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Summary 1.5 Changing man - problem 5: Shakespeare to be
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This is my personal summary of problem 5 of block 5: developmental psychology
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Problem 5 – Shakespeare to beBroca’s aphasia (Non-fluent aphasia)
A type of aphasia (language disorder after stroke) with effortful speech. Understanding is
good, but finding the words is difficult. Intelligence remains intact.
Wernicke’s aphasia (Fluent aphasia)
A type of aphasia (language disorder after stroke) with poor comprehension. Speech is
effortless, but the meaning is impaired.
Language and communication skills
- Language: A small number of individually meaningless symbols (sounds, letters,
gestures) that can be combined according to agreed-on rules to produce an infinite
number of messages
- Communication: The process by which one organism transmits information to and
influences another organism.
- Vocables: Unique patterns of sound that a prelinguistic infant uses to represent
objects, actions, or events (e.g. ‘’vroom vroom’’ represents a car).
Five components of language
Five kinds of knowledge underlie the growth of linguistic proficiency:
1. Phonology: The sound system of a language and the rules for combining these
sounds to produce meaningful units of speech. Children must learn how to
discriminate, produce and combine the speechlike sounds of their native language in
order to make sense of the speech they head and to be understood when they speak.
o Phonemes: The basic units of sounds that are used in a spoken language.
2. Morphology: Rules governing the formation of meaningful words from sounds. For
instance, rules for prefixes, suffices, past tense, present tense, and so forth.
3. Semantics: The expressed meaning of words and sentences.
o Morphemes: Smallest meaningful language units
o Free morphemes: Morphemes that can stand alone as a word (e.g. cat, go).
o Bound morphemes: Morphemes that cannot stand alone but that modify the
meaning of free morphemes (e.g words ending in -ed indicate the past tense).
4. Syntax: The structure of a language; the rules specifying how words and grammatical
markers are to be combined to produce meaningful sentences.
o e.g. Cartman killed Kenny, Kenny killed Cartman or Kenny Cartman killed
5. Pragmatics: Principles that underlie the effective and appropriate use of language in
social contexts (e.g. ‘’May I have a cookie?’’, instead of ‘’Give me a cookie!!!’’).
o Sociolinguistic knowledge: Culturally specific rules that dictate how language
should be used in particular social contexts.
, Theories of language development
- The empiricist perspective (nurture): According to the learning perspective,
caregivers teach language by modeling and by reinforcing grammatical speech.
o Criticism:
- The notion that parents shape syntax by directly reinforcing
grammatical speech or by imitating adult speech is doubtful.
- Linguistic universals – aspects of language development that all
children share – cannot be explained by this perspective.
- Primates are only able to learn a very limited level of language,
which would suggest that language is species-specific.
- Certain brain areas appear to be specialized in language production
and comprehension, suggesting a biological predisposition.
- Language appears to have a sensitive period that lies approximately
between birth and puberty.
- The nativist perspective (nature): According to the nativists, humans are biologically
programmed to acquire language by means of certain innate mechanisms:
According to Chomsky, humans are equipped with a language acquisition
device (LAD) – an inborn linguistic processor that is activated by verbal input
and contains a universal grammar, or rules that are common to all languages.
According to Slobin, children have an inborn language-making capacity (LMC)
– a set of cognitive and perceptual abilities that are highly specialized for
language learning.
o Criticism:
- Other species also show auditory discrimination very early on.
- Nativist describe language development, but fail to explain it by
merely attributing it to a built-in language acquisition device.
Nativists are not clear about how LAD or LMC might operate.
- Nativists have overlooked the many ways in which a child’s language
environment promotes language learning.
- The interactionist perspective: Argues that language acquisition reflects a complex
interplay among a child’s biological predispositions (nature), cognitive development,
and the characteristics of the child’s unique linguistic environment (nurture).
Like the nativists, interactionist believe that children are biologically prepared
to acquire language. However, the preparation consists not of an LAD or LMC
but a powerful human brain that slowly matures, allowing children to gain
more and more knowledge, which gives them more to talk about.
Interactionists also stress that language is primarily a means of
communicating that develops in the context of social interactions as children
and their companions strive to get their messages across, one way or another.
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