Language

1. Language Our spoken, written, or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning

2. Facts About Languages • There are 6,500 languages spoken in the world • About 2,000 of those have less than 1,000 speakers • What languages have the most number of native speakers? • Mandarin • Spanish • English • English has the most number of speakers • Dead language: Still known and used in special contexts, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication • Latin • Hieroglyphics • Extinct Language: No longer has any speakers • Endangered Language: At risk of failing out of use

3. Why Do Languages Become Extinct? • Populations in physical danger • Natural disasters, famine, disease • War/Genocide • Prevention or Discouragement of using Language: • Political repression • Cultural , political, economic marginalization • Extinct Languages

4. Building Blocks of Language • Phonemes: Set of basic sounds • 869 in the world; No one language uses them all; 40-45 in English • Letters like C, B, T + Short and long vowels + sounds like Ch, Sh • Usually difficult to learn the phonemes of another language • Morphemes: Smallest unit of sound with meaning • Some morphemes are also phonemes (I, a) • Most morphemes are combinations of two or more phonemes • Prefixes and suffixes (pre, ed, s, etc.) • About 100,000 in the English language • Combine to make 616, 500 w0rds (in Oxford English Dictionary) • We are all born with the ability to produce all of the phonemes of all of the languages of the world!

6. Differences in Languages • Rotokas (spoken in Papua New Guinea) has 11 phonemes and 6 consonants • Hawaiian has 12 phonemes • !Xu (spoken in Southern Africa) has 141 phonemes and 100 consonants (including clicks) • Arabic only has 3 vowels (three short, three long) • Punjabi (India) has 25 vowels

7. Grammar • A system of rules in a given language that enables us to communicate with and understand others • Semantics: the set of rules we use to derive meaning from morphemes, words, and even sentences • Example: adding –ed means that something happened in the past • Syntax: the rules we use to order words into sentences • In English adjectives usually come before nouns (red house) • Language that doesn’t make meaningful sense can be grammatically correct • Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz • Shortest sentence in English language that includes every letter of the alphabet

8. Language Development • How many words will you learn between your first birthday and high school graduation? • 60,000 • 3,500 a year (10 a day) • Receptive v. Productive Language • Receptive: ability to comprehend speech • Productive: ability to produce words • Receptive matures before productive

9. Receptive Language • By 4 months… • Babies can discriminate speech sounds • Can also read lips • By 7 months… • Can segment spoken sounds into individual words (hard for us to do when listening to a foreign language!)

10. Productive Language • By 4 months of age… • Enter into the babbling stage: stage in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language • Not an imitation of adult speech – includes sounds from other languages! • Listener could NOT identify the baby as being Korean, Ethiopian, French • Ex: Da-da, na-na, ta-ta and ma-ma • By 10 months… • Babbling changes so that the language is identifiable (other sounds disappear) • Babies become functionally deaf to speech sounds outside of their native language (because of lack of exposure)

11. Productive Language Cont. • 1st Birthday… • One-Word Stage: stage that lasts from 1-2 during which a child speaks mostly in single words • Use sounds to communicate meaning • Often only one recognizable syllable (family members learn to understand) • Inflection may carry meaning - “Doggy!” • 18 Months… • Two-Word Stage: stage in which a child speaks mostly two-word statements • Learning increases from one word a week to one word a day • Telegraphic Speech: Stage where a child speaks like a telegram – “go car” – using mostly nouns and verbs (TERMS ACCEPTED. SEND MONEY.) • If a child gets a late start on learning a particular language, their language development will still proceed through the same sequence, although usually at a faster pace

12. Overgeneralization

13. Two Views on Language Development B.F. Skinner Noam Chomsky • Humans are born with an innate ability to produce language • Language acquisition device • We acquire language too quickly for it to be explained by learning principles • All human languages have nouns, verbs, subjects, and objects • No matter what language we speak, we begin to speak in nouns and in common course • Believed that language development can be explained through learning principles • Association, imitation, reinforcement • Humans learn language similar to the way that pigeons learn to peck! So who is right? Nature v. Nurture?

14. Is there a critical period for language development? • Critical Period: Particular time in which something needs to be learned • Children who have not been exposed to a language by age 7 gradually lose their ability to produce any language (including sign language) • Brain’s language capacity never fully develops • The older we get, the harder it is to learn a new language

15. Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis • Proposed by Benjamin Lee Whorf aka Linguistic Determinism (1956) • Different languages impose different conceptions of reality • The Hopi have no past tense. Can they think about the past? • A skier may have more words for snow . Do they think about snow differently? • Gender-free words can change our way of thinking • Contemporary Thoughts on LRH: • To say that our language determines the way we think is too extreme • However, you may think differently in different languages • Example: English has a focus on self-focused emotions; Japanese has a focus on interpersonal emotions ; Bilingual people may report having a different sense of self in different languages • Language and colors: We see colors much the same, but we use our native language to classify and remember colors

16. Bi/Multilingualism • More than half the world’s population is bilingual • Children learning two languages simultaneously can master approximately the same number of vocabulary items as children learning a single language • Total must be divided between the two languages • Discrepancies disappear by adulthood