Transcript Second Language Acquisition

Second Language
Acquisition
Yueh-chiu Wang
National Penghu University
What is a language?
A
language is considered to be a
system of communicating with other
people using sounds, symbols and
words in expressing a meaning, idea
or thought. This language can be
used in many forms, primarily
through oral and written
communications as well as using
expressions through body language.
The nature of human languages
Based upon Victoria (2003), a number of
facts related to all languages are shown as
follows:
 1. Whatever humans exist, language exits.
 2. All languages are equally complex and
equally capable of expressing any idea in
the universe. The vocabulary of any
language can be expanded to include new
words for new concepts.

 3.
All languages change through time.
 4. The relationships between the
sounds and meanings of spoken
languages and between the gestures
and meanings of sign languages are
for the most part arbitrary.
 5.
All human languages use a finite
set of discrete sounds or gestures
that are combined to form
meaningful elements of words, which
themselves may be combined to
form an infinite set of possible
sentences.
 6.
All grammars contain rules of a
similar kind for the formation of
words and sentences.
 7. Every spoken language includes
discrete sound segments. Every
spoken language has a class of
vowels and a class of consonants.
 8.
Similar grammatical categories
(nouns, verbs) are found in all
languages.
 9. There are universal semantic
properties like “male” or “female”,
“animate” or “human”, found in every
language in the world.
 10.
Speakers of all languages are
capable of producing and
comprehending an infinite set of
sentences.
 11. Any normal child, born anywhere
in the world, is capable of learning
any language to which he or she is
exposed.
 12.
Every language includes the
sound system (phonology), the
structure of words (morphology),
how words may be combined into
phrases and sentences (the syntax),
the ways in which sounds and
meanings are related (semantics),
and the words or lexicon.
 The
sounds and meanings of these
words are related in an arbitrary
fashion.
Linguistic competence vs. linguistic
performance
 Linguistic
competence means you
have the capacity to produce sounds
that signify certain meanings and to
understand or interpret the sounds
produced by others.
The creativity of linguistic
knowledge
 Knowledge
of a language enables
you to combine words to form
phrases, and phrases to form
sentences. Knowing a language
means being able to produce new
sentences never spoken before and
to understand sentences never heard
before. This ability is referred to as
part of creative aspect of language
use.
 Knowing
a language includes
knowing what sentences are
appropriate in various situations.
 Our creative ability not only is
reflected in what we say but also
includes our understanding of new or
novel sentences.
 Then,
the knowledge of a language
makes it possible to understand and
produce new sentences.
 All human languages permit their
speakers to form indefinitely long
sentences; creativity is a universal
property of human language.
Linguistic competence
 How
you use this knowledge in
actual speech production and
comprehension is linguistic
performance.
Slips of the tongue
 When
we speak, we usually wish to
convey some message. At some
stage in the act of producing speech,
we must organize our thoughts into
strings of words. Sometimes the
message is garbled. We may
stammer, or pause, or produce slips
of tongue.
 For
the most part, linguistic
knowledge is not conscious
knowledge. The linguistic system is
learned subconsciously with no
awareness that rules are being
learned. This knowledge represents
a complex cognitive system.
Descriptive Grammar

The grammar is the knowledge speakers have
about the units and rules of their language—rules
for combining sounds into words (called
phonology), rules of word formation (called
morphology), rules for combining words into
phrases and phrases into sentences (called
semantics). It does not tell you how you should
speak; it describes your basic linguistic
knowledge. It explains how it is possible for you
to speak and understand and make judgments
about well-formedness, and it tells what you
know about the sounds, words, phrases, and
sentences of your language.
Prescriptive grammars
 Prescriptive
grammars such as
Lowth’s are different from the
descriptive grammars we have been
discussing. Their goal is not to
describe the rules people know, but
to tell them what rules they should
follow.
 It
is undeniable that the standard
dialect may indeed be a better
dialect for someone wishing to obtain
a particular job or achieve a position
of social prestige.
Universal Grammar
 The
more linguists explore the
intricacies of human language, the
more evidence accumulates to
support Chomsky’s view that there is
a Universal Grammar that is part of
the biological endowed human
language faculty. We can think of UG
as the blueprint that all languages
follow that forms part of the child’s
innate capacity for language learning.
Linguist theory
A major aim of linguistic theory is to
discover the nature of UG. It shed light on
the nature of human language.
 Linguistic theory is concerned not only
with describing the knowledge that an
adult speaker has of his or her language,
but also with explaining how this
knowledge is acquired.

