Dialects, Pidgins, Creoles & AAE Linguistics

• Dialect refers to language variations specific to a geographical region or social group, with dialects of the same language being mutually intelligible.
• New dialects constantly emerge and evolve, influenced by the isolation of human communities.
• Physical isolation, such as that of Icelandic versus Danish communities, and social isolation, like that of African American Vernacular English, accelerate the emergence of new dialects.

Pidgins & Creoles

• Pidgin represents a simplified communication system used by speakers of different languages, borrowing features from all source languages.
• It serves as a make-shift system rather than a full language.
• Creole is a full language with native speakers that develops from multiple source languages, essentially a fully developed form of Pidgin.

Dialectal Variation and Language-Based Prejudice

• Speech patterns significantly influence perception, encompassing foreign accents, speech impediments, stuttering, jargon, and dialect.

Grammatical properties of African American English

• African American Vernacular English (AAE), also known as 'Ebonics' or Black English, differs systematically from Standard American English (SAE).
• AAE speakers follow distinct rules rather than making random errors.
• In AAE, "it" is used as the expletive subject, as in "it's really a god," while SAE uses "there."
• AAE includes agreement for negation, exemplified by "you ain't goin' to no heaven."
• AAE permits copula deletion where the copula can be contracted in SAE, such as "'if you bad' vs 'if you are bad'".
• Cluster reduction in AAE involves deleting stop consonants from the cluster.
• In AAE, /θ/ and /ð/ become stop consonants (stopping) in the initial word position like how 'thin' /θɪn/ becomes [tɪn], and 'this' /ðɪs/ becomes [dɪs].
• When /θ/ and /ð/ appear elsewhere, they are realized as [f] and [v] (labialization) like how 'bath' /bæθ/ becomes [bæf], and 'brother' /bɹʌðɹ/ becomes [bɹʌvɹ].
• AAE, lowers /ɪ/ to [ɛ] or [æ] when followed by [ŋ], similar to many Southern English dialects.
• An example includes ‘sing’ /sɪŋ/ becoming [sɛŋ].
• In AAE, /z/ changes to [d] when followed by a nasal consonant, as in 'isn’t’ /ɪznt/ becoming [ɪdnt].
• Gullah (or Geechee) is both a cultural group and a language spoken in coastal South Carolina and Georgia by descendants of enslaved West Africans.
• The Gullah creole has features of both English and African languages.

Sign Language and Deaf Culture

• Charles-Michel I'Epee (1712-1789) founded a school for the deaf in 1760 and attempted to create an artificial signed system, but it got rejected.
• Laurent Clerc (1785-1869), a deaf student and teacher at I'Epee's school, later became Thomas Gallaudet's ASL instructor.
• Thomas Gallaudet (1787-1851), a minister concerned about deaf education, traveled to the U.S. and established the first deaf school in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817.
• Oralism involves educating deaf students through oral language, using lip reading, speech, and mimicking mouth shapes.
• The Milan conference in 1880 resulted in 164 hearing educators of the deaf voting to ban sign language in favor of oralism.
• Residential/boarding schools for deaf children, established in the 1800s and 1900s, separated deaf children from the hearing world and provided initial exposure to ASL despite the use of oralism.
• "Deaf" with a capital D is the concept of distinct cultures within the deaf community using ASL.
• "Hard of hearing" describes individuals with substantial hearing impairment to retain the ability to access sound and speech, and considered deaf in a cultural sense.

Sign Language Linguistics

• Sign language is autonomous and not derived from spoken language.
• Sign languages can differ arbitrarily from each other.
• Sign languages exhibit a higher degree of iconicity than spoken languages, reflecting gestures of speech.
• Sign languages share structure with spoken language, but different modality.

Phonology in Sign Language

• Characterized by a finite number of discrete, meaningless, contrastive phonetic parameters including movement, location, handshape, orientation, and non-manual markers (facial expressions).

