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

Language

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

Facts About Languages

Populations in physical danger Natural disasters, famine, disease War/Genocide

Prevention or Discouragement of using Language:

Political repressionCultural , political, economic marginalization

Extinct Languages

Why Do Languages Become Extinct?

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!

Building Blocks of Language

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

Differences in Languages

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

Grammar

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

Language Development

By 4 months… Babies can discriminate speech sounds Can also read lips

By 7 months… Can segment spoken wounds into individual

words (hard for us to do when listening to a foreign language!)

Receptive 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-maBy 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)

Productive Language

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

Productive Language Cont.

Overgeneralization

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!

Two Views on Language Development

So who is right? Nature v. Nurture?

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

Is there a critical period for language development?

Proposed by Benjamin Lee Whorf aka Linguistic Determinism

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

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

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

Bi/Multilingualism