Teaching grammars
 Teaching
grammars can be helpful to
people who do not speak the
standard or prestige dialect, but find
it would be advantageous socially
and economically to do so. Teaching
grammars assume that the student
already knows one language and
compares the grammar of the target
language with the grammar of the
native language.
 Children
can acquire any language
they are exposed to with comparable
ease and even though each of these
languages has its own peculiar
characteristics, children learn them
all in very much the same way.
 The
child’s inexorable path to adult
linguistic knowledge and the
uniformity of acquisition process
point to
Mechanism of language acquisition
 Do
children learn through imitation?
 Imitation cannot account for another
important phenomenon: children
who are unable to speak for
neurological or physiological reasons
learn the language spoken to them
and understand it.
Language acquisition (children)
 Children
acquire a system of rules
that enables them to construct and
understand sentences, most of which
they have never produced or heard
before. Children, like adults, are
creative in their use of language.
Do children learn through
reinforcement?
 In
the behaviorist tradition, is that
children learn to produce correct
(grammatical) sentences because
they are positively reinforced when
they say something right and
negatively reinforced when they say
something wrong.
 In
fact, attempts to correct a child’s
language are doomed to failure.
Children do not know what they are
doing wrong and are unable to make
corrections even when they are
pointed out.
Do children learn language through
analogy?
 It
has also been suggested that
children put words together to form
phrases and sentences by analogy,
by hearing a sentence and using it as
a sample to form other sentences.
 In
the connectionist model, no
grammatical rules are stored
anywhere. Linguistic knowledge,
such as knowledge of the past tense,
is represented by a set of neuron-like
connections between different
phonological forms.

As a model of language acquisition,
connectionism faces some serious
challenges. The model assumes that the
language of the child’s environment has
very specific properties. Another problem
is that rules such as formation of past
tense cannot be based on phonological
form alone but must also be sensitive to
information in the lexicon.
Do children learn through
structured input?
 Another
suggestion is that children
are able to learn language because
adults speak to them in a special
“simplified” language sometimes
called motherese, or child-directed
speech (baby talk). This hypothesis
places a lot of emphasis on the role
of the environment in facilitating
language acquisition.
 The
adults adjusts his language to
the child’s increasing linguistic
sophistication. The exaggerated
intonation and other properties of
motherese may be useful for getting
a child’s attention and holding it, but
it is not a driving force behind
language development.
 Analogy,
imitation, and
reinforcement cannot account for
language development because they
are based on the implicit or explicit
assumption that what the child
acquires is a set of acquisition or
forms rather than a set of
grammatical rules.
 Theories
that assume that acquisition
depends on a specially structured
input also place too much emphasis
on the environment rather than on
the grammar-making abilities of the
child.
Children construct grammars.
 Language
acquisition is a creative
process. Children are not given
explicit information about the rules,
by either instruction or correction.
They must somehow extract the
rules of the grammar from the
language they hear around them,
and their linguistic environment does
not need to be special in any way for
them to do this.

Children are part of the innate blueprint
for language that children use to construct
the grammar of their language. The
answer is that children acquire a complex
grammar quickly and easily without any
particular help beyond exposure to the
language because they do not start from
scratch. UG helps them to extract the
rules of their language and to avoid many
grammatical errors.
 The
innateness hypothesis also
predicts that all languages will
conform to the principles of UG. But
there is little doubt that human
languages conform to abstract
universal principles and that human
brain is specially equipped for
acquisition of human language
grammars.
Stages in Language Acquisition
 Children’s
early utterances may not
look exactly like adult sentences, but
child language is not just a
degenerate form of adult language.
The words and sentences that the
child produces at each stage of
development conform to the set of
grammatical rules he has developed
to that point.
 The
shaping by the linguistic
environment that we see in
perception also occurs in the speech
the infant is producing. At around
six months, the infant begins to
babble. The sounds produced in this
period include many sounds that do
not occur in the language of the
household. However, babbling is not
linguistic chaos.

Gradually, the child’s babbles come to
conclude only those sounds and sound
combinations that occur in the target
language. Babbles begin to sound like
words, although they may not have any
specific meaning attached to them. At
this point adults can distinguish the
babbles of an English-babbling infant from
those of an infant babbling in other
languages.
 Babbling
illustrates the readiness of
the human mind to respond to
linguistic input from a very early
stage. During the babbling stage,
the intonation contours produced by
hearing infants begin to resemble the
intonation contours of sentences
spoken by adults.

