ENG511 Treasure

Topic-134: Operating Principles

One of the most productive approaches to the question has been Slobin’s work on operating principles. We may think of operating principles as children’s preferred ways of taking in (or operating on) information. These principles have proven useful in explaining certain patterns in early child grammar. For instance, children in virtually all languages use fixed word order to create meanings, even though some languages have much freer word order than others.

Topic-135: Sensorimotor Schemata

Piaget refers to the first 2 years as the sensorimotor period of development because the schemata the child uses to organize experience are directly related to taking in sensory information and acting on it. Sensorimotor schemata include banging, sucking, and throwing. The major development that culminates near the end of the sensorimotor period is the acquisition of object permanence, the notion that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be perceived. Once object permanence is acquired, the child is no longer at the mercy of immediate stimuli but can respond on the basis of stimuli no longer present. We would certainly anticipate that developments of this magnitude would be related to the child’s language development. More specifically, we can make two predictions about child language.

Topic-136: Whole Object Bias and Taxonomic Bias

Whole object bias in developmental psychology: For example, if a child is shown and given the label "truck", the child will assume truck refers to the whole object instead of the tires, doors, colors or other parts. If a researcher points to an object while simultaneously saying a new name, children will assume that the new label refers to the whole object. Ellen Markman pioneered work in this field. Her studies suggest that even in cases where color or dynamic activities are made salient to children, they will still interpret the new word as a label for whole objects. Furthermore, infants hold a primitive theory of the physical world that is guided by three constraints on the behavior of physical bodies: objects must move as wholes, objects move independently of each other, and objects move on connected paths. It is suggested that these three constraints help guide children’s interpretations of scenes, and, in turn, explain how the whole object bias reflects the nonlinguistic status of objects.

In addition, children seem to use a taxonomic bias: they will assume that the object label is a taxonomic category rather than a name for an individual dog. For example, they will assume that dog is a label for a group of animals, not just Fido. Ordinarily, children focus on thematic relations between objects when categorizing. If given milk, a spoon, or a car, children will group each item with a cow, soup, or a stop sign, respectively.

Topic-139: The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis

Pidgins and Creoles: To understand this idea more fully, we have to make a few distinctions. A pidgin is ‘an auxiliary language that arises when speakers of several mutually unintelligible languages are in close contact’ (Bickerton, 1984, p. 173). Typically this occurs when workers from diverse countries are brought in as cheap labor in an agricultural community. Immigrant workers come to speak a simpler form of the dominant language of the area—just enough to get by. A creole occurs when the children of these immigrants acquire a pidgin as their native language. Because access to native speakers of the dominant language is usually limited, these children receive the impoverished pidgin version as their primary linguistic input. Bickerton (1983) observes that the conditions necessary to produce creoles have existed numerous times between 1500 and 1900 when various European nations developed labor-intensive agricultural economies on isolated, under populated tropical islands throughout the world. Bickerton’s studies have focused on creoles in Hawaii. Although Hawaiian contact with Europeans goes back to the 18th century, it was not until 1876 that a revision of the U.S. tariff laws led to a large influx of indentured workers to harvest Hawaiian sugar. Because Hawaiian creole developed between 1900 and 1920, it was possible for Bickerton to study the development of the creole by studying the speech of people who are still living. In particular, he examined the language of immigrants who moved to Hawaii and that of their children who were born in the first two decades of the 20th century. The speech of pidgin speakers was rudimentary. In many cases, there was no recognizable syntax, and the language resembled a linguistic free-for-all. Some speakers used one word order and others another; the word orders were often related to the speaker’s own native language. Moreover, complex sentences were absent in pidgin: pidgin sentences had no subordinate clauses, and even single-clause utterances often lacked verbs. In addition, there was no consistent system of anaphora.

Topic-140: The Language Bioprogram

Unlike pidgins, the creoles resembled the structural rules of other languages. From these observations, Bickerton concludes that children have an innate grammar that, in the absence of proper environmental input, serves as the child’s language system. He calls this system the language bio program. Bickerton (1984) has responded to other possible interpretations of his research. One is that the sophistication found in the children’s creoles was based on their access to English, the language of the plantation owners. Bickerton points out, however, that contact between immigrant families and owners was limited and that the Hawaiian creole differed in several respects from English.

