The Language Instinct

Chapter 9 Baby Born Talking-Describes Heaven

Pinker, S. (2007). The Language Instinct: How the mind creates Language. New York: Harper Perennial. Harper Collins.

All infants come into the world with linguistic skills Peter Fimas & Peter Jusczyk Experiement (p.266-67) 1 month old baby They put a switch inside a rubber nipple and hooked it up to a tape recorder. The tape played when the baby sucked. Sound: ba ba ba baby showed boredom by sucking slowly Sound: pa pa pa- baby sucked more vigorously to hear more syllables. This is a 6th sense: speech perception, rather than just hearing the syllables as a raw sound: two ba's differ as much as a ba and a pa, but are both heard as ba by adults.

Infants come equipped with these skills; they do not learn them by listening to their parents. English learning infants under the age of 6 months can distinguish phonemes in different languages that adults can not. Infants may enter the world with knowledge of the mother's language. Study has shown that 4 day old French babies suck harder to hear French than Russian. Babies even prefer French when the consonant and vowel sounds are electronically muffled and the melody comes through; however, they are indifferent when the tapes are played backwards and the melody is distorted.

Age of baby

Language Development
Able to distinguish phonemes used in different language that adults are unable to distinguish. Beginning to lump together the distinct sounds that their language collapses into a single phoneme, while continuing to discriminate distinct ones that their language keeps seperate. They can no longer distinguish different phonemes of languages. They begin to sort the sounds directly, tuning their speech analysis module to deliver the phonemes used in their language. This module serves as the front end of the system that learns words and grammar. Begin to understand words and produce them. Words are usually produced in isolation- a one word stage Language takes off and vocabulary growth jumps to the new-word-every-two-hours minimum rate that the child will maintain until adolescence. Language booms into fluent grammatical conversation. Sentence length increases steadily and the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the 1,000's before the 3rd birthday.

Under 6 months 6 months

10 months Around 1st birthday

18 months Between the late 2's and mid 3's

Age of baby

Speech Production System

Vocal tract like a nonhuman mammal. The larynx comes up like a periscope and engages the nasal passage, forcing the infant to breathe through the nose and making it anatomically possible to drink and breathe at the same time. The larynz has descended deep into the throat, opening up the cavity behind the tongue that allows the tongue to move forwards and backwards and produce the variety of voewl sounds used by adults. Begin to play with sound, rather than using them to express their physical and emotional states, and their sequences of click, hums, glides, trills, hisses, ans smacks begin to babble in real syllables. The sounds are the same in all languages. Vary their syllables like neh-nee, da-dee, and mehneh, and produce gibberish.

newborn
By 3 months 5-7 months By end of 1st year

By listening to their own babbling, babies in effect write their own instruction manual; they learn how much to move muscle in which way to make which change in sound. This is a prerequisite to duplicating the speech of their parents.

Normal children can differ by a year or more in their rate of language development, though the stages they pass through are generally the same.

For any grammatical rule, 3 year old children obey them most of the time.

Children rarely scramble word order and, by age 3, come to supply most inflections and function words in sentences that require them.

Errors that are heard occur only 0.1% - 8% of the opportunities for making them; more than 90% of the time, the child is on target.

The Auxiliary System (words like can, should, must, be, have and do) 24 billion billion logical possible combinations In s study, Stromswold found no errors among 66,000 sentences in which they could have occurred A 3 year old is grammatically correct in quality, not just quantity.

Children acquire free word order: SOV and VSO orders, rich systems of case and agreement, strings of agglutinated suffixes, negative case marking, or whatever else language throws at them. Errors often follow the logic of grammar.

Most conspicuous error is to overgeneralize

Ex. putting an -s or -ed on an irregular past tense Irregular forms must be memorized and this takes time. Children are grammatical geniuses

I finded her instead of found.

Know constructions Obey rules Respect language universals Avoid many errors

Practice is important; however, grammar development does not depend on overt practice. Children learn grammar by being a naturalist, passively observing the speech of others. To become speakers children must leap into the linguistic unknown and generalize to an infinite world of as-yet-unspoken sentences. A child's grammar has an internal check and balance. They will eventually hear the word enough times to realize that it is the correct word to be used. (held instead of holded) Children are able to set up the right phrase structure of a sentence. A child knows what to focus on in decoding case and agreement inflections: a noun's inflection might depend on whether it is in subject or object position; a verb's might depend on tense, aspect, and the number, person, and gender of its subject and object.