The generally accepted view is that
humans are born with a predisposition to
discover the units that serve to express
linguistic meanings, and that at a
genetically specified stage in neural
development, the infant will begin to
produce these units—sounds or gestures—
depending on the language input in
language acquisition.
 The
“babbling as language acquisition”
hypothesis is supported by recent
neurological studies that link
babbling to the language centers of
the left hemisphere, also providing
further evidence that the brain
specializes for language functions at
a very early age.
First words
 Some
time after the age of one,
children begin to use repeatedly the
same string of sounds to mean the
same thing. At this stage children
realize the sounds are related to
meanings. They have produced their
first true words.
 Most
children go through a stage in
which their utterances consist of only
one word. This is called the
holophrastic stage because these
one-word utterances seem to convey
a more complex message.
 Children’s
early pronunciations are
not haphazard, however. The
phonological substitutions are rulegoverned. Children do not create
bizarre or whimsical rules. Their
rules conform to the possibilities
made available by UG.
 The
child’s acquisition of morphology
provides the clearest evidence of rule
learning. Children’s errors in
morphology reveal that the child
acquires the regular rules of the
grammar and overgeneralizes them.
This overgeneralization occurs when
children treat irregular verbs and
nouns as if they were regular.
 When
children are still in the
holophrastic stage, adults listening to
one-word utterances often feel that
the child is trying to convey a more
complex message.
 Around
the time of their second
birthday, children begin to put words
together. At first these utterances
appear to be strings of two of the
child’s earlier holophrastic utterances,
each word with its own single-pitch
contour. Soon, they begin to form
actual two-word sentences with clear
syntactic and semantic relations.
 The
intonation contour of the two
words extends over the whole
utterances rather than being
separated by a pause between the
two words.
 Telegraphic
speech is also very good
evidence against the hypothesis that
children learn sentences by imitation.
Adults—even those speaking
motherese –do not drop function
words when they speak to children.
 By
the age of 3, most children are
consistent in their use of function
morphemes. Moreover, they have
begun to produce and understand
complex structures, including
coordinated sentences and
embedded sentences of various kinds.
 It
may take a child several months or
years to master those aspects of
pragmatics that involve establishing
the reference for function
morphemes such as determiners and
pronouns.
 Though
the stages of language
development are universal, they are
shaped by the grammar of the
particular adult language the child is
acquiring.

The ability of children to form complex
rules and construct grammars of the
languages used around them in a
relatively short time is phenomenal. The
similarity of the language acquisition
stages across diverse peoples and
languages shows that children are
equipped with special abilities to know
what generalizations to look for and
 what
to ignore, and how to discover
the regularities of language.
 Children develop language the way
they develop the ability to sit up,
stand, crawl, or walk. They are not
taught to do these things. , but all
normal children begin to do them at
around the same age.
 Children
acquire some aspects of
syntax very quickly, even while they
are still in the telegraphic stage.
Most of these early developments
correspond to what we earlier
referred to as the parameters of UG.
Stages in language acquisition
 Children’s
early utterances may not
look exactly like adult sentences, but
child language is not just a
degenerate form of adult language.
The words and sentences that the
child produces at each stage of
development conform to the set of
grammatical rules he has developed
to that point.
Language acquisition
 Behaviorism:
the second language
view
** Learners receive linguistic input
from speakers in their environment,
and positive reinforcement for their
correct repetitions and imitations.
Language development is described
as the acquisition of a set of habits.

For the behaviorist, errors are seen as first
language habits interfering with the
acquisition of second language habits.
This psychological learning theory has
often been linked to the contrastive
analysis hypothesis (CAH). The CAH
predicts that where there are similarities
between the two languages, the learner
will acquire target language structures
with ease; where there are differences,
the learner will have difficulty.
Cognitive theory: a new
psychological approach
 Cognitive
psychologists tend to see
second language acquisition as the
building up of knowledge systems
that can eventually be called on
automatically for speaking and
understanding.
 At
first, learners have to pay
attention to any aspect of the
language which they are trying to
understand or produce. Gradually,
through experience and practice,
learners become able to use certain
parts of their knowledge so quickly
and automatically that they are not
even aware that they are doing it.
Creative construction theory
 Learners
are thought to ‘construct’
internal representations as ‘mental
pictures’ of the target language. The
internal representations are thought
to develop, in predictable stages, in
the direction of the full second
language system.
 Acquisition
takes place internally as
learners read and hear samples of
the language that they understand.
The speech and writing which the
learner eventually produces is seen
as an outcome of the learning
process rather than the cause of
learning as a necessary step in
learning.
Explaining first language
acquisition

These descriptions of language
development from infancy through the
early school years show that we have
considerable knowledge of what children
learn in their early language development.
Three main theoretical positions have
been advanced to explain it: behaviorist,
innatist, and interactional/developmental
perspectives(Lightbown & Spada, 2006).
The behaviorist perspective: Say
what I say
 With
regard to language learning,
the best-known proponent of this
psychological theory was B.F. Skinner.
According to this view, the quality
and quantity of the language the
child hears, as well as the
consistency of the reinforcement
offered by others in the environment,
would shape the child’s language
behavior.
This theory gives great importance to the
environment as the source of everything
the child needs to learn.
 Behaviorism seems to offer a reasonable
way of understanding how children learn
some of the regular and routine aspects of
language, especially at the earliest stages.
However, children who do little overt
imitation acquire language as fully and
rapidly as those who imitate a lot.

The innatist perspective: It’s all in
your mind
 Noam
Chomsky is one of the most
influential figures in linguistics, and
his ideas about how language is
acquired and how it is stored in the
mind sparked a revolution in many
aspects of linguistics and psychology,
including the study of language
acquisition.
A
central part of his thinking is that
all human languages are
fundamentally innate and that the
same universal principles underlie all
of them. He argued that children are
biologically programmed for
language and that language develops
in the child in just the same way that
other biological functions develop.
 For
Chomsky, language acquisition is
very similar. The environment
makes only a basic contribution—in
this case, the availability of people
who speak to the child. The child or
the child’s biological endowment will
do the rest.
 He
hypothesized that children are
born with a specific innate ability to
discover for themselves the
underlying rules of a language
system on the basis of the samples
of a natural language they are
exposed to. This innate endowment
was seen as a sort of template,
containing the principles that are
universal to all human languages.

