Development: Basic Models Basic issue: heritability (nature-nurture interactions) --no development: small adults! --progressive differentiation --instinct.

Development: Basic Models• Basic issue: heritability (nature-nurture

interactions)• --no development: small adults!• --progressive differentiation• --instinct (maturation alone --> devel.)• --readiness (maturation is a pre-req for

learning)• --critical period (maturation is a pre-req but

opportunity disappears)• --stages and waves

Development:Why study?

• Child is father to the man

• Analysis of complex system

• Heredity --environment issues

• Heritability = Vg/Vt (variance)

• Why difficult? --right experiment

• Role of culture & socialization: Rosseau/Victor of Aveyron

Language

• The Premise of this lecture is that Language is what distinguishes humans from animals. All of us have it, none of them do. Is this just species-centrism, or is it accurate? In order to answer that question, we need to look at what language is.

Animal Signaling systems

• Animal signaling systems. White tailed deer, Monkeys, Bees etc. Characteristics of signal system: invariant-fixed mapping, unstructured, uncreative, unproductive....

Behavioral View of Language

• Language as sets of words: Simple behavior, responses to stimuli. Not so.Skinner: (de)mands & (con)tacts. control via echo, text, intraverbal or autoclitics (descriptive or functional--frames "the x's car". Chomsky's scathing attack led to alternative view

Language Can be Described as Complex Heirarchy of RulesStart with phonology: Phoneme (40 out of

200 sounds)Made up of distinctive features (8) ex.

-place (7) [bl, ld, d, a, p, v g] -manner (6) of artic. stop, fric,

affric, nas, lat, semivowelexample: /p/ /t/ /k/:: /b/ /d/ /g/ + VOT experiment 20msec

Word/Morpheme Level (Meaning)

• 50,000 Morphemes

• 200,000 Words

• You can say a lot….but still limited

Syntactic Level

• Rules of ordering/inflection convey meaning. (“Dog bites cat” and “Cat bites dog” mean different things while using same words!

• Language as “packaging” job is to convey underlying propositions

Pragmatic Level

• Language in social use within a community

• It’s all automatic and mostly effortless despite its complexity

• Enormous complexity and rapid online processing!

Hockett’s Defining Characteristics

A. displacement: bees do it vy limited (flagpole ex).B. productivity: say anything "palimony" bees cant' do

flagpole-no vertC. creativity: (cont. of above?) (not one of Hockett's)D. interchangeability: any speaker can understand any

messageE. discreteness: small separable units of soundF. duality of patterning: small set of building blocks--

>infinite wordsG. traditional transmission: knowledge passed onH. arbitrariness: no natural relationship necessary

between word & ref.I. semanticity: (cont. of above) ie. arbitrary

assignment of word--ref.J. vocal=auditory channel, specialization: unimp.K.

broadcast xmission, direct. reception, rapid fading, total feedback

Animals Learning Human Lang.

• Porpoises/whales/

• chimps/gorillas

• parrots!

Language/thought/impact

• Whorf/Sapir hypothesis

• Roesh and the Dani (BW-R-GYB-BR-PPOG-L)

• Why is language so important? --Cultural cumulation (and not oysters on rocks or termites on sticks!)

• Schactel

Language Development

• Taught? -not an easy issue• Course of development--

– infant conversations– babbling (back to front, front to back)– one word– two word– Then syntax, and off and running– vocab. learning plus nuances (5000+ by

age 5)

Arguments for Innateness• semi-dedicated brain tissue (Broca's,

Wernicke's)• critical period• early start and early development +

difficulty of task (complexity of rules, 5000+ words by age 5 + semi-complete set of rules

• overgeneralization: not mimicry • syntactic uniqueness (numerous issues)

(many instances: wild chn. animals, no-input lang. etc.)

• poor teaching and poor examples (parsing problem)

Thought Leads Language!

• Holophrastic speech

• Telegraphic speech

• “Bye bye cat” ex.

• Kid’s translations of adult speech