Unit 7

Cognition
 Learning Targets
36-1 Describe the structural components of
a language.
36-2 Discuss how we acquire language, and
Module explain the concept of universal grammar.
36-3 Discuss the milestones in language
36 development, and identify the critical period
for acquiring language.
36-4 Discuss the brain areas that are
Thinking and involved in language processing and
Language speech.
36-5 Describe the relationship between
thinking and language, and discuss the
value of thinking in images.
 language

our spoken,
written,
or signed words
and the ways we
combine them to
communicate Language transmits knowledge and
meaning allows for mind-to-mind
communication.
 What are the structural components
of language?

phoneme~
in a language, the smallest distinctive sound unit

morpheme~
in a language, the smallest unit that carries meaning;
may be a word or a part of a word (such as a prefix)

grammar~
in a language, a system of rules that enables us to
communicate with and understand others
 phoneme
To say bat, English
speakers utter the
phonemes
b, a, and t.
Linguists surveying 3 phonemes!
nearly 500 languages
have identified 869 To say that:
different phonemes in th, a and t
human speech, but no Also 3 phonemes!
language uses all of
Phonemes are sounds,
them (Holt, 2002;
not letters and not the same
Maddieson, 1984).
as syllables.
 morpheme

Most morphemes
combine two or
more phonemes.
Some are words,
while others are
parts of words.
 examples of
morphemes
The
word “readers,” for example,
contains three (3) morphemes:
“read,” (1)
“er” (2)
Every word in a (signaling that we
language contains mean “one who reads”),
one or more and “s” (3)
morphemes. (signaling that we mean not one,
but multiple readers).
 grammar

Rules for word

order and word Semantics is about selecting
meaning help us the correct word to convey the
meaning you intend.
to understand
language.
Syntax is about putting the
Two components words into the correct order
of grammar are according to grammatical
semantics and standards of your language.
syntax.
 Noam Chomsky on grammar

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”

Noam Chomsky, a linguist, used this sentence to

illustrate correct syntax (the nouns, adjectives and
verbs are all in their proper place grammatically) but
poor semantics (the choice of words do not convey
the appropriate meaning…what is a ‘green idea’ and
how can it be ‘colorless’?)
 Test your skills.

Rapid bouquets deter sudden neighbors.

Discuss the correct and incorrect application of the

grammar rules of syntax and semantics in the
sentence above.
 1. What Would You Answer?

Think about the word “prepares,”

Each “r” can be considered a _____________.

“pre” is considered a ___________________.

There are _____________ morphemes in the

word.

There are _____________ phonemes in the word.

 2. What Would You Answer?

The prefix “pre” in “preview” or the suffix “ed”

in “adapted” are examples of

A. phonemes.
B. morphemes.
C. babbling.
D. semantics.
E. syntax.
 How do we acquire language and what is
universal grammar?

Linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that language is

nature’s gift—an unlearned human trait, separate
from other parts of human cognition.

He theorized that a built-in predisposition

to learn grammar rules, which he called universal
grammar, helps explain why preschoolers
pick up language so readily and use grammar so well.
 3. What Would You Answer?

According to Noam Chomsky, language acquisition

occurs most especially because of

A. exposure to language in early childhood.

B. instruction in grammar.
C. reinforcement for babbling and other early verbal
behaviors.
D. imitation and drill.
E. linguistic determinism.
 Early language acquisition

Children’s language development moves from

simplicity to complexity. Infants start without
language (in fantis means “not speaking”).

Yet by 4 months of age, babies can recognize

differences in speech sounds.

(Stager & Werker, 1997)

 How does receptive
language develop?

In one study, babies preferred looking at a face that

matches a sound—an ah coming from wide open lips
and an ee from a mouth with corners pulled back.
(Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1982)

Recognizing such differences marks the beginning of

the development of babies’ receptive language, their
ability to understand what is said to and about them.
 babbling
stage

Beginning around 4
months, the stage of
speech development in Long after the
beginnings of receptive
which an infant
language, babies’
spontaneously utters
productive language—
various sounds their ability to produce
(phonemes) is at first words—matures.
unrelated to the
household language.
 one-word
stage
Around their first birthday,
most children enter the one-
word stage. They have
already
the stage in learned that sounds carry
speech development, meanings and now begin to
from about age 1 to 2, use sounds—usually only
during which a child one barely recognizable
speaks mostly in syllable, such as ma or da—
single words to communicate meaning.
 two-word
stage A 2-year-old’s speech
contains mostly nouns and
verbs (“Want juice”).