The innatist perspective emphasizes the
fact that all children successfully acquire
their native language. Even children with
very limited cognitive ability develop quite
complex language systems if they are
brought up in environments in which
people interact with them. This is seen as
support for the hypothesis that language
is somehow separate from other aspects
of cognitive development and may depend
on a specific module of the brain.
The Critical Period Hypothesis
 Chomsky’s
ideas are often linked to
the critical period hypothesis (CPH) –
the hypothesis that animals,
including humans, are genetically
programmed to acquire certain kinds
of knowledge and skill at specific
times in life. Beyond those ‘critical
periods’, it is either difficult or
impossible to acquire those skills.
 With
regard to language, the CPH
suggests that children who are not
given access to language in infancy
and early childhood will never
acquire language if these
deprivations go on for too long.
 It
is difficult to find evidence for or
against the CPH, since nearly all
children are exposed to language at
an early age. However, history has
documented a few ‘natural
experiments’ where children have
been deprived of contact with
language. Two of the most famous
cases are those of Victor and Genie.
 Although
Victor and Genie appear to
provide evidence in support of the
CPH, it is difficult to argue that the
hypothesis is confirmed on the basis
of evidence from such unusual cases.
 The
innatist perspective is thus
partly based on evidence for a critical
period. It is also seen as an
explanation for ‘the logical problem
of language acquisition’.
Interactionalist/developmental
perspectives: learning from inside
and out

Developmental psychologists and
psycholinguists have focused on the
interplay between the innate learning
ability of children and the environment in
which they develop. These researchers
attribute considerably more importance to
the environment than the innatist do even
though they also recognize a powerful
learning mechanism in the human brain.
 They
see language acquisition as
similar to and influenced by the
acquisition of other kinds of skill and
knowledge, rather than as something
that is different from and largely
independent of the child’s experience
and cognitive development.
Piaget and Vygotsky
 It
is easy to see from this how
children’s cognitive development
would partly determine how they use
language. The developing cognitive
understanding is built on the
interaction between the child and the
things that can be observed.
 For
Piaget, language can be used to
represent knowledge that children
have acquired through physical
interaction with the environment.
 For
Vygotsky (1978), He concluded
that language develops primarily
from social interaction. He argued
that in a supportive interactive
environment, children are able to
advance to a higher level of
knowledge and performance.
 Piaget
saw language as a symbol
system that could be used to express
knowledge acquired through
interaction with the physical world.
For Vygotsky, thought was
essentially internalized speech, and
speech emerged in social interaction.
 Five
central hypotheses constitute
his ‘monitor model’: (1) the
acquisition-learning hypothesis; (2)
the monitor hypothesis; (3) the
natural order hypothesis; (4) the
input hypothesis; and (5) the
affective filter hypothesis.
1. The acquisition-learning
hypothesis

According to Krashen, there are two ways
for adult second language learners to
approach learning a second language:
they may ‘acquire’ it or they may ‘learn’ it.
Essentially, he says, we acquire as we
engage in meaningful interaction in the
second language, in much the same way
that children pick up their up their first
language—with no attention to form.
 We
learn, on the other hand, via a
conscious process of study and
attention to form and error
correction, most typically in formal
language classrooms.
2. The monitor hypothesis
 Krashen
has specified three
conditions necessary for monitor use:
sufficient time, focus on form, and
knowing the rules. The learned
system, on the other hand, acts only
as an editor or ‘monitor’, making
minor changes and polishing what
the acquired system has produced.
3. The natural order hypothesis
 This
hypothesis states that we
acquire the rules of a language in a
predictable sequence—some rules
are acquired early while others are
acquired late.
4. The input hypothesis
 Krashen
asserts that we acquire
language in only one way—by
receiving comprehensive input, that
is, by understanding messages. If
the input contains forms and
structures just beyond the learners’
current level of competence in the
language, then both comprehension
and acquisition will occur.
5. The affective filter hypothesis

The ‘affective filter’ is an imaginary barrier
which prevents learners from using input
which is available in the environment.
Depending on the learner’s state of mind
or disposition, the filter limits what is
noticed and what is acquired. The filter
will be ‘up or operating when the learner is
stressed, self-conscious, or unmotivated.
It will be ‘down’ when the learner is
relaxed and motivated.
The Critical Period Hypothesis

Lenneberg observed that this ability to
develop normal behaviors and knowledge
in a variety of environments does not
continue indefinitely and that children who
have never learned language cannot
return to normal if these deprivations go
on for too long. He argued that the
language acquisition device, like other
biological functions, works successfully
only when it is stimulated at the right time.
A
time is referred to as the ‘critical
period’. There are two versions of
the CPH. The strong version is that
children must acquire their first
language by puberty or they will
never be able to learn from
subsequent exposure. The weak
version is that language learning will
be more difficult and incomplete
after puberty.