Morphology

• Spoken languages concatenate morphemes, sign languages use sequential and simultaneous morphology.
• Sequential morphology means phonemes/morphemes follow each other.
• Simultaneous morphology means phonemes/morphemes are superimposed on each other and produced simultaneously.
• An example of sequential derivational morphology includes Teacher = teach + person in ASL.
• Simultaneous morphology appears in agreeing verbs in ASL and object agreement is most common.
• Classifiers are words representing a large category of possible words, and at the border of abstract grammatical expressions and gestures.

Sign Language Myths and Misconceptions

• Sign language is not universal.
• Sign language is not based on spoken language.
• Sign language is not simply pantomimes.
• Sign language is arbitrary and not always iconic.
• Sign language has the same expressive capacity as spoken language.
• Signed and spoken language are processed in similar ways.
• Children learn signed and spoken language in similar ways.
• Signed languages were not invented by hearing people.

Basic Brain Organization

• Primary sensory cortex is the first to receive inputs from the sensory periphery.
• Primary motor cortex sends outputs to the motor periphery.
• Secondary sensory/motor cortex is for higher-order processing, linked to the primary cortex.
• Association cortex is high-order and not directly linked to a particular modality, and more expanded in humans.
• The prefrontal cortex, located in the anterior part of the frontal lobe, is involved in working memory, cognitive control, and attention.
• Sensory information decussation results in sensory information being initially processed in opposite hemisphere.
• The left motor cortex controls the right side of the body, while central structures (torso) are under bilateral control.

Brain Development

• Embryonic brain development is highly structured and guided by genetics.
• Brain size rapidly increases from birth to adulthood, with the most rapid changes occurring from fertilization to 2 years old.
• Neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, is rapid and extreme during embryonic development but limited after birth.
• Myelination is the development of glial cells and myelin sheath, insulates and supports axons, and contributes to brain size.
• Synaptogenesis, the formation of new synapses (connections) within and across brain regions, contributes to brain growth.
• Synaptic pruning eliminates neural connections based on a "use it or lose it" principle, where frequently used connections are maintained and others are shed.
• Pruning occurs from the third trimester into early adulthood.
• Structural connections involve myelination, synaptogenesis, neuron size, gray/white matter volume, synaptic pruning, and microstructural changes (neurotransmitters and receptors).
• During a critical/sensitive period, children must be exposed to language for structural brain changes to occur, in order to fully acquire it.

Executive Function

• Executive functions are high-level cognitive processes that facilitate behavior and cognition in demanding circumstances.
• Executive functions encompass vision, audition, motor control, and language.
• Working memory is more complex and involves processing what you are remembering.
• Short-term memory is purely about temporary storage of information.
• Short-term memory involves a way of remembering what someone said a second ago.
• Working memory involves working on math problems or maintaining a phone number in the brain.
• The phonological loop rehearses speech in short term memory, allows to keep information fresh.
• The language Acquisition with working memory involves Perceiving speech and maintaining to analyze the internal structure like Syntactic and semantic analysis.
• Pragmatics involves understanding point of conversation.
• Cognitive control, including selection of information and inhibition of irrelevant thoughts, allows greater focus on tasks/information.
• Attention is important for linguistic processing, including joint attention, language data in the environment (parent speech), and focus on particular parts of sentence structure.

Language Processing

• Transforming an acoustic/visual signal into something meaningful involves distinct linguistic representations.
• Lexical access/word recognition quickly narrows down words based on the initial phoneme.
• The recognition point is when a word can be uniquely identified from input, even if the full word hasn't been perceived.
• Incrementalism means building sentence structure and composing meaning as soon as possible.
• Garden-pathing involves building the wrong structure or making the wrong interpretation due to incomplete information.
• Language production involves selecting appropriate morphemes, building structure to convey meaning, coding articulatory gestures, and speech.
• Types of language production span from Spontaneous communication to singing and memorized speech.
• Breakdowns in speech production include semantic, morphological/syntactic, phonological, and articulatory errors.
• Self-monitoring involves catching errors before/after production.
• Disfluencies involve False starts/stops, difficulty with word finding.
• Repair involves fixing breakdowns from speech errors or misinterpretations.

