language

Definition
Language is a system of communication using sounds or
symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts,
ideas, and experiences.
 Studying Language
• Language has fascinated thinkers for thousands of years,
dating back to the ancient Greek philosophers Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle (350–450 BCE), and before.
• The modern scientific study of language traces its
beginnings to the work of Paul Broca (1861) and Carl
Wernicke (1874). Broca’s study of patients with brain
damage led to the proposal that an area in the frontal lobe
(Broca’s area) is responsible for the production of language.
Language and brain areas
Structure of language
 Stages
• Pre-linguistic ofmonths)
Stage(0-12 language development
• Crying
• Cooing, 2-3 months
• Babbling, around 6 months
• Use of gestures also
• Child at the end of this stage is able to recognize familiar voices and
experiment the pitch and sounds.
• Holophrastic Stage (12-18 months)
• Holopharase, using single words to convey whole idea.
• Having 50 words until the end of this stage
• Nouns and verbs usage and increase the understanding of words.
• Two Word Stage (18-24).
• Combine two words to form speech also known as telegraphic speech
• Emerge basic syntax
• Vocabulary increased to 200 words
• Use two phrases to produce complex ideas

• Early Multiword stage (2-3 years)

• Short sentences
• Increase vocabulary and grammatical understanding
• Able to use pronouns and simple questions
• Express needs and desire more clearly
• Later Multiword stage (3-5 years)
• More complex sentences 5 and more words
• Use plurals, conjunctions and past tenses
• Vocabulary up to 1000 words
• Narrative and story telling skills
• Advance language development stage (5+ years)
• Complex grammatical structures mastery
• Engage in conversations.
• Develop reading and writing skills
• Understand abstract language.
 The four major concerns of
psycholinguistics are as follows
1. Comprehension
• Ability to understand written and spoken language

2. Representation.
• Ability to group words together into phrases to create meaningful sentences and to
make connections between different parts of a story.
3. Speech production.
How do people produce language? This includes the physical processes of speech
production and the mental processes that occur as a person creates speech.

4. Acquisition
How do people learn language? This includes not only how children learn
language but also how people learn additional languages, either as children or
later in life.
 Parsing: Making Sense of Sentences

• Parsing is the process that occurs when a person hears

or reads a string of words and phrases to understand
their grammatical meaning and structure.
• How strings of words create meaning is to consider
how meaning is created by the grouping words and
phrases.
 Understanding Meaning: Semantics
• Semantics is the study of meaning in a language. Semanticists are concerned with
how words and sentences express meaning. In semantics,
• Denotation is the strict dictionary definition of a word.
• Connotation is a word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other non
explicit meanings.
• Both are taken together meaning of a word. Because connotations may vary
between people, there can be variation in the meaning formed. Imagine the word
snake. For many people, the connotation of snake is negative or dangerous.
Others, for example, a biologist specializing in snakes (called a herpetologist),
would have a different and probably much more positive connotation for the word
snake
 Acquiring Language in life span