CPH suggests that there is a time in
human development when the brain is
predisposed for success in language
learning. Developmental changes in the
brain change the nature of second
language acquisition. According to this
view, language learning which occurs after
the end of the critical period may not be
based on the innate structures believed to
contribute to first language acquisition or
SLA in early childhood.
 Rather,
older learners depend on
more general learning abilities—the
same ones they might use to learn
other kinds of skills or information.
It is argued that these general
learning abilities are not as
successful for language learning as
the more specific, innate capacities
which are available to the young
child.
 The
critical period hypothesis has
been challenged in recent years from
several different points of view. At
least in the early stages of second
language development, older
learners are more efficient than
younger learners.
 In
neurological research, it has not
been demonstrated that the
hypothesized changes take place in
the brain at puberty. Much research
seems rather to suggest that the
brains of very young infants already
have some areas which are
specialized for processing language.
 These
studies have concluded that
older learners almost inevitably have
a noticeable ‘foreign accent’. Mark
Patkowski studied the effect of age
on the acquisition of features of a
second language other than accent.
Those who had begun learning their
second language before the age of
15 could ever achieve full, native-like
mastery of that language.
 Patkowski
found that age of
acquisition is a very important factor
in setting limits on the development
of native-like mastery of a second
language and that this limitation
does not apply only to accent. These
results gave added support to the
critical period hypothesis for SLA.
 Experience
and research have shown
that native-like mastery of the
spoken language is difficult to attain
by older learners.
Caretaker talk
 In
English, caretaker talk involves a
slower rate of speech, higher pitch,
more varied intonation, shorter,
simpler sentence of patterns,
frequent repetition, and paraphrase.
 Furthermore, topics of conversation
are often limited to the child’s
immediate environment, the ‘here
and now’.
Linguistic competence
 Linguistic
competence is best
described as internalized knowledge
of a language.
 Linguistic performance is the
external evidence of language
competence, and is usage on
particular occasions when factors
other than linguistic competence
may affect its form.
What is language?
 Language
is the source of human life
and power. When you know a
language, you can speak and be
understood by others who know that
language. This means you have the
capacity to produce sounds that
signify certain meanings and to
understand or interpret the sounds
produced by others.
1. The relationship between form and
meaning is arbitrary.
 Knowledge of a language enables you to
combine words to form phrases, and
phrases to form sentences. Knowing a
language means being able to produce
new sentences never spoken before and
to understand sentences never heard
before. The linguist Noam Chomsky
refers to this ability as part of the
creative aspect of language use.

All human languages permit their speakers
to form indefinitely long sentences;
creativity is a universal property of human
language.
 It is a difference between what you know,
which is your linguistic competence, and
how you use this knowledge in actual
speech production and comprehension,
which is your linguistic perforamnce.

Slips of the tongue
 When
we speak, we usually wish to
convey some message. At some
stage in the act of producing speech,
we must organize our thoughts into
strings of words. Sometimes the
message is garbled. We may
stammer, or pause, or produce slips
of the tongue.
 For
the most part, linguistic
knowledge is not conscious
knowledge. The linguistic system—
the sounds, structures, meanings,
words, and the rules for putting
them all together—is learned
subconsciously with no awareness
that rules are being learned.
What is grammar?
 Descriptive
grammar: It does not tell
you how you should speak; it
describes your basic linguistic
knowledge. It explains how it is
possible for you to speak and
understand, and it tells you what you
know about the sounds, words,
phrases, and sentences of your
language.
Prescriptive grammars
 The
linguists wished to prescribe
rather than describe the rules of
grammar, which gave rise to the
writing of prescriptive grammars.
Language universals
 The
grammar includes everything
speakers know about their
language—the sound system, called
phonology; the system of meanings,
called semantics; the rules of word
formation, called morphology; and
the rules of sentence formation,
called syntax. Lexicon is the
vocabulary of words.
The laws of a language representing the
universal properties of all languages
constitute a universal grammar.
 Chmosky, following the lead of the early
rationalist philosophers, proposed that
human beings are born with an innate
“blueprint” for language , what we referred
to as Universal Grmmar.