Brain Organization of Language

• Aphasia refers to language disorders due to brain damage, typically in the left hemisphere.
• Broca's aphasia involves effortful, non-fluent production with good comprehension, patient is typically aware of the deficit, and it stems damage to the frontal lobe.
• Wernicke's aphasia involves fluent production and poor comprehension, without awareness of the deficit, and it stems damage to the temporal and inferior parietal lobes.
• Right hemisphere patients exhibit only a small but significant effect on lexical comprehension using the RH temporal lobe.
• The dual stream model features dorsal (left hemisphere) and ventral streams, where both are involved in production; only ventral is involved in comprehension.

Brain Organization of Sign Language

• Left hemisphere strokes have a greater impact on sign characteristics.
• Modality-independence suggests left hemisphere dominance for language regardless of modality.
• Severe linguistic deficits in ASL are the observed result severe linguistic deficits in ASL following left hemisphere damage.
• Neuroimaging studies activate left hemisphere areas similarly in spoken and sign language.
• Functional brain development in infants involves speech-activating areas like adults, transitioning from distributed processing to more focused activation in language regions and left hemisphere bias.
• Language deprivation is a chronic lack of full access to a natural language during the critical period, first 5 years of life.
• The symptoms present in late learners include impaired grammatical development, difficulty with sequential narratives, working memory, and lack of conversational awareness.
• Language deprivation occurs when deaf children are not exposed to ASL after adolescence due to having hearing parents .
• Late learners appear to have normal or accelerated lexical development.
• Late earners are severely impaired in ASL syntax with Graded effects depending on age of acquisition and a Gradient critical period.
• Brain function and structure regarding language is severely impacted in late first language acquisition.

Language Sampling

• Language assessment and language sampling is collected with structured data using online and off-line methods.
• Online methods measure measurements of perception/comprehension.
• Offline methods measure endpoint or product of linguistic process.
• Control confounding factors and isolate domain or variable of interest.
• Data may not fully reflect children's everyday language use, and might be meta linguistic.
• It should show naturalistic language samples.
• Sampling should be accurate, show reflection of daily language, but is influenced by the environment and child's cooperation / intelligibility.
• Sample across multiple days and does not show comprehension.
• A Language sampling project should have >100 utterances, naturalistic, and be representative of actual language use.
• Mean length of utterance (MLU) measures utterance sizes, correlated to morphemes, ignoring derivational morphology and compounding
• One would measure Number of morphemes (bound and single).
• Inflectional morphemes are counted (-ed, -s, -ing, '-s).
• Contractions all count as 2 morphemes, except lets, don’t and wont.
• False starts, repetition, and reformulations are not counted.
• Derivational morphology, reduplications, and proper names count as single words.
• Irregular past tense verbs and irregular plurals count as one morpheme.
• Xxx means the speech wasn't understood but still count as one morpheme.
• / = reformulation or a repetition so is not needed to count. language sampling project, 4 language samples, 2 children, TD / Late talker.

Morphology

• Derivational Morphology causes changes in meaning and grammatical category.
• Inflectional morphology express grammatical information and category has no change or meaning or grammatical category.

Bilingualism

• Bilingualism is the ability to speak 2 languages at some level of proficiency and or fluency in a first language unless a disorder prevents it.
• Multilingualism is the ability to speak 2 languages.
• Polyglot is the term for speaking 3+ languages at a high proficiency.
• Simultaneous bilingualism is learning both languages from birth.
• Sequential bilingualism is learning the second language later.
• L1 is primary language
• L2 is second language
• Balanced bilinguals have equal proficiency in both.
• A heritage language is not spoken outside of the home.
• Code switching is the intermixture of multiple languages, and or dialects within a conversation.
• Some feel they can express themselves via it and for solidarity.
• Transfer effects: One language effects the other language in a multilinguistic speaker.
• Dual lexical activation results in equivalent translation gets "active".
• Cognates are word from different languages with similar meanings.
• False friends are words with similar spelling/pronunciation that have different meaning.
• The bilingual advantage is that multiple languages gives some the cognitive benefit relative to monolinguals, but not replicable.

Explore the formation of new dialects through isolation, the difference between pidgin and creole languages, and linguistic prejudice arising from dialectal variation. Understand copula deletion, cluster reduction, stopping, and labialization in African American Vernacular English (AAE).