset of Alzheimers

THE BRAIN
SAMANTHA

BROCAS AREA
Language processing is distributed across many areas of the brain, but over time it
becomes concentrated into two main areas. The Broca and Wernicke areas.
The Broca is located in the left frontal cortex and produces the patterns in vocal
and sign languages.
The Broca area was named after the French physician Paul Broca after he was the
first to report on speech problem when that specific area of the brain was
damaged.
He found that people with the damaged area were still able to understand
language, but had a problem speaking.
An example of what someone who has a damaged Broca may say is:
Ah, Monday, uh, Casey park. Two, uh, friends, and, uh, thirty minutes.

WERNICKES AREA
Located on the left side of the brain in the temporal cortex.
It is involved in language comprehension (spoken and sign languages).
Named after the German Neurologist Carl Wernicke, after he first described how he observed speech
difficulty in patients who had damage done to the posterior area.
It differs from the Broca area by:

Grammatical speech is possible, but meaningless

Nearly impossible to comprehend language

Wernickes area is highly active when we make judgements about word meaning.
Despite not understanding language sounds, they understand all non-language sounds with clarity.
In Japan (and other character based languages, the book uses Japan as an example), theyve found
that people with damage to the Wernickes area have trouble writing and understanding the language
symbols because the symbols stand for a specific sound in the spoken language.

RIGHT CEREBRAL HEMISPHERE

Even though both the Broca and Wernicke areas are important to language, there is
substantial evidence that the Right Cerebral Hemisphere is also a contributor to
understanding language.
The four things it contributes to are:
Processing Meaning
Language Comprehension
Language Based Tasks
Language Development

MEET CINNAMON

LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT

JESSICA

The linguistic hypothesis maintains that

Language shapes the nature of thought.

Benjamin Whorf
1956

LANGUAGE AND COLOR PROCESSING

How does language influence our understanding of color?
More recent research shows that language may indeed influence color processing.
Research on English children and African children from the Himba tribe
The English have 11 basic color terms, but the Himba only have 5
Showed a series of colored tiles to each child and then asked to choose the color from an
array of 22 colors. The youngest children from both sides tended to confuse similar colors
Older children increasingly reflected the color terms they leaned
English children made fewer mistakes matching tiles with English name, while the Himba
children made fewer errors matching tiles with Himba names
Showing that language can influence how children think about colors.

LANGUAGE AND CONCEPT OF TIME

Researches looked at the way people think about time:

In English: we often use spatial terms. We look forward to promising future or move a meeting back to fit our
schedule.

We also use these terms to describe horizontal spatial relations such as taking a step forward and two steps back.
(Boroditsky, 2001)

Hes at Two OClock.

Mandarin Chinese: often describes time using terms that refer to vertical spatial dimensions. Earlier events are
referred to as up and later events as down.

To test the effects of this difference, researchers showed English speakers and Mandarin speakers either a horizontal or
vertical display of objects and then asked them to make a judgment involving time such as whether March comes before
April. English speakers were faster after seeing a horizontal display, whereas the opposite was true from Mandarin
speakers.

There is considerable evidence that language can influenced thought both by highlighting specific properties of
concepts and by allowing it to formulate verbal rules that help us solve problems.

How does horizontal concept of time contrast with vertical concept of time?

THE END