There is great uniformity in the pattern of language

development across languages and cultures.
Newborns enter the world without being able to
use language, but evidence suggests they have
some experience and knowledge very early on,
perhaps even before birth.
• De Casper, Lecanuet, Busnel, Granier-Deferre, and Maugeais
(1994). Mahler et al (1988) demonstrated that four-day-old
infants could distinguish between spoken French and Russian.
• One-month-old infants can distinguish between most of the
phonological contrasts of all the languages of the world.
• By their sixth month, infants typically can recognize their
own names and respond to “no.”
• From six to twelve months they can recognize names of
familiar objects, foods, and body parts (Bergelson &
Swingley, 2012).
• From age one to two years, children can point to objects and pictures when named
and understand some requests or questions (e.g., “Push the truck” or “Where’s the
horsey?”).
• At this age children often exhibit overextension, applying the words they know to
more things than adults do (e.g., doggie may be used to refer to all four-legged
animals) and under extension (e.g., using car to refer to a particular car rather
than all cars). It is estimated that children typically understand nearly three times
more words than they produce at this stage.
• Children’s utterances initially consist of single words, but in
their second year they start to combine words to produce longer
“telegraphic” speech, leaving out grammatical words (e.g.,
articles like the and a and prepositions like by and for).
• By their third year their utterances continue to get longer and
more complex. They typically use full sentences and can form
questions, make negative statements, and use grammatical
morphemes.
• Vocabulary growth continues rapidly, and by the third year the
vocabulary gap between production and comprehension narrows.
Also by the third year they can answer who, what, and where
questions
• Infants don’t learn language in isolation; instead they are typically
actively engaged in highly interactive and social contexts. Parents talk
to and play with their children.
• Hart & Risley, 1995, estimated that parents direct three hundred to four
hundred vocal sound an hour to their children. Speech directed at
infants called child-directed speech typically differs from that between
adults.
• Children's typically has fewer words, less complex syntax, more
repetition, higher pitched, slower, or longer pauses). These speech
simplifications provide infants important cues that assist in their
language learning (Dominey & Dodane, 2004). Eye contact and smiling
provide strong social cues.
• As children get older, their language use gets more
sophisticated.
• By the age of six they may have a vocabulary of 14,000
words and their syntax grows in complexity.
• Additionally, they may begin to learn a new medium of
language use.
• Overall, the speed and apparently effortless nature of
our ability to use language is amazing
• Indeed, the ability to learn a language is only marginally
dependent on intelligence.
• If a child does not acquire his first language by puberty, it is
difficult, and perhaps impossible, for him to learn one after
that time.
• Formal teaching of the first language is unnecessary: the child
may have to go to school to learn to read and write but he does
not have to go to school to learn how to talk.
Different School of thoughts and their
view about language development
• Behaviorist view
• Psycholinguistic view
 Behaviorist view of language
• The connection between language and the brain, but on behavioral research on the
cognitive mechanisms of language. We take up the story of behavioral research on
language in the 1950s when behaviorism was still the dominant approach in
psychology . In 1957, B. F. Skinner, the main proponent of behaviorism, published a
book called Verbal Behavior, in which he proposed that language is learned through
reinforcement.
• According to this idea, just as children learn appropriate behavior by being rewarded
for “good” behavior and punished for “bad” behavior, children learn language by
being rewarded for using correct language and punished (or not rewarded) for using
incorrect language.
 Noam Chomsky
• Acquisition of language is innate
• Grammatical rules are common to all languages.
• Innate ability of acquiring grammatical structure of a
language is allows children to learn their language quickly
even limited linguistics input they received in infancy.
Language and thoughts
 Language and Thought
• Classical theorists like Plato and Aristotle argued that the categories
of thought determine the categories of language. To them, language
is only the outward form or expression of thought.
• Another view was expressed by the behaviorist J. B. Watson was
“thought is language”. He believed hat thought is sub-vocal speech,
that is , when we “think aloud,” it is called speech; when we “speak
covertly,” it is called thinking.
• Theorists within this group are divided between those who think that
language completely determines cognitive categories and those who
merely say that language strongly influences cognitive categories.
 What come first?
• According to a research thoughts comes first. Before
learning a language a child has the ability to think.
• Although thoughts comes first but language influence
their mind and ability to interact with the world.
• According to Piaget language precede thoughts. E.g. To
express our dislike to something initially need us to
develop schema about not liking it.
 Relationship between thoughts and
language
• Thoughts are not determined by language but it provide the
framework (Structure of thoughts, context, emotional
expression) for an individual’s conscious and subconscious
thought.
• The language a person speaks has and influence on their mind
and how they view the world.
• Child is not born with a language but with the ability to think.
• Piaget argued that usage of language depend upon the stage of
cognitive development.
• It is generally accepted by Ethno linguists that culture
influences language but there is far less agreement about the
possibility that language influences culture.
• Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Whorf, suggested
that language affects how people perceive their reality, that
language coerces thought.
• Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures
limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought
processes such as categorization, memory, and perception.
• The relationship between language and culture is that the structure of
a language determines the way in which the speakers of that language
view the world. This view is called Linguistic Determinism
• A somewhat weaker version is that the structure doesn’t determine
the view but is still extremely influence speakers of a language
towards adopting a particular world-view. This view is called
Linguistic Relativism
• Benjamin Lee Whorf 1897-194, argued that " language
is shaped by culture and reflects the individual actions
of people daily".
• He felt that language shaped a person's view and
influenced thoughts.
• Today, many linguists agree with Whorf's studies. His
studies, though not all were proven, helped future
linguists in their studies.
 Vygotsky
• In early development speech and thoughts are
independent.
• Language is a cultural tool that plays a key role in
development.
• Language allows adults to share their knowledge and to
communicate with their child
• After acquisition of language child by using language can
make decisions, problem solving and regulation their
behavior.