Psych Notes for March 18th Pages 287 289 The Features of Language We can think about language at four levels of analysis all of which we need to coordinate to communicate effectively o Phonemes The sounds of our language Influenced by elements of our vocal tract including our lips teeth tongue placement vibration of the vocal cords opening and closing of our throat and other physical manipulations of our throat and mouth o Morphemes The smallest units of meaningful speech Created by stringing phonemes together Convey information about semantics Semantics Meaning derived from words and sentences o Syntax The grammatical rules that govern how we compose words into meaningful strings Ex I ate pizza for dinner vs Pizza I dinner ate Morphological Markers Grammatical elements that modify words by adding sounds to them that change their meaning o Extalinguistic Information Elements of communication that aren t part of the content of language but are critical to interpreting its meaning such as facial expressions and tone of voice Dialects Vairations of the same language used by groups of people from specific geographic areas social groups or ethnic backgrounds Pages 290 292 How Do Children Learn Languages Learn in the womb During the first year or so after birth infants learn much more about the sounds of their native languages Babbling An intentional vocalization that lacks specific meaning infants figuring out how to move their vocal tracts to generate specific sounds Infants acquire the sounds of their language during their first year of life Comprehension precedes production Children are learning to recognize and interpret words well before they can produce them The first major milestone in children s syntactic development is combining One Word Stage Children use just individual words to convey entire words into phrases thoughts Pages 295 297 Critical Periods for Language Learning Sensitive Period Period during which people are more receptive to learning and can acquire new knowledge more easily The simplest explanation of children s language learning is that they learn through imitation Generativity Language isn t just a set of predefined sentences that we can pull out and apply in appropriate contexts Instead it s a system that allows us to create an infinite number of sentences producing new statements thoughts and ideas never previously uttered Nativist Account Says that children come into the world with some basic knowledge of how language works o Language Acquisition Device A part of the brain that comes preprogrammed to enable children to use language Social Pragmatics Account Suggests that specific aspects of the social environment structure language learning General Cognitive Processing Account Proposes that children s ability to learn language results from general skills that children apply across a variety of activities
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