At about 18 months, Their speech follows rules

children’s learning of of syntax, arranging words
language explodes from in a sensible order.
about a word per week
to a word per day. English-speaking children
By their second typically place adjectives
before nouns—white house
birthday, most have
rather than house white.
entered the two-word
Spanish reverses this order,
stage. as in casa blanca.
 telegraphic speech

The two-word stage

produces sentences in
which a child speaks like a
telegram—
“go car”
—using mostly
nouns and verbs so it is
referred to as
telegraphic speech.
 4. What Would You Answer?

Eighteen-month-old Becca is in the telegraphic

speech phase. Which of the following best
represents something she might say?

A. “Mama”
B. “Yogurt please”
C. “Katie fall”
D. “The dog is fuzzy”
E. “I love you mommy”
 What was your first word?

How closely do your first experiences with language

match up with the research? Did you talk earlier
than your peers? Later?
 What is the critical period of
language development?

Childhood seems to represent a critical (or

“sensitive”) period for mastering certain aspects of
language before the language-learning window slowly
closes.
(Hernandez & Li, 2007; Lenneberg, 1967)
Later-than-usual exposure—at age 2 or 3—unleashes
the idle language capacity of a child’s brain,
producing a rush of language. But by about age 7,
those who have not been exposed to either a spoken
or a signed language lose their ability to
master any language.
 Can we learn a new language as adults?

Ten years after coming to the

United States, Asian immigrants
took an English grammar test.
Although there is no sharply
defined critical period for
second language learning,
those who arrived before age 8
understood American English
grammar as well as native
speakers did. Those who
arrived later did not.
(Data from Johnson & Newport,
1991.)
 Do you speak a second language?

Consider a language you began to learn after

learning your first language (if you later learned to
speak a second language at home, if you are
learning a second language at school, or if you just
picked up some words or phrases from a new
language while traveling).
How did your learning this other language differ from
learning your first language?
Does speaking it feel different?
 Deafness and experience.

The impact of early experiences is evident in

language learning in prelingually (before learning
language) deaf children born to
hearing non-signing parents.

These children typically do not experience language

during their early years. Natively deaf children who
learn sign language after age 9 never learn it as well
as those who learned it early in life.
 What is aphasia?

impairment of language, usually caused by left

hemisphere damage either to
Broca’s area (impairing speaking)
or to Wernicke’s area (impairing understanding)
 What brain areas are involved in
language processing and speech?

in 1865, French physician Paul Broca confirmed a

fellow physician’s observation that after damage to an
area of the left frontal lobe (Broca’s area) a person
would struggle to speak words, yet could sing familiar
songs and comprehend speech.
A decade later, German investigator Carl Wernicke
discovered that after damage to a specific area of
the left temporal lobe (Wernicke’s area), people were
unable to understand others’ words
and could speak only meaningless sentences.
 Broca’s area

helps control
language expression—
an area of the frontal
lobe, usually in the
left hemisphere, that
directs the muscle
movements involved in
speech
Wernicke’s area

a brain
area involved in
language
comprehension
and expression;
usually in the left
temporal lobe
 How are language and ideas related?

Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf contended that

“language itself shapes a [person’s] basic ideas.”

His hypothesis of linguistic determinism proposed

that language controls the way we think and interpret
the world around us.

For instance, the Hopi, a Native American tribe, have

no past tense for their verbs, and so could not readily
think about the past.
 Limitations to Whorf’s hypothesis

Today’s psychologists believe that a strong form of

Whorf’s linguistic determinism is too extreme.
We all think about things for which we have no words.

And we routinely have unsymbolized (wordless,

imageless) thoughts, as when someone, while
watching two men carry a load of bricks, wondered
whether the men would drop them.

(Heavey & Hurlburt, 2008; Hurlburt et al., 2013)

 What is linguistic influence?

the weaker form of “linguistic relativity”—the idea that

language affects thought (thus our thinking and world
view is “relative to” our cultural language)
words influence our
thinking

In Papua New
Guinea, Berinmo
children have words
for different shades of
“yellow,” which might
enable them to spot
and recall
yellow variations more
quickly.
On the color spectrum, blue blends into green—until we draw
a dividing line between the portions we call “blue” and
“green.”
Although equally different on the color spectrum, two different
items that share the same color name, as the two “blues” do
above, are harder to distinguish than two items with different
names - “blue” and “green.”
(Özgen, 2004)
 thought and
language
combine

The traffic runs

both ways
between thinking
and language.
Thinking affects
our language,
which affects our
thought.
 Do we think in images?

Indeed, we often think in images. Artists think in

images. So do composers, poets,
mathematicians, athletes, and scientists.

We often think in images when we use nondeclarative

(procedural) memory (our automatic memory system
for motor and cognitive skills and classically
conditioned associations).
 Let’s look at the research…

For someone who has learned a skill, such as ballet

dancing, even watching the activity will activate the
brain’s internal simulation of it.
(Calvo-Merino et al., 2004)

Imagining a physical experience activates some of

the same neural networks that are active during the
actual experience.
(Grèzes & Decety, 2001).
 How does imagination produce winners?

