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Kanzi used symbols to represent objects and actions

1. Describe how Kanzi’s communication skills fulfill each of the four critical properties of language. Kanzi used symbols to represent objects and actions He and the psychologists understood a shared semantic system (“meanings”)

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Kanzi used symbols to represent objects and actions

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  1. 1. Describe how Kanzi’s communication skills fulfill each of the four critical properties of language. • Kanzi used symbols to represent objects and actions • He and the psychologists understood a shared semantic system (“meanings”) • He generated thousands of combinations (many of them spontaneous) • He seemed to follow grammar rules, and understood how word order changed the meaning of a sentence

  2. 2. Summarize Steven Pinker’s argument for the evolutionary basis of human language. • Language is a species-specific trait produced by natural selection • Communication has adaptive value • A small advantage to survival can increase that trait in populations in a relatively short amount of time (by evolutionary standards)

  3. Behaviorist Theories • Skinner (1957) • Claims language is acquired through imitation, reinforcement, and other conditioning principles • When language and syntax are understood, children are understood and gets what they need (rewarded)

  4. Nativist Theories • Noam Chomsky (1959, 1965) • Children have an inborn propensity to develop language • They learn the rules of language, not specific verbal responses • Humans are equipped with a language acquisition device – innate process that facilitates the learning of language • Language development is similar across very different cultures

  5. Interactionist Theories • Biology and experience both make important contributions to language development • Language is part of cognitive development • Social communication plays a large role • Emergentist theories examine the growth of neural networks that emerge in response to experience

  6. 4. What evidence did B. L. Whorf present to support the linguistic relativity hypothesis? • One’s language determines the nature of one’s thought • Based on observation, he claimed that Eskimo language had many words for snow, and thus they perceive snow differently than English-speaking people

  7. 5. What are some criticisms of his reasoning? • Did not do systematic cross-cultural comparisons of perceptual processes • Overestimated the number of Eskimo words for snow • Ignored the variety of English words for snow

  8. 6. How did Eleanor Rosch’s work refute Whorf’s hypothesis? • Examined color perception • Compared the Dani of New Guinea (who only have terms for two basic colors) to English speakers • Found no difference in their abilities to perceive and learn the names of colors

  9. 7. What is the weaker version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis? • A given language makes certain ways of thinking easier or more difficult

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