 Children
are able to acquire language
as quickly and effortlessly as they do
because they do not have to figure
out all the rules of their language—
the laws of language—are part of
their biological endowment.
Animal languages
 If
language is viewed only as a
system of communication, then
many species communicate.
Humans also use systems other than
language to relate to each other and
to send and receive messages, like
so-called body language.
Talking parrots
 Language
is a system that relates
sounds or gestures to meanings.
Talking birds such as parrots and
mynah birds are capable of faithfully
reproducing words and phrases of
human language that they have
heard, but their utterances carry no
meaning.
The birds and the bees
 Most
animals possess some kind of
“signaling” communication system.
The imitative sounds of talking birds
have little in common with human
language, but the calls and songs of
many species of birds do have a
communicative function, and they
resemble human languages in that
they may be “dialects” within the
same species.
 Birdcalls
and songs are
fundamentally different kinds of
communicative systems. The kinds
of messages that can be conveyed
are limited, and messages are
stimulus controlled.
 Birdcalls
(consisting of one or more
short notes) convey messages
associated with the immediate
environment, such as danger,
feeding, nesting, flocking, and so on.
Bird songs (more complex patterns
of notes) are used to stake out
territory and to attract mates.
 The
bees’ dance is an effective
system of communication for bees.
It is capable, in principle, of infinitely
many different messages, like
human languages; but unlike human
language, the system is confined to a
single subject—food source.
 The
number of repetitions per minute
of the basic pattern in the tailwagging dance indicates the precise
distance; the slower the repetition
rate, the longer the distance.
Language and thought
 Human
beings are very much at the
mercy of the particular language
which has become the medium of
expression for their society… we see
and hear and otherwise experience
very largely as we do because the
language habits of our community
predispose certain choices of
interpretation.
 Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis strong
claims that the background linguistic
system of each language is itself the
shaper of ideas, the program and
guide for the individual’s mental
activity, for his analysis of
impressions, for his synthesis of his
mental stock in trade.
 Linguistic
determinism holds that the
language we speak determines how
we perceive and think about the
world. Language acts like a filter on
reality.
 Linguistic
relativism hold that
different languages encode different
categories and that speakers of
different languages think about the
world in different ways.
 People’s
thoughts and perceptions
are not determined by the worlds
and structures of their languages.
Similarly, although languages differ
in their color words, speakers can
readily perceive colors that are not
named in their language.
 Politicians
and marketers certainly
believe that language can influence
our thoughts and values. Politically
correct (PC) language also reflects
the idea that language can influence
thought. Many people believe that
by changing the way we talk, we can
change the way we think.
Content words and function words
 Languages
make an important
distinction between two kinds of
words—content words and function
words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives,
and adverbs are the content words.
 Content words are sometimes called
the open class words because we can
and regularly do add new words to
these classes.
Function words
 There
are other classes of words that
do not have clear lexical meaning or
obvious concepts associated with
them, including conjunctions,
prepositions, the articles, and
pronouns. These kinds of words are
called function words because they
have a grammatical function.
Function words are called closed
class words.
Morphemes: The minimal units of
meaning
 The
linguistic term for the most
elemental unit of grammatical form
is morpheme. The word is derived
from the Greek word morphe,
meaning “form.” Im-possible: There
are two morphemes.
A
morpheme is an arbitrary unit of a
sound and a meaning that cannot be
further analyzed. Every word in
every language is composed of one
or more morphemes.
 With
respect to words, linguistic
creativity means that not only can
we understand words that we have
never heard before, but we can also
create new words.
Bound and Free Morphemes
 Our
morphological knowledge has
two components: knowledge of the
individual morphemes and
knowledge of the rules that combine
them. One of the things we know
about particular morphemes is
whether they can stand alone or
whether they must be attached to a
host morpheme.
 Affixes,
suffixes and prefixes are
parts of the words. They are bound
morphemes.
Word coinage
 New
words may be added to the
vocabulary of a language by
derivational processes. New words
also enter a language in a variety of
other ways. Ex. Keenex from the
words clean and Jell-O from gel.
Greek roots borrowed into English
have also provided a means for
coining new words.
Compounds
 Two
or more words may be joined to
form new, compound words. The
kinds of combinations that occur in
English are nearly limitless.
Acronyms
 Acronyms
are words derived from
the initials of several words. Ex.
NASA from National Aeronautics and
Space Agency, UNESCO from United
Nations Educational, Scientific, and
Cultural Organization.
Blends
 Two
words may be combined to
produce blends. Blends are similar
to compounds but parts of the words
that are combined are deleted. Ex.
Smog from smoke+fog
 Motel from motor + hotel
Inflectional morphemes
 Function
words like to, it, and be are
free morphemes. Many languages,
including English, also have bound
morphemes that have a strictly
grammatical function. They mark
properties such as tense, number,
gender, case, and so forth. Such
bound morphemes are called
inflectional morphemes.
 Inflectional
morphemes in English
typically follow derivational
morphemes. Commit+ment+s
 Polymorphemic words are words with
more than one morpheme.
Inflectional morphemes are
determined by the rules of syntax.
They are added to complete words.
Derivational morphemes
 Derivational
morphemes, when
added to a root or stem, may change
the syntactic word class and/or the
meaning of the word. Ex. Boy+ish
means adding –ish to the noun boy
derives an adjective.
 Function
words and bound
inflectional morphemes are inserted
into sentences according to the
syntactic structure.
Brain and Language
 The
brain is the most complex organ
of the body. It lies under the skull
and consists of approximately 10
billion nerve cells (neurons) and
billions of fibers that interconnect
them.
 The
surface of the brain is the cortex,
often called “gray matter”, consisting
of billions of neurons. Beneath the
cortex is the white matter, which
consists of connecting fibers.
 The
cortex is the decision-making
organ of the body. It receives
messages from all the sensory
organs, and it initiates all voluntary
actions. It is “the seat of all which is
exclusively human in the mind” and
the storehouse of our memories.
 Somewhere
in this gray matter
resides the grammar that represents
our knowledge of language.
 The
left hemisphere supervises the
right side of the body, and the right
hemisphere supervises the left side.
If you point with your right hand, it
is the left hemisphere that controls
your action, and conversely. This is
referred to as contralateral brain
function.
Broca’s area

