Week 3 Notes.pdf

Week 3 Notes Theories of Language Behavioral (Skinner, 1957) B.F. Skinner 1904-1990 Most influential psychologist of the 20th century Doesn’t believe free will exists ○ “Radical behaviorism” Sees human behavior as resulting from previous actions/events Coined operan...

Week 3 Notes Theories of Language Behavioral (Skinner, 1957) B.F. Skinner 1904-1990 Most influential psychologist of the 20th century Doesn’t believe free will exists ○ “Radical behaviorism” Sees human behavior as resulting from previous actions/events Coined operant conditioning ○ Applying reinforcement or punishment after behavior to strengthen or weaken voluntary behavior How does this relate to language? Skinner wrote Verbal Behavior in 1957 Proposed a functional analysis (structure and category) of language based on his operant conditoning Describes how language development takes place The logic of behaviorism is ○ Antecedent (stimulus)>Behavior (response)>Consequence (reinforcement) Where does it start? External stimuli ○ Who’s a cute baby? ○ Look at mommy! Internal stimulus ○ Cold, hungry, lonely Back-and-forth reactions build on each other bit by bit Primary and Secondary Reinforcers Caregiver primary reinforcers: Eye gaze, speech, giving, food if baby provides ○ Reinforcers help fulfill primary needs Infant: Once survival needs are met, frequent, consistent, and contingent (giving a response without controlling it) responses Caregiver: more responses that vary depending on infant’s vocalizations Primary reinforcers: fulfilling primary needs Secondary reinforcers: fulfilling non-biological needs (peek-a-boo, talking, tickling) Verbal operants in developing language Basic elements of verbal behavior  Once reinforced, they develop into secondary verbal behaviors (=more complex responses) Verbal Operants: ways an infant can communicate and learn language through responding to external and internal stimuli ○ Mands Response to a deprivation or aversive state (like hunger, pain, feeling cold…) ○ Echoics Synonym of imitation/priming Learning through repetition ○ Tacts Commenting on the world without making a request ○ Extended tacts Providing the same response to a stimulus that shares a feature with a known one>overextensions Achieved through stimulus generalization Extend knowledge of one thing to another ○ Autoclitics Skinner’s way of adressing syntax and grammar Overgeneralization Why should I care as a future SLP? A lot of the evidence-based treatment procedures in speech-language pathology are behavioral procedures based on Skinner’s operant conditioning Currently called “Applied behavioral analysis” ABA (Hedge, 1998) Criticisms Only focuses on language use ○ Not form (sounds, words, sentences) ○ Not meaning (what we universally talk about, eg people and objects, order of events ect.) From Chomsky: Skinner’s theory doesn't fully explain the rapid pace of language acquisition and the ability to create new sentences (New Week) Language (Lois Bloom & Margaret Lahey, 1978) Both speech-language pathologists Both worked with children with developmental language disorders View language as a tool to represent information in messages And as a social act They define language in the context of language development and disorders Definitions revolve around these key terms ○ Code  Represent one thing with another Consider maps, pictures, graphs, words, and sentences Uses sounds and movements that are arbitrarily associated with objects or events to represent them (based on Saussure’s work) Most of the words in the language we speak are arbitrarily connected When encoding, you recall and combine pieces of the code to represent information and create a message When decoding, you recognize and make sense of the elements of the code to understand a message The code is the form of language Language is a system Rules delineating how sounds can combine to form words, and how words can combine to form sentences Rules make language predictable The number of possible combinations in language is infinite, contrary to sounds, words, and the rules that govern them We can produce and understand sentences that have never been created before or that we have never heard before Language is a convention Is there anything tree-like about the word tree? What about the word ‘meowing’ Relationship between words and what they designate (signifier/signified) is arbitrary>comvention to use a given word for a given object is a social constraint Language represents shared knowledge Language is used for communication ○ Most of the time, language is used to interact with other people You gain information, give information, to to accomplish goals, and try to maintain contact ih others ○ Nonverbal information affects communication Can I Get the juice Give me the juice, please Language in 3D Content ○ Words (also called signs) create meaning ○ Language content is organized in various categories of topics ○ Language content is more universal than language topics Routines, relationships, hobbies But the topics within these categories will vary across people and cultures  Form ○ The form is broadly what connects sounds with meaning ○ Structure of language ○ Includes Sounds: phonology, articulatory features Words: parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives) Sentences: types (declarative, negative, question…), clause (main, subordinate) ○ The inventry of linguistic units and the system of rules for their combination ○ Form is determined by The content of what you’ll say The purpose behind what you’ll say The context of use Use ○ Why we speak: social function ○ Influence of linguistic and nonlinguistic context, pragmatics ○ Why you might choose one form over another to reach our specific communication goal How do the 3 parts come together Content, form, use > language competence/knowledge Plan for the behaviors involved in the comprehension and production of language ○ Behaviors also influence the plan What is unique about Bloon & Lahey This is the first time all 3 components are looked at together Linguistic theory has considered form the only object of study prior to the 1960s-No account of meaning in messages Skinner (1957) focused on the psychological explanation of verbal behavior, centering on use and ignoring form and content A child acquires a mental plan with cognitive, linguistic, and social rules to pair sounds with meaning Takeaways Skinner ○ Behaviorist who views language only from a usage perspective ○ Views learning as operant conditioning: learning through stimulus-response Bloom and Lahey ○ Add notions of form and content to language  Form describes the components of language (sounds, words, sentences) Content categorizes the topics that humans universally talk about Noam Chomsky Born 1928 Considered the founder of modern linguistics Treats language as uniquely human and a biologically-based cognitive ability Started the “cognitive revolution” in linguistics and related fields (cognitive psychology, philosophies of mind and language) Main ideas ○ The basic principles of all languages, and the basic range of concepts they are used to express are innately represented in the human mind ○ Language learning is the unconscious construction of a grammar from these principles based on cues drawn from the child’s linguistic environment Link to Skinner ○ Chomsky’s 1959 review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior came to be regarded as the definitive refutation of behaviorist accounts of language learning ○ The main problem with Skinner’s approach is that it does not account for the ability to generate or understand new sentences without having heard them before What is Universal Grammar? ○ It’s a theory saying that humans possess innate faculties to acquire language, and that all lamguages share some grammatical properties ○ Related to work i generative grammar (=precisely formulated set of rules whose output is all the sentences of a language) The goal of generative grammar is to understand the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans’ subconscious grammatical knowledge Descriptive rather than prescriptive ○ Ideas ○ Convention ○ System ○ Communication Mental grammar/Universal Grammar Chomsky