Chapter 7 Language and Thinking Topic I Language and Language Acquisition Language Acquisition in Humans Language Acquisition in Chimpanzees Phonemes Basic Sounds Morphemes Units of Meaning Syntax Making and Understanding Sentences From Sounds to Meaning Language Acquisition Raising Chimps as Children Using Sign Language and Smarter Chimps What Did the Chimps Learn Explanations for Language Acquisition Learning Skinner Innate Neural Mechanisms Chomsky Rapid Review of Language and Language Acquisition Questions for Making Connection What do you spend most of your time doing The answer is simple thinking Indeed almost every moment you re awake you are reviewing what happened in the past solving problems or planning for the future all of which involve thinking In fact it s difficult not to think for more than a couple of moments Furthermore the importance of thinking is reflected in the difference between us and our close relatives the chimpanzees Chimps are better at doing things like swinging through the trees but we re better at thinking and it s that ability that has led to our greater development If thinking is our most used and important skill what s second Language Not only do we spend a lot of time using language in talking listening reading and writing but language often provides the basis for thinking because we usually think in words I ll begin this chapter by examining language and then I ll go on to discuss thinking Topic I Language and Language Acquisition When I speak French native speakers of French laugh at my accent Why do most people have an accent for languages they learn later in life Why don t some people hear their own accents Can chimpanzees be taught to talk If they can t actually talk can they learn to communicate with humans by using sign language What can we learn about human language from chimpanzees Until she was thirteen years old Genie was strapped into a chair in a small bedroom where she had almost no human contact heard virtually no language and was punished for making any noise When Genie was discovered she had practically no language The question was could Genie learn language at the age of thirteen Language can be defined as a system of symbols that enables individuals to communicate with one another Ashcraft 1994 The symbols in that system can be sounds spoken words signs written words and gestures and you use those symbols in almost everything you do Think for a moment about what it would be like if you didn t have language You wouldn t be able to communicate with others and your ability to think might also be limited because to some extent you use language in thinking Indeed language is one of the most important skills you have It s interesting that regardless of what remote area of the world anthropologists have searched they have never found a group of humans who didn t use language Furthermore although the members of some groups count by making notches on a bone while we may use computers all groups have languages that are equally complex Pinker 1994 In fact stone age groups that have not had contact with the outside world have languages that are as highly developed as English Clearly having a highly developed language is a universal and crucial characteristic of a human being Despite the importance of language we usually don t give much attention to it unless we develop a language disorder such as dyslexia or a stroke wipes out our language Furthermore when we do think about language we often oversimplify it For example you may assume that you learned language in the same way that you learned to do math problems or ride a bike but as you ll soon discover the acquisition of language is a very different and unique process From Sounds to Meaning First we must develop an understanding of the basic building blocks of language and how those blocks are put together Specifically in this section we ll examine a the sounds of language b how we combine sounds to form words and c how we combine words to form sentences An understanding of these factors is interesting and relevant because it explains why we have accents and why we may have difficulty learning a new language Phonemes Basic Sounds Phonemes FOH neemz are the basic sounds that we use in forming words For example the word who is made up of two phonemes h and u There are hundreds of different phonemes and different languages use different but overlapping sets of phonemes For example German employs some guttural sounds that do not occur in English English uses about 40 phonemes while other languages have more or fewer In a sense a phoneme is the ultimate sound bite and as with many sound bites by themselves they do not have much meaning It s interesting to note that you were born with the ability to hear and pronounce the entire range of phonemes but by the time you were six months or a year old you had lost the ability to hear and pronounce most of the phonemes Kuhl et al 1992 Overall then it appears that there is a critical period for retaining the phonemes of one s native language Given that you lose some phonemes the question is why do you lose some and keep others The answer is simple You keep the phonemes that you hear during the first year of life and you lose the phonemes that you don t hear That was demonstrated in a study in which investigators recorded and analyzed the babbling use of random phonemes of two infants one in a French speaking family and one in an English speaking family Levitt Utman 1992 The infants started with the same phonemes but over time the phonemes they used in their babbling began to mimic the phonemes used by their parents The fact that you lose phonemes means that later in life you may not be able to hear or use some phonemes For example Japanese infants can hear both la and ra but most Japanese adults cannot hear la because it is one of the phonemes they lose However you aren t actually deaf to the phonemes you can t hear Instead when a phoneme you lost is used you translate that phoneme into one that is in your phoneme repertoire That means that in some cases you ll hear a word differently from how it is actually being pronounced For example when the phoneme la is used with most Japanese adults they substitute ra Therefore they hear bla as bra It s because you lose the ability to hear and use some phonemes that you will probably speak a foreign language with an accent Not having the phonemes for a particular language can interfere with learning that
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