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Talking the talk - Summary
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Summary of the book Talking the Talk by Harley, for the course Memory and Language in the Bachelor of Psychology.
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Extensive summary Psychology of Language (lectures + important terms book)
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Geheugen en taal samenvatting deeltentamen IIChapter 2 Animals
Ants communicate with pheromones chemical signals, ants smell pheromones with their
antennae, which can detect both the direction and intensity of pheromones on the ground.
Different kinds of pheromones indicate different things; trail pheromones, alarm
pheromones, breeding pheromones.
Group of women together will eventually menstruate in synchrony caused by pheromones.
Bees know where to go because other bees have told them where to go. ‘Bee dances’ when
bee finds a source of food. The direction of the dance conveys information about the relative
position of the food and the length of the waggle part of the dance conveys information
about distance. Insects can only communicate about the direction and distance of a food
source.
Primates are highly social. Non-human primates communicate by sound, touch and smell,
using gestures, facial expressions, grooming and calls smooth running of social group and
protect it from outside threats.
Non-human primates have rich communication systems but fall short of being like human
beings can only talk about food, threats, whether I have a fight, etc. Meanings are limited
to the here and now. Calls aren’t combined in the way we combine words using rules of
grammar.
Cetaceans (including whales, dolphins and porpoises) communicate with each other by a
sound. Highly social and intelligent species. The large baleen whales produce the long, low-
frequency sounds whale song. Very loud, can travel for many miles underwater. Echoing
location, help whales co-ordinate group feeding.
Animals have sophisticated communication systems, but:
- They’re limited to communicating about the here and now
- They have a very limited number of things they communicate about
- They don’t use a set of rules of grammar to combine symbols into sentences
- Incapable of discussing their own communication systems
Dogs can understand commands but will not understand language. Rico knew names of
200 objects, could fetch appropriate object from around house. But limited: knowledge
limited to names of objects, no indication that he knew that words we know are related in
meaning go together, couldn’t produce the names.
Most attempts to learn language to animals have used non-human primates.
Parrot Alex: could name 50 different objects and vocabulary of 150 words.
- Could use adjectives and verbs
- Could classify objects depending on characteristics
,But abilities of Alex were limited: no clear evidence he could relate nouns using verbs. Verbs
are essential for language. No understanding of the meanings of his vocalisations. But we
should be very careful of thinking animals to be stupid and inferior to humans.
Chimpanzees are highly social and highly intelligent most of research of teaching
language has been done with chimps.
Raise chimp like a human child in a family setting: cross fostering. First attempt: chimpanzee
Gua raised along with son Donald. Obvious that Donald’s language abilities were superior,
particularly in production. Comprehension of language of Gua was first better, but Donald
overtook Gua’s comprehension skills: Gua’s language remained extremely limited.
Conclusion: chimpazees are cognitively linguistically similar to human children of the same
age until the time children start to speak in earnest – around age of 18 months. But we
shouldn’t have great expectations of speech of chimpanzees; great evolutionary step was
the redesign of the vocal apparatus in humans that enables us to produce complex sounds,
chimps never took this leap forward.
Washoe: chimp raised as a child, learned sign language. By age of four: could produce about
85 signs and understand many more. Made the same mistakes as human children would
make (overgeneralisations: child has learned some aspect of the meaning of the word but
not that it can be used only in restricted context). Washoe combined words like ‘ out open
please hurry’. Was sensitive to word order.
Two critisisms in this work with chimps:
1. Methodological: the rigour of the experimental work wasn’t sufficient to enable
strong conclusions such as ‘Washoe acquired language’. Focus was on Washoe’s
success. Comparison with clever Hans: uses trainers to convey information about
what is the appropriate response.
2. She learned in fact much less than she seemed to have done. More relative uses of
signs that are related in meaning to what they denote. Little evidence Washoe
learned grammatical rules. Utterances largly tied to here and now. Utterances lacked
syntactic structure of those made by a human child with the vocabulary of a similar
size.
Chimps taught in a laboratory environment produce longer utterances and more complex
one. But much more limited than those of children, and no clear evidence they learned a
grammar in the sense of acquiring a system of rules that enables us to combine words in
novel ways.
Kanzi: male bonobo that acquired significant language abilities. Learned language based on
symbols (lexigrams). Age of 6: acquired 200 symbols. Sensitive to word order and verb
meaning. Spontaneous utterances formed the majority of his utterances. Also understands
great deal of spoken English.
Claim that Kanzi’s language skills were equivalent to that of a young child criticisms:
- Whether Kanzi learned as much by observation rather than by direct training using
rewards
, - Whether he uses language the way as we do differences: most utterances are
request about what he wants, rather than comments on the word. Grammatical
structures very simple. Learned grammar slower than children.
Why are animals poor at language?
- Chimpanzees have much smaller brains than humans aren’t clever enough to
learn language well
- Chimps vary in their processing of language like humans vary in intelligence
- Possessing language depends on having a high level of relevant cognitive skills
- Only humans can acquire language because language depends on specific, innate
processes that only humans have
But it depends on how we define language.
Operational conditioning: learn to respond on pictures of one sort but not on the other.
could be used for lexigrams. But would you say animals really learned words the way we do?
We know so much more than just being able to distinguish a sign. Grammar: do they
produce multi-word utterances using grammar, or just learn a few simple word orders?
just operant conditioning.
Chapter 3 Children
Children make plenty of noise before they start speaking:
- Crying, burping, screaming
- Cooing
- 4 months: laughing
- 6 months: speechlike sounds known as babbling
- 9 months: extensive signs of comprehension little later: first recognizable words
- 18 months: dramatic increase of vocabulary: the vocabulary explosion, started
combining words (lacking grammatical detail telegraphic speech
- 2,5 years: starting to speak like little adults (syntax)
A foetus can hear sufficiently well to be able to influence his or her behavior, but unable to
make out individual words. Able to hear rhythm of speech. Different languages have
different rhythms. Babies are sensible to rhythm of language from very early age. Infants at
the age of ix months can distinguish between sounds that are not used in their own
language, so children could not have learned this in the womb. After year lost this ability,
focuses on own language.
Before the age of six months babies babble. Babbling is the repetitive production of speech-
like sounds, two basic types:
- Reduplicative babbling production of repeated syllables
- Variegated babbling proudction of chains of largely non-repeated syllables
Babbling lasts up to nine months.
Why do babies babble?
- Babbling is influenced by the language the baby hears (deaf kid’s babbling is different
than hearing children’s babbling)
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