Biological Bases Lecture Notes PDF

BIOLOGICAL BASES LING/PSYC 370B January 20 th & 23 rd Gabrielle Manning Roadmap ◦ Characteristics of human language ◦ Language creation & input ◦ Animal communication ◦ Genetics & neural bases 2 CHARACTERISTICS OF HUMAN LANGUAGE...

BIOLOGICAL BASES LING/PSYC 370B January 20 th & 23 rd Gabrielle Manning Roadmap ◦ Characteristics of human language ◦ Language creation & input ◦ Animal communication ◦ Genetics & neural bases 2 CHARACTERISTICS OF HUMAN LANGUAGE 3 Human language LANGUAGE IS… ◦ Species-specific: only humans have language ◦ Species-general: all communities and individuals within a given community have language 4  Hockett’s design features Vocal-auditory channel Rapid fading Language produced Speech sounds fade through the vocal tract quickly is perceived through the auditory channel Broadcast transmission Interchangeability and directional reception People can send and Listeners can receive the same identify/receive signals message 5  Hockett’s design features Total feedback Semanticity Internalization of a Associations between message you produce language units and Control and adjust places/people/things message Specialization Arbitrariness Language sounds are Associations between purely for language and the world communicative are arbitrary purposes 6  Hockett’s design feature Discreteness Productivity Language units are Novel messages can be distinct created from discrete Every language has a units limited number of sounds (between 10- 100) Displacement Cultural transmission Language can be used Language is learned to communicate about through communicative things/places/people interaction with others that are not currently present 7  Hockett’s design features Duality of patterning Combination of different sounds with no intrinsic meaning to create words that convey meaning PAT TAP APT 8  Hockett’s design features Reflexiveness Learnability Language can be used Language users can to describe/refer to learn a second, third, language fourth, etc. language Prevarication Language can be used to make false statements - intentionally and unintentionally 9 ANIMAL COMMUNICATION 10 Do animals have language? ◦ Despite animals sharing some design features with humans, they do not have language ◦ Animals communicate with one another in a variety of ways 11 Honeybee waggle dance Semanticity Productivity Interchangeability 12 Vervet monkeys ◦ Distinct alarm calls for various predators ◦ Different reactions depending on the alarm call Arbitrariness Productivity 13  Ape communication Washoe First non-human to learn sign language at 10 months old “rock Knowledge of ~350 signs berry” Use of productivity Koko Sign language training at the age of 1 “finger 1000+ signs bracelet” Use of productivity 14  Ape communication Kanzi ◦ Use a keyboard with lexigraphs to communicate ◦ Understands complex syntactic sentences ◦ Put the soap in the water ◦ Click here to see! ◦ Use of displacement ◦ Click here to watch! 15 Ape communication ◦ Chimps have been shown to keep track of another chimp’s gaze ◦ Point/gesture to something they want HOWEVER… ◦ Joint attention: the knowledge between individuals that they are paying attention to/referring to the same thing 16 LANGUAGE INPUT & CREATION 17 Creating language ◦ Humans use cultural transmission to help language learning ◦ Children deprived of language input have the tools to create properties of language ◦ Pidgins & creoles ◦ Homesign ◦ Nicaraguan sign language 18 Pidgins & creoles Pidgins Creole ◦ Create a form of communication ◦ When a pidgin becomes a native ◦ Lexical items from each language, language create a new grammar ◦ Grammatically more complex ◦ Structurally simple ◦ Provides information on biological ◦ E.g., Russenorsk bases of human language 19 Homesign ◦ A large proportion of deaf children are born to hearing parents (~90%) Hi! ◦ Homesign: a gestural communication system created by a deaf person to communicate with others who do not know sign language 20 Nicaraguan Sign Language ◦ A shared homesign system created from traditional transmission and generational progression ◦ Younger students… ◦ Learned the system from older students ◦ Altered the system, making is more fluent ◦ Created more compact gestures ◦ Benefited to the most from structured input in terms of language learning 21  Critical period hypothesis ◦ Critical period: when children appear to have an easier time learning language “Wild” children Late ASL acquisition Socially isolated Children born to hearing ~9-12 years-old parents Victor of Aveyron Issue for innate theories Not taught sign-language Never learned more than a few Those who learned ASL after words childhood have been shown to not perform as well as those Genie 13-years old Mama wash hair in sink exposed during infancy Vocabulary of 5-year-old At school scratch face. (Newport, 1990) 4 years later I want Curtis play piano. Like go ride yellow school bus. Small two cup. 22 Critical period hypothesis A few issues…. ◦ Sensitive? Optimal? ◦ Clear start and end ◦ Steep or gradual decline? ◦ Length – 5, 7, 13? ◦ Not all parts of language are equal ◦ Second language acquisition (childhood & adulthood) 23 GENETICS & NEURAL BASES 24 Fun facts about the brain ◦ The brain weighs approx. 3 pounds ◦ A piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand contains approx. 100,000 neurons ◦ The brain is comprised of about 100 billion interconnected neural cells ◦ Your brain is always active (on some level) ◦ There are no clearly separable parts of the brain ◦ Neurolinguistics: the study of how the physical brain relates to language behaviour 25 Genetics Specific language FOXP2 impairment (SLI) ◦ Strong hereditary ◦ Atypical language development with the component absence of neurological damage, cognitive impairment, or hearing issues ◦ Difficulties with… ◦ Late speaking and ungrammatical ◦ Language learning sentences ◦ Production ◦ Hereditary component ◦ Grammar Yesterday I fall over ◦ Non-language related spectacle difficulties mugs Gabrielle introduced Kevin to Leah 26 Broca’s area ◦ Patient “Tan” ◦ Damage to the left frontal lobe (Broca’s area) ◦ Broca’s area: a region of the brain concerned with speech production ◦ Fragmented speech ◦ Little grammatical structure Side view of the brain’s left hemisphere (Sedivey, 2020, p. 69) 27 Wernicke’s area ◦ Patients with comprehension difficulties and fluent incomprehensible speech ◦ Autopsy showed a lesion in the temporal lobe ◦ Wernicke’s area: a region of the brain concerned with the comprehension of language Side view of the brain’s left hemisphere (Sedivey, 2020, p. 69) 28 Wernicke’s area ◦ Aphasia: language disruption (comprehension, production) caused by brain damage ◦ Broca’s aphasia: difficultly with word choice, halting speech, but intact comprehension ◦ Wernicke’s aphasia: nonsensical well articulates fluent speech and difficulty with language comprehension ◦ Children can have aphasia ◦ Stroke ◦ Trauma, head injury, tumor ◦ Overactive immune system 29 What about signed languages? ◦ ASL patients ◦ Difficulty producing signs with good comprehension (Broca) ◦ Difficulty comprehending signs but can produce them (Wernicke) ◦ Broca’s area = production of hand movements ◦ Wernicke’s area = comprehension signs 30 Lateralization ◦ Brain lateralization: the tendency for the brain’s right and left hemisphere to specialize in different functions ◦ Language impairment with left-hemisphere cerebral damage indicates that functions can be lateralized ◦ Further supported from studies on: dog cat ◦ ”Split-brain” patients ◦ Healthy brain using dichotic listening 31 31 Separate knowledge systems ◦ Double dissociation: evidence for two mental processes to be independent “cookie” ◦ Tasks belong to different language-related networks ◦ Different tasks recruit different networks ◦ E.g., ◦ Speech perception = network to map acoustic information bababad adadada ◦ Word recognition = network to map speech onto mental representations of meaning 32