LINGUIS 100 1st Edition Lecture 22 Today we are watching a movie in lecture so these notes will be purely about that movie The mental use of language being within your genes and that it is like having hair or learning to walk a nobody is taught language b There is controversy about this theory that language is built into us They would argue that it is holly learned i This is the question of modern linguistics How much does a child have to learn and how much is built into us from birth ii Doesn t a child just repeat what he or she hears No there is some systematic pattern behind this that is not just repeated c You just have to listen to a three year old for a minute to know that they do not simply just repeat what they hear i If we don t just repeat what we hear then how do we learn the information that is being given to us in a specific way in an organized way ii We know that all children learn to speak d Children acquire language by being immersed in it all the time i Children can acquire very complex sentences at a very young age It is has been thought that children take 5 to 10 years to develop a proper and complex syntax but we can see that children can do this at a much younger age ii It is very commonly misunderstood that this theory is to mean that all of language is innate being your primary language as well as second languages But we know that second languages a very much so learned and not not just innate However much of the rules that you know about those other languages are already innate within you because of knowing rules from your first or native language e Papua New Guinea i contains about 0 1 of the world s population and 20 of the world s languages ii Many of the tribes there have never written their languages but speak many of them that contain numerous complications and complex rules iii Many verbs can have anywhere between 2 000 and 3 000 different forms this is why it is one of the most complex parts of language and why it is one of the most important as well f Across language comparison i Depending on where the verb is placed in the sentence we can have a number of different forms but we also see that the possibilities to change the systematic make up of languages are limited ii While the number of possibilities within a language are infinite particularly in making up new sentences we do see the patterns of each being varied but limited in a way that we can identify them clearly These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute Book Learning Vocabulary a In the later babbling stage from 9 to 10 months is when children begin to speak vowel combinations with syllable sequences like ma ma and da da i During 10 to 11 months babies can produce varied syllable like ma da ga ba ii We know that a child is older and farther along in their language development when the child does not put a negative at the beginning of the sentence b Overextension this is the most common pattern for a child to overextend the meaning of a word on the basis of similarities of shape sound and size i For example a child might call an orange a circular pillow and the sun the word ball because of their similar shape ii The ironic part of overextension is that it doesn t necessarily work in reverse order By this we mean that if a parent were to set a tomato an apple a ball and an orange in front of a child and asked them to pick up the apple the child would have no problem distinguishing which one the apple is c Overgeneralization is the process that a child uses to take one grammatical rule and apply it to many parts of speech including those where it does not apply i This includes the plural and can often be seen with children adding s to a number of words that are made plural without adding s exceptions are not understood at this point