Topic-141: Parameter Setting

Parameters is a framework within generative linguistics in which the syntax of a natural language is described in accordance with general principles (i.e. abstract rules or grammars) and specific parameters (i.e. markers, switches) that for particular languages are either turned on or off. For example, the position of heads in phrases is determined by a parameter.

Topic-145: Broca’s Aphasia

A person with expressive aphasia will exhibit effortful speech. Speech generally includes important content words, but leaves out function words that have only grammatical significance and not real-world meaning, such as prepositions and articles. This is known as "telegraphic speech." The person's intended message may still be understood but his or her sentence will not be grammatically correct. In very severe forms of expressive aphasia, a person may only speak using single word utterances. Typically, comprehension is mildly to moderately impaired in expressive aphasia due to difficulty in understanding complex grammar.

The speech of a person with expressive aphasia contains mostly content words such as nouns, verbs, and some adjectives. However, function words like conjunctions, articles, and prepositions are rarely used except for “and” which is prevalent in the speech of most patients with aphasia. The omission of function words makes the person's speech agrammatic. A communication partner of a person with aphasia may say that the person's speech sounds telegraphic due to poor sentence construction and disjointed words. For example, a person with expressive aphasia might say " Smart... university... smart... good... good..."

Topic-146: Wernicke’s and Conduction Aphasia

The following are common symptoms seen in patients with Wernicke's aphasia: Impaired comprehension: It deficits in understanding (receptive) written and spoken language. This is because Wernicke's area is responsible for assigning meaning to the language that is heard, so if it is damaged, the brain cannot comprehend the information that is being received. Poor word retrieval: The ability to retrieve target words is impaired. This is also referred to as Anomia. Fluent speech: Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia do not have difficulty with producing connected speech that flows. Although the connection of the words may be appropriate, the words they are using may not belong together or make sense (see Production of Jargon below). Production of jargon: Speech that lacks content, consists of typical intonation, and is structurally intact. Jargon can consist of a string of neologisms, as well as a combination of real words that do not make sense together in context. It may include word salads. Awareness: Individuals with Wernicke's aphasia are often not aware of their incorrect productions which would further explain why they do not correct themselves when they produce jargon, paraphasias, or neologisms. Conduction aphasics will show relatively well-preserved auditory comprehension, which may even be completely functional. Spontaneous speech production will be fluent and generally grammatically and syntactically correct. Intonation and articulation will also be preserved. Speech will often contain paraphasic errors: phonemes and syllables will be dropped or transposed (e.g., "snowball" → "snowall",

"television" → "vellitision", "ninety-five percent" → "ninety-twenty percent"). The hallmark deficit of this disorder, however, is in repetition. Patients will show a marked inability to repeat words or sentences when prompted by an examiner.

After saying a sentence to a person with conduction aphasia, he or she will be able to paraphrase the sentence accurately but will not be able to repeat it, possibly because their "motor speech error processing is disrupted by inaccurate forward predictions, or because detected errors are not translated into corrective commands due to damage to the auditory-motor interface."

Topic-148: Geschwind’s Models of Language Processing

1. For listening to and understanding spoken words, the sounds of the words are sent through the auditory pathways to the primary auditory cortex (Heschl’s gyrus). From there, they continue to Wernicke’s area, where the meaning of the words is extracted.
2. In order to speak, the meanings of words are sent from Wernicke’s area via the arcuate fasciculus to Broca’s area, where morphemes are assembled. The model proposes that Broca’s area holds a representation for articulating words. Instructions for speech are sent from Broca’s area to the facial area of the motor cortex, and from there instructions are sent to facial motor neurons in the brainstem, which relay movement orders to facial muscles.
3. In order to read, information concerning the written text is sent from visual areas to the angular gyrus and from there to Wernicke’s area, for silent reading or, together with Broca’s area, for reading out loud.