Language was the first cognitive model to
be localized in the brain via scientific
evidence. In 1864 Paul Broca related
language specifically to the left side of the
brain. He stated that we speak with the
left hemisphere. He based his finding on
the observation that damage to the front
part of the left hemisphere resulted in loss
of speech, whereas damage to the right
side did not.
Wernicke’s area
 Unlike
Broca’s patients, those with
Wernicke’s aphasia spoke fluently
with good intonation and
pronunciation, but with numerous
instances of lexical errors ( word
substituitions), often producing
jardon and nonsense words. They
also had difficulty in comprehending
speech.
 MRI
and PET studies reaffirm the
lateralization of language.
 It appears that even from birth the
human brain is predisposed to
specialize for language in the left
hemisphere since language usually
does not develop normally in children
with early left-hemisphere brain
lesions.
Split brains
 Split-brain
patients also provide
evidence for language lateralization
for understanding brain functions.
When the brain is surgically split,
certain information from the left side
of the body is received only by the
right side of the brain, and vice versa.
 Studies
of split-brain patients reveal
that in the human brain, as in the
monkey brain, the two hemispheres
are distinct. Moreover, the messages
sent to the two sides of the brain
result in different responses,
depending on which side receives the
message.
 In
a split-brain patient, information
in the right hemisphere is
inaccessible to the left hemisphere.

Various experiments of this sort have
provided information on the different
capabilities of the two halves. The right
brain does better than the left in pattern
matching tasks, in recognizing faces, and
in spatial orientation. The left hemisphere
is superior for language, for rhythmic
perception, for temporal-order judgments,
and for mathematical thinking.
 Because
of the crucial endowment of
the left hemisphere for language,
written material delivered to the
right hemisphere cannot be read if
the brain is split, because the
information cannot be transferred to
the left hemisphere.
Dichotic listening
 Dichotic
listening is an experimental
technique that uses auditory signals
to observe the behavior of the
individual hemispheres of the human
brain.
Language and brain development
 There
is an intimate connection
between language and the brain.
Specific areas of the brain are
devoted to language, and injury to
these areas disrupts language. In
the young child, injury to or removal
of the left hemisphere has severe
consequences for language
development.
The critical period
 Children
who do not receive linguistic
input during their formative years do
not achieve nativelike grammatical
competence. Behavioral tests and
brain imaging studies show that late
exposure to language alters the
fundamental organization of the
brain for language.
The Critical Age Hypothesis
 It
is a part of the biological basis of
language and states that the ability
to learn a native language develops
within a fixed period, from birth to
puberty. During this critical period,
language acquisition proceeds easily,
swiftly, and without external
intervention.
 Tests
of lateralization (dichotic
listening and ERP) showed that
Genie’s language was lateralized to
the right hemisphere, even though
the left hemisphere is normal
predisposed for language . The
evidence suggests that the critical
period is for the acquisition of certain
aspects of language, but not all
aspects.
A Critical Period for Bird Songs
 Bird
songs lack certain fundamental
characteristics of human language
such as discrete sounds and
creativity. The bird species for which
a critical period has been observed
are those whose “language”
acquisition is guided by something
akin to the innate human language
ability.
 Some
bird species show no critical
period. The cuckoo sings a fully
developed song even if it never hears
another cuckoo sing. These
communicative messages are
entirely innate. For other species,
songs appear to be completely
learned.
 Apparently,
the basic nature of the
songs of the some species is present
from birth, which means that it is
biologically determined.
The Evolution of Language
 The
relation between the continued
use of language and the
development of the brain has no
doubt been far more important. If
the human brain is structured and
wired for the acquisition and use of
language, how and when did this
development occur? It seems to have
arisen with the origin of the species.
God’s gift to mankind
 Although
myths, customs, and
superstitions do not tell us very
much about language origin, they do
tell us about the importance ascribed
to language.
 The
belief that all languages
originated from a single source—the
monogenetic theory of language
origin—is found not only in the Tower
of Babel story in Genesis, but also in
a similar legend of the Toltecs, early
inhabitants of Mexico, and in the
myths of other peoples as well.
The development of language in
the species
 Some
people on both sides of the
discontinuity view believe that
language is species specific.
 According to this hypothesis, the
development of language is linked to
the evolutionary development of the
speech production and perception
apparatus. This would be
accompanied by changes in the brain
 and
the nervous system toward
greater complexity.
 The existence of mynah birds and
parrots is evidence that this step is
insufficient to explain the origin of
language, because these creatures
have the ability to imitate human
speech, but not the ability to acquire
language.
 Lateralization
certainly makes
greater specialization possible.
Research conducted with birds and
monkeys, however, shows that
lateralization is not unique to the
human brain.
 The
search for these answers goes
on and provides new insights into the
nature of language and the nature of
the human brain.
 Language
most likely evolved with
the human species, possibly in
stages, possibly in one giant leap.
Research by linguists, evolutionary
biologists, and neurologists support
this view and the view that from the
outset the human animal was
genetically equipped to learn
language.
 Studies
of the evolutionary
development of the brain provide
some evidence for physiological and
anatomic preconditions for language
development.
Language in society
 Idiolect:
The unique characteristics
of the language of an individual
speaker are referred to as the
speaker’s idiolect. English may be
said to consist of more than 450
million idiolects.
 When
there are systematic
differences in the way different
groups speak a language, we say
that each group speaks a dialect of
that language. Dialects are mutually
intelligible forms of a language that
differ in systematic ways.
A
dialect is not an inferior or
degraded form of a language, and
logically could not be so because a
language is a collection of dialects.
 Dialects
and languages reflect the
underlying rule systems—grammars
that differ from one another. In truth,
dialects and language exist on a
continuum.
 It
is not surprising that a clear-cut
distinction between language and
dialect has evaded linguistic scholars.
We shall, however, use the rule-ofthumb definition and refer to dialects
of one language as mutually
intelligible versions of the same basic
grammar, with systematic differences
among them.
Regional dialects
 Dialect
diversity develops when
people are separated geographically
and socially. The change that occur
in the language spoken in one area
or group do not necessarily spread to
another.
 Dialect
differences tend to increase
proportionately to the degree of
communicative isolation of the
groups.
 Changes
in the grammar do not take
place all at once in a speech
community. They occur gradually,
often originating in one region and
spreading slowly to others, and often
over the life spans of several
generations of speakers.
Accents
 Regional
phonological or phonetic
distinctions are often referred to as
different accents. Thus, accent
refers to the characteristics of speech
that convey information about the
speaker’s dialect, which may reveal
in what country or in what part of
the country the speaker grew up.
 By
the time of the American
Revolution, there were three major
dialect areas in the British colonies:
the Northern dialect spoken in New
England and around the Hudson
River; the Midland dialect spoken in
Pennsylvania; and the Southern
dialect.
 How
regional dialects develop is
illustrated by changes in the
pronunciation of words with an r.
Dialect Atlases
 Dialect
atlases: Dialect differences
are geographically plotted. The
dialectologists who created the map
noted the places where speakers use
one word or another word for the
same item. For example, 「krik」and
「krIk」for the creek whose
differentiation based on the variation
in pronunciation of the same word
forms dialect areas.
Isogloss
 Isogloss:
A line drawn on the map to
separate the areas is called an
isogloss. When you cross an isogloss,
you are passing from one dialect
area to another.