Why aren't babies born talking?

They have to listen to themselves to learn how to work their articulators, and have to listen to their elders to learn communal phonemes, words, and phrase orders. 18 months is the age in which a child begins putting words together. Language develops as quickly as the human brain can handle it.

Chapter 10: Language Organs and Grammar Genes

A single gene is thought to disrupt grammar, but that does not mean a single gene controls grammar. The ability to converse in everyday English is what is disrupted, not the ability to learn the standard written dialect in school. Is there a language instinct? If so, it must be somewhere in the brain Studies of aphasic patients have enlightened scientists on the study of the brain. The left hemisphere of the brain is engaged by speechlike sounds, wordlike shapes, movements of the mouth, ABSTRACT LANGUAGE. Language, whether by ear and mouth or by eye and hand, is controlled in the left hemisphere of the brain. The left hemisphere handles the abstract rules and trees underlying language, the grammar and the dictionary and the anatomy of words, and not merely the sounds and the mouthings at the surface.

The body is symmetrical Why? A creature with asymmetrical design would veer off in circles. The brain is divided into maps of visual, auditory, and motor space that literally reproduce the structure of real space. The left brain controls the right space. Kinsbourne speculates that changes in the genetic instructions for building the creature resulted in a half-twist during embryonic development. Humans are by far the most adept manipulators in the animal kingdom, and we are the species that displays the strongest and most consistent limb preference. 90% of people in all societies and periods in history are right handed, and most are thought to possess one or two copies of a dominant gene that imposes the right hand. Possessors of two copies of the recessive gene develop without this strong hand bias; they turn into the rest of the right-handers, left-handers and ambidextrics. The left hemisphere controls language in 97% of right handers, but the right hemisphere controls only 19% of left handers. 68% of left handers have language in the left hemisphere or both.

Brocas Area
Is adjacent to the part of the motor-control strip dedicated to the jaws, lip, and tongue, and it was once thought that it was involved in the production of language.
Brocas aphasia: damage to the area resulting in a syndrome of slow, labored, ungrammatical speech. Implicated in grammatical processing Damage to area alone does not produce long lasting severe aphasia; however the surrounding areas must be damaged as well. Connected by a band of fibers to a second language organ, Wernickes area. Wernickes aphasia is in some ways the compliment of Brocas. The role of Brocas area in language is unclear. Perhaps the area underlies grammatical processing by converting messages in mentalese into grammatical structures and vice versa, in part by communicating via the basal ganglia with the prefrontal lobes, which subserve abstract reasoning and knowledge.

Wernickes aphasia
A symptom is that patients show few signs of comprehending the speech around them. Patients utter fluent streams of more-or-less grammatical phrases, but their speech makes no sense and is filled with neoglisms and word substitutions. Patients have consistent difficulty naming objects; they come up with related words or distortions of the correct one. A third kind of apasia: Damage to the connection between Brocaa area and Wernickes area resulting in the patient being unable to repeat sentences.

To be honestno one really knows what either Brocas area or Wernickes area is for. There are indications that these regions in the rear of the perisylvian are implicated in storing and receiving words.

Anatomy: the language sub organs within the perisylvian might be: front of the perisylvian (Brocas area), grammatical processing; rear of the perisylvian (Wernickes area and the 3 lobe junction), the sounds of words, especially nouns, and some aspects of their meaning.

We will never understand language organs and grammar genes by looking for postage stamp sized globs of brain. The computations underlying mental life are caused by the wiring of the intricate networks that make up the cortex, networks with millions of neurons, with each neuron connected to thousands of others, operating in thousandths of a second. Pinker expects the basic design of language, from X-bar syntax to phonological rules and vocabulary structure, to be uniform across the species.. The complexity of language circuitry leaves plenty of scope for quantitative variation to combine into unique linguistic profiles. Some module might be relatively stunned or hypertrophied. Some normally unconscious representation of sound or meaning or grammatical structure might be more accessible to the rest of the brain. Some connection between language circuitry and the intellect or emotions might be faster or slower.