4PAHPBIO Psychology and the Brain Week 7
Psychology BSc Year 1 Language
LANGUAGE
7.1 LANGUAGE IS NOT A UNITARY FUNCTION AND CAN BE
BROKEN DOWN INTO DISCRETE PROCESSES.
• Language is the system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people,
community, etc…, typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic
structure (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989)
THE SPEECH CHAIN
• When you speak, you are actively thinking about what you are hoping to say
• When speaking, you are using the muscles in the mouth and face to articulate the linguistic
representation of those thoughts
• The sound that is produced creates an acoustic wave, which is received by the ears
o This allows you to monitor that what is being said makes sense
• Haptic feedback is received regarding the quality of the sound produced
• The sound waves travel to the listener’s ears, which feed the information to the brain
o In face-to-face situations, the listener can also see the facial movements of the speaker,
which can provide additional cues such as context
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,4PAHPBIO Psychology and the Brain Week 7
Psychology BSc Year 1 Language
7.2 ALL LANGUAGE HAS AN INHERENT GRAMMATICAL
STRUCTURE.
COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE
Phonemes
• The smallest units of sound that make a meaningful difference in a language
• Produced by positions and movements of the vocal tract (lips, teeth, tongue, vocal cords and throat)
o In sign language, they are defined by the shapes and movement of hands
• Most languages contain between 15-60 phonemes (English has 46)
• Infants are born able to understand all phonemes but lose their ability by around 10 months old,
recognising phonemes very similarly to adult native speakers (Werker & Tees, 2002)
Categorical Perception of Speech
• Speakers of different languages can hear the differences between only some phonemes
o For example, in English, there is no differentiation between the sound of a hard ‘c’ and ‘k’
(cake and keep); however, in other languages, they represent two different phonemes
o In English, the ‘r’ phoneme and ‘l’ phoneme are different (lake and rake), however, in
Japanese ‘r’ and ‘l’ are the same phoneme
Morpheme
• A string of one or more phonemes that makes up the smallest units of meaning in a language that
are usually combinations of phonemes
o For example, prefixes or suffixes such as “re-”—to do again, or “-est”—the maximum
o They can also be words such as “I” or “a”, which are also phonemes in themselves
• They can reverse the meaning of a verb, turn a noun into a verb, turn present into past tense, etc…
Syntax
• A set of rules of a language by which we construct sentences
o In English, sentences must have a noun and a verb, which can be modified by adjectives
and adverbs
• The order by which the words appear may also be important for the meaning of the sentence
o In English, “the man bites the dog” differs from “the dog bites the man”
o However, in German, only the article endings (der or den) before the noun matter so “der
hund beisst den mann” and “den mann beisst der hund” both mean “the dog bites the man”
Information Surrounding Language
• Syntax can create ambiguity such that words can change meaning depending on the interpretation
of them within the context in which they are spoken
• Misunderstandings can arise easily if people are not aware of the contextual information, such as
the knowledge that we and others have on the subject, nonverbal expressions like facial
expressions, gestures and tone of voice
o For example, there can be more than one meaning to the same sentence, such as “I shot
an elephant in my pyjamas” (Marx, 1930)
Semantics
• This is the meaning of a sentence that allows us to distinguish between sentences that are
syntactically correct and make sense and ones which are syntactically correct but make no sense
o For example, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” is a semantic violation
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, 4PAHPBIO Psychology and the Brain Week 7
Psychology BSc Year 1 Language
Pragmatics
• Addresses how we use different words within the context of a sense to convey the meaning of a
particular word
• For example, the word “ball” can mean many different things
o Context in which we use the word can help one understand its meaning
o Intonation can also be used to help understanding
7.3 THE REASONS WHY LANGUAGE IS UNIQUELY HUMAN.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE IN CHILDREN
Infants
• They can hear muffled versions of speaking whilst in the womb
o Moon et al. (1993) found that 2 days old babies were more likely to suck harder on a dummy
when hearing their mother’s native language than a foreign language (even if the native
language was spoken by a stranger), suggesting they are aware of language at an early age
o Saffran et al. (1996) found that babies were aware of patterns of their native language by
showing surprise when hearing speech with different patterns of phonemes
6-8 weeks old
• Infants are already learning language long before they speak their first words
• They begin making vowel sounds (“oooh” and “ahhh”) and practice using different cries and squeals
6 months
• They begin to understand their own name
7 months
• They begin babbling and engaging in intentional vocalisations (although lacking specific meaning) to
practice creating specific sounds
10-12 months
• They begin to understand more common words such as “mama” and “bottle” (Mandel et al., 1995)
By 1 year
• Babies can discriminate between sounds that adults cannot, helping them to adopt different
languages without an accent in later life
o They begin to lose this ability by 1 year old
• Babbling becomes more similar to the sounds of the language they are learning (de Boysson-
Bardies et al., 1984)
o Babies learning sign language babble by making hand movements that represent real sign
language (Petitto & Marentette, 1991)
• The sounds have a more conversational tone and sound meaningful
o This helps them to understand the social and communicative function of language
1-2 years
• They begin to understand that words refer to particular objects and ideas
• They develop a vocabulary of several hundred words—increasing to several thousand by
kindergarten, 50,000 by Year 6 and 200,000 by university (University of Minnesota Libraries, 2015)
• Early sounds often confuse ‘b’ and ‘d’ or ‘c’ and ‘z’
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