Language: Nature and AcquisitionOutline1. Properties of LanguageSlide 4Slide 5Slide 6Slide 7Slide 8Slide 9Slide 10Slide 11Slide 12Slide 132. Processes of Language ComprehensionSlide 15Slide 16Slide 17Slide 18Slide 193. Language AcquisitionSlide 21Slide 22Slide 23Slide 24Language: Nature and AcquisitionChapter 9Outline1. Properties of Language1. General Description2. Fundamental Aspects of Language2. Processes of Language Comprehension1. Speech Perception2. Semantics and Syntax3. Language Acquisition1. Stages of Language Acquisition2. Nature and Nurture1. Properties of LanguageBasic Concepts•Language–The use of an organized means of combining words in order to communicate–Makes it possible for us to communicate with those around us and to think about things and processes we currently cannot see, hear, feel, touch, smell•Communication–Exchange of thoughts and feelings–Not all communication is through language (gestures, glances, touches, pictures)1. Properties of LanguageBasic Concepts•Psycholinguistics–The psychology of our language as it interacts with the human mind•Related areas of study–Linguistics•The study of language structure and change–Neurolinguistics•Studies the relationship among the brain, cognition, and language–Sociolinguistics•Studies the relationship between social behavior and language1. Properties of Language1. General Description•Six properties that are distinctive of language–Communicative•Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language–Arbitrarily symbolic•Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and its referent: an idea, a process, a relationship, or a description•Arbitrary relationship - lack of any reason for choosing a particular symbol to refer to a particular thing1. Properties of Language1. General Description•Six properties that are distinctive of language (cont.)–Regularly structured•Language has a structure; only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings–Structured at multiple levels•The structure of language can be analyzed at more than one level ( e.g., in sounds, in meaning units, in words, in phrases)1. Properties of Language1. General Description•Six properties that are distinctive of language (cont.)–Generative, productive•Within the limits of a linguistic structure, language users can produce novel utterances, and the possibilities for creating new utterances are virtually limitless–Dynamic•Languages constantly evolve and change1. Properties of Language2. Fundamental Aspects of Language•Two fundamental aspects of language–Comprehension of language •Receptive comprehension and decoding of language input (deriving meaning from what you hear or read)–Production of language•Expressive encoding and production of language input (transforming our thoughts into a form that can be expressed as linguistic output – speech or writing)1. Properties of Language2. Fundamental Aspects of Language•Levels of analysis of language1. Phonology – system of speech sounds•Phoneme – the smallest unit of speech sound that can be used to distinguish one utterance in a given language from another •Different languages use different numbers and combinations of phonemes•Phonemics – the study of the particular phonemes of a language•Phonetics – the study of to produce or combine speech sounds1. Properties of Language2. Fundamental Aspects of Language•Levels of analysis of language2. Morphology•Morpheme – the smallest unit that denotes meaning within a particular language•Content morphemes – the words that convey the bulk of the meaning (e.g. charge in recharge)•Functional morphemes – the morphemes that add detail and nuance to the meaning of the content morphemes or that help the content morphemes to fit the grammatical context (e.g. re in recharge)1. Properties of Language2. Fundamental Aspects of Language•Levels of analysis of language3. Mental Lexicon•Mental Lexicon – the entire set of morphemes in a given language or in a given person’s linguistic repertoire; contains the information about meaning, phonological form, orthographic form and syntactic properties of a particular word•Vocabulary – the repertoire of words created by combining morphemes1. Properties of Language2. Fundamental Aspects of Language•Levels of analysis of language4. Syntax•The way in which users of a particular language put words together to form sentences•It is the structure of our utterances•A sentence comprises at least two parts–Noun phrase which contains at least one noun–Verb phrase which contains at least one verb and whatever the verb acts on1. Properties of Language2. Fundamental Aspects of Language•Levels of analysis of language5. Semantics•The study of meaning in language•How words express meaning•How language interacts with conceptual structure6. Discourse•Encompasses language use at the level beyond the sentence, such as in conversation, paragraphs, stories•Studies the interactions between the context and language2. Processes of Language Comprehension1. Speech Perception•We are able to perceive speech with amazing rapidity–Whereas we can perceive as many as 50 phonemes per second in language we can perceive only about one (or less) phone per second of nonspeech sounds–One explanation – coarticulation•Phonemes are produced in a way that overlaps them in time, making one or more phonemes begin while other phonemes sill are being produced2. Processes of Language Comprehension1. Speech Perception•The view of speech perception as ordinary–Speech perception is ordinary use of general perceptual principles of feature-detection and Gestalt psychology to explain how listeners understand speech–There is nothing domain specific about speech perception2. Processes of Language Comprehension1. Speech Perception•The View of Speech Perception as Special–Speech perception is special because it lies within the domain of language and is governed by principles that are different form general principles of perception–Categorical perception•Although the speech sounds we actually hear comprise a continuum of variation in sound waves, we perceive discontinuous categories of speech sounds•Although the tokens of speech sound were physically equal in acoustic distance from one another, people only heard the tokens that also