Language Structure
Our spoken, written or signed words and the ways we combine them to communicate meaning.
What is language?
Infants start without language
What is receptive language?
A technique that can be used to target and increase a behavior by pairing performance of the target behavior with a positive or rewarding outcome
What is operant conditioning?
Controls language expression--an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech.
What is Broca's area?
Whorf’s hypothesis that language determines the way we think.
What is Whorf’s Linguistic Determinism?
The smallest distinctive sound units in language
What is phonemes?
Beginning at about 4 months, the stage of speech development in which the infant spontaneously utters various sounds at first unrelated to the household language
What is Babbling stage?
All human languages have nouns, verbs, and adjectives as grammatical building blocks.
What is Chomsky’s Universal Grammar?
Controls language reception--a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression; usually in the left temporal lobe.
What is Wernicke’s Area?
The elementary units of meaning
What is morphemes?
The stage in speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which a child speaks mostly in single words
What is One-word stage?
Human infants display a remarkable ability to learn statistical aspects of human speech. Their brains not only discern word breaks, they statistically analyze which syllables
What is statistical learning?
Impairment of language, usually caused by left-hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding)
What is Aphasia?
The system of rules that enables us to communicate
What is grammar?
Beginning at about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a child speaks mostly in two-word statements.
What is the two-word stage?
Childhood seems to represent a “sensitive” period for mastering certain aspects of language before the language-learning window closes
What is a critical period?
Language processing is spread across other brain areas as well, where different neutral networks handle specific linguistic subtasks
What is the brain division of language?
The prefix "pre" in "preview" or suffix "ed" in "adapted" are examples of
What is morphemes?
Early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram "go car", using mostly nouns and verbs.
What is telegraphic speech?