One experiment on mental practice and basketball

free-throw shooting tracked the University of
Tennessee women’s team over 35 games.
(Savoy & Beitel, 1996).
During that time, the team’s free-throw accuracy
increased from approximately 52 percent in games
following standard physical practice, to
some 65 percent after mental practice.
Players had repeatedly imagined making
free throws under various conditions, including being
“trash-talked” by their opposition.
 How can visualization improve grades?

Two groups of introductory psychology students

facing a midterm exam one week later.
(Taylor et al., 1998)
The first group spent five minutes each day
visualizing themselves scanning the posted grade list,
seeing their A, beaming with joy, and feeling
proud. This daily outcome simulation had little effect,
adding only 2 points to their exam score average.
The second group spent five minutes each day
visualizing themselves effectively studying—reading
the textbook, going over notes, eliminating
distractions, declining an offer to go out.
 What were the results?

This daily process simulation paid off: The group

began studying sooner, spent more time at it, and
beat the others’ average score by 8 points.

The point to remember:

It’s better to spend your fantasy time planning how to
reach your goal than to focus on your
desired destination.
 5. What Would You Answer?

Jacque learned to speak Italian when she was in the

first grade and was able to speak, read, and write
Italian fairly well by the fourth grade.
She moved to a new school system that did not have
Italian as a choice for World Languages, so she
decided to take Spanish.
Sometimes she found herself saying and
writing words in Italian as she completed her Spanish
assignments.
Often, she remembered the vocabulary
in Italian before she said the word in Spanish.
 6. What Would You Answer?

Sometimes she felt like knowing Italian helped her

learn Spanish, but sometimes she thought it just
confused her!
When Jacque was in her Spanish classroom, she
felt more at ease with the Spanish language.
When she went to a French restaurant, she was
frustrated because the menu was unreadable to her.
 7. What Would You Answer?

Use an example to show how each concept is related

to Jacque’s experiences.
 Working memory
 Explicit memory
 Effortful processing
 Context-dependent memory
 Proactive interference

Explain how these brain structures play a role in

Jacque’s memory processing.
• Hippocampus
• Amygdala
Learning Target 36-1 Review

Describe the structural

components of a language.

 Phonemes are a language’s basic units of sound.

 Morphemes are the elementary units of meaning.
 Grammar—the system of rules that enables us to
communicate— includes semantics (rules for
deriving meaning) and syntax (rules for ordering
words into sentences).
Learning Target 36-2 Review

Discuss how we acquire language, and

explain the concept of universal grammar.

 Linguist Noam Chomsky has proposed that all

human languages share a universal grammar—the
basic building blocks of language—and that
humans are born with a predisposition to learn
language.
 As our biology and experience interact, we readily
learn the specific grammar and vocabulary of the
language we experience as children.
Learning Target 36-3 Review

Discuss the milestones in language

development.

 Language development’s timing varies, but all

children follow the same sequence.
 Receptive language (the ability to understand what
is said to or about you) develops before productive
language (the ability to produce words).
 At about 4 months of age, infants babble, making
sounds found in languages from all over the world.
 By about 10 months, their babbling contains only
the sounds found in their household language.
Learning Target 36-3 Review cont.

Discuss the milestones in language

development.

 Around 1-year, children begin to speak in single

words. This one-word stage evolves into the two-
word stage (telegraphic speech) utterances
before the 2nd birthday, after which they begin
speaking in full sentences.
Learning Target 36-3 Review part III

Identify the critical

period for acquiring language.

 Childhood represents a critical period for language

learning; lack of exposure to a spoken or signed
language by age 7 results in an inability to master
any language. Deaf children born to hearing, non-
signing parents often demonstrate the impact of
early language experiences.
Learning Target 36-4 Review

Discuss the brain areas that are involved

in language processing and speech.

 Two important language- and speech-processing

areas are Broca’s area, a region of the left frontal
lobe that controls language expression, and
Wernicke’s area, a region in the left temporal lobe
that controls language reception (and also assists
with expression).
 Language processing is spread across other brain
areas as well, where different neural networks handle
specific linguistic subtasks.
Learning Target 36-5 Review

Describe the relationship between

thinking and language, and discuss the
value of thinking in images.
 Whorf’s linguistic determinism hypothesis suggested
that language defines thought; it may be more accurate
to say that language influences thought.
 Different languages embody different ways of thinking,
and immersion in bilingual education can enhance
thinking.
 We think in images when we use nondeclarative
memory which can increase our skills when we mentally
practice upcoming events.