Language & Thought Language is our written, spoken and/or signed words and their

combinations to communicate meaning. Above all, language is about the transmission of information through structures, which are:

Phoneme: the smallest distinctive sound unit in a language

Morpheme: the smallest distinctive sound unit that carries meaning.

Syntax: the rules for combining words (combinations of morphemes) into grammatically sensible sentences.

Semantics: the meta-rules for deriving meaning from combinations of sounds; syntax is implied, not stated.

The ability to create increasingly complex language structures is uniquely human. (Premack 2007) (m 366 c 350)

Language Development Although we only use 150 words for daily communication, from

year 1 to 18 we learned 60,000. (McMurray, 2007).(m 366 c 351)

In order to speak an original sentence, we sample approx. 10,000 words out of memory, assemble them with near-perfect syntax, and speak at 3 words a second. (Vigliocco & Hartsuiker, 2002).(m 367 c 351)

Receptive language: by 4 months, babies can recognize differences in speech sounds (Stager & Werker, 1997).( m 367 c 351))

At 7 months, they can segment sounds into individual words. Their adeptness at this task--as judge by listening patterns--predicts their language abilities at ages 2 & 5. (Newman et al., 2006).(m 367 c 351)

Productive Language Babbling stage: beginning at about 4 months, this stage of

speech development occurs when infants spontaneously utter various sounds at first unrelated to the household language.

Many of these sounds are consonant-vowel pairs formed by simply bunching the tongue in the front of the mouth, by opening and closing the lips, both necessary for feeding. (MacNeilage & Davis, 2000).(m 367 c 351)

From this early babbling, a listener could not identify an infant as being from a particular language group.

Deaf infants who observe their deaf parents singing begin to babble more with their hands. (Petito & Marentette, 1991).(m 367 c 351)

By 10 months old, babbling has changed so that a trained ear can identify the household language. (de Boysson-Bardies et al., 1989). (m 367 c 351)

Language and Neural Maps Without exposure to other languages, babies begin to lose their

ability to hear and produce sounds and tones found outside their native language. (Meltzoff et al., 2009)(m 367 c 351)

One-word stage: the stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words.

Two-word stage: beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks telegraphically in nouns and verbs.

If a child gets a late start such as after receiving a cochlear implant or being adopted by a family in another country, their language development still proceeds through the same sequence, though usually at a faster pace. (Ertner et al., 2007)(m 368 c 362)

Explaining Language Development Linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that there is a universal

grammar, or the same grammatical building blocks.

Creating a language: young deaf children in Nicaragua were brought together to form a school; in time, they drew upon sign gestures to create their own Nicaraguan sign language, complete with words and intricate grammar. (Sandler et al., 2005).( m 369 c 353)

Babies' brains do not only discern vocal breaks, they statistically analyze which syllables most often go together. After just two months of listening to a unbroken string of nonsense syllables, 8-months-old infants were able to recognize 3-syllable sequences that appeared repeatedly. (Saffran et al., 2009).(m 369 c 353)

Detecting differences between patterns supports the idea that babies are born ready to learn grammar.

Critical Periods Childhood seems to represent a critical or window period for

mastering certain aspects of language. (Hernandez & Li, 2007).( m 369 c 353)

The window on language learning closes gradually in early childhood. Later-than-usual exposure to language (at age 2 or 3) unleashes the idle language capacity of a child's brain. But by about age 7, those who have not been exposed to either a spoken or a signed language gradually lose their ability to master any language.

Natively deaf children who learn sign after age 9 never learn it as well as those who lose their hearing at age 9 after learning English. They also never learn English as well as other natively deaf children who learned sign in infancy. (Mayberry et al., 2002) (m 370 c 354).

Living in a Silent World Deaf children who grow up around other deaf people more often

identify with Deaf culture and feel positive self-esteem. If raised in a signing household, whether by deaf or hearing parents, they also express higher self-esteem and feel more accepted. (Bat-Chava, 1994).(m 371 c 355)

When older people with hearing loss must expend effort to hear words, they have less remaining cognitive capacity available to remember and comprehend them. (Wingfield et al., 2005).(m 371 m 355)

People who lose one channel of sensation do seem to compensate with a slight enhancement of their other sensory abilities. Blind musicians are more likely than sighted ones to develop perfect pitch. (Hamilton, 2000). (m 371 c 355)

Brain & Language Aphasia: Impairment of language, usually caused by left-

hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding).

Broca's area controls language expression--an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.

Wernicke's area controls language reception--a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.

Different neural networks are activated by nouns and verbs, by different vowels, by reading stories of visual versus motor experience. (Shapiro et al., 2006).(m 372 c 356)

Different neural networks are activated for native language versus one learned later in life. (Perani & Abutalebi, 2005). (m 373 c 357)

Chimp Talk Human language appears to have evolved from gestured

communication (Pollick & de Wall, 2007). (m 373 f 28.3 c 358 f 9.10)

Even today, gestures are naturally associated with speech, especially speech that has spatial content.

Both gesture and speech communicate, and when they convey the same rather than different information (as they do in baseball or Navy SEALs sign language) we understand faster and more accurately.

If by language we mean verbal or signed expression of complex grammar, then humans alone possess language.

A 2 1/2 year old child can display cognitive abilities, such as following an actor's gaze to a target, that are unmatched by chimpanzees. (Hermann et al., 2010).(m 375 c 359)

Linguistic Determinism Benjamin Whorf put forth the hypothesis that language determines

the way we think.

Pro: Unlike English, which has a rich vocabulary for self-focused emotions, Japanese has more words for interpersonal emotions such as sympathy. (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).(m 376 c 360)

Bilingual individuals reveal different personality profiles when taking the same test in their two languages. (Dinges & Hull, 1992).(m 376 c 360)

Fig 28.4 When people view blocks of equally different colors, they perceive those with different names as more different visually. (Osgen, 2004).(m 377 c 361 f 9.11)

Bilingual advantage: thanks to 'executive control' bilinguals are better at inhibiting their attention to irrelevant information (Bialystock & Craik, 2010).(m 377 c 361)

Thinking in Images For someone who has learned a skill, such as ballet dancing,

even watching the activity will activate the brain's internal simulation of it, reported by Calvo-Merino et al., (2004) who collected fMRIs as people watched videos. (m 378 c 362)

Outcome simulation--imagining winning an event--has less likelihood of success that process simulation, where one imagines going step-by-step to achieve a goal. (Taylor, 1998).(m 378 c 362)