The Dictionary of American Regional
English (DARE) is a reference tool, whose
aim is not to prescribe how Americans
should speak or even to describe the
language we use generally, the “standard”
language. Instead, it seeks to document
the varieties of English that are not found
everywhere in the United States—those
words, pronunciations, and phrases that
vary from one region to another.
 Despite
such differences, we are still
able to understand speakers of other
English dialects. Although regional
dialects differ in pronunciation,
vocabulary, and syntactic rules, the
differences are minor when
compared with the totality of the
grammar.
 Dialects
typically share most rules
and vocabulary, which explains why
the dialects of a language are
mutually intelligible.
Social dialects
 It
is therefore not surprising that
different dialects of a language
evolve within social groups.
Communication within a particular
group is free and unconstrained.
Sociolinguistic analysis
 Speakers
from different
socioeconomic classes often display
systematic speech differences, even
when region and ethnicity are not
factors. These social-class dialects
differ from other dialects in that
sociolinguistic variables, while still
systematic, are often statistical in
nature.
Pidgins and Creoles

A lingua franca is typically a language with
a broad base of native speakers, likely to
be used and learned by persons, whose
native language is in the same language
family. Often in history, however, traders
and missionaries from one part of the
world have visited and attempted to
communicate with peoples residing in
another distant part.
 Instead,
the two groups use their
native languages as a basis for a
rudimentary language for few lexical
items and less complex grammatical
rules. Such a “marginal language” is
called a pidgin. Tok Pisin is an
English-based pidgin that is widely
used in Papua New Guinea.
 The
variety of Tok Pisin used as a
primary language in urban centers is
more highly developed and more
complex than the Tok Pisin used as a
lingua franca in remote areas.
Lingua Francas
 One
language is often used by
common agreement. Such a
language is called a lingua franca.
English has been called “ the lingua
franca of the whole world. French, at
one time, was the lingua franca of
diplomacy. Latin was a lingua franca
of the Roman Empire and of western
Christendom for a millennium.
 Hindi
and Urdu are the lingua francas
of India and Pakistan.
Styles
 Most
speakers of a language speak
one way with friends, another on a
job interview or presenting a report
in class, another talking to small
children, another with their parents,
and so on. These “situation dialects”
are called styles, or registers.
Slang
 Slang
has been defined as “one of
those things that everybody can
recognize and nobody can define.”
The use of slang or colloquial
language, introduces many new
words into the language by
recombining old words into new
meanings.