This course deals with the fundamentals important in Psychology as a science. Psychology is the study of behavior and the mind. But all of us have tried to understand and predict behavior throughout our lives, first with our parents, then with our peers and teachers, and finally with our friends and co-workers. The difference is that psychological scientists conduct research that discovers the facts about behavior and our minds, so its principles are based on science and not just on intuition and experience. The course covers the fundamentals of learning, memory, motivation, emotion, and how behavior changes as we age. The content of the course has received approval from "Quality Matters", an organization that evaluates on-line courses. The learning outcomes are: (1) Students will be able to recognize and describe major psychological principles of learning; (2) Students will be able to distinguish between different types of memory; (3) Students will be able to describe how motivation and emotion can affect how we behave; and (4) Students will know how cognitive behavior and social behavior develops as we age.
Lecture Video 3.2: Language
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Del curso dictado por Georgia Institute of Technology
Introduction to Psychology as a Science 2 – Fundamentals of the Mind and Behavior
2 calificaciones
Georgia Institute of Technology
2 calificaciones
De la lección
Section 3: Cognition
Language and Intelligence allow us to engage in complex cognition.
Conoce a los instructores
Dr. Anderson D. SmithRegents’ Professor Emeritus
School of Psychology
One complex behavior that we all engage in, is the use of language.
And today we're going to talk about language.
We'll deal with what the properties of language are, have we developed language
and something about how language is dealt with in the brain.
And, finally, a little bit on, is language something only humans have, or
is it shared with other non-human animals.
Okay, what are the[SOUND] basically six properties of language, that all
languages have. The first is it's communicative.
We use language to interact with each other, in a society.
It's arbitrary, except for a very few things called[UNKNOWN].
Like, for example, hiss, is a sound that actually describes what it is we are
talking about, what a snake, does when it uses sound.
But it's arbitrary for most things, it's symbolic.
Which means it represents something. It's also meaningfully structured, we
have grammar and syntax, which helps us understand and use language.
It's creative, in a sense that we make sentences all the time that we've never
heard before or never made before. In fact, when I start this sentence, I'm
not even sure how it's going to end. So it's very productive or creative, and
it's dynamic. We, we, we add to our vocabulary all the
time. In fact, we add words to everybody's
vocabulary. As things happen, and creates new ways of
symbolically representing things, that didn't exist in the past.
Communicative, arbitrary, meaningfully structured, creative, and dynamic; the
properties of every language. Now, when you look at a language, it has
certain components to it. First it's made of sounds.
When I'm talking and you're listening, and understanding.
And those're called phonemes. Those phonemes are, in fact, the
different kinds of sounds we make. And they're about 200 in all languages.
And then there are morphemes, which are the smallest unit in the language that
actually represent something, that's, has meaning.
And then we have words, so for example phonemes, if I say, if I have a sentence
that says, it takes time and effort to learn a second language.
The, the phonemes would be I and T making up it.
And then take and then because it is plural, there is another for, for, for an
s that's another morpheme, other than take, which is the plural, which makes
takes, and the word is takes. And you can sort of divide up, language
with these components. Phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, like
a noun phrases and a ver, and a verb phrase, and then sentences.
Now, how we acquire language? Well, there are two basic views.
There's a behaviorist view, which says in Skinner's book was called Verbal
Behavior,which says language is learned, and of course language is learned to some
extend. But people like Noam Chomsky, in his book
Language and the Mind, believed that there was an innate human predisposition
to acquire language, because all humans use language.
[COUGH] And he said, so built into the genes, is a language acquisition device,
an LAD. You can learn language, because we're
genetically predisposed to learn it. This is supported by the fact that
there's a critical period for learning language.
Johnson and Newport studied people that came into this country, from ages 3 to
19. And looked at, and then 10 years after
they immigrated into the United States, they gave a test of complex grammar.
And as you can see, if they immigrated between 3 and 7, they looked just like
native language speakers, in this test of gram, grammar ten years later.
But then, if they came in later than 7, their performance on the language tests,
on the grammar tests, declined dramatically.
Depending upon when they, what the age was when they entered.
So it's not the length of time that you're using the language, it's when you
first started using the language, that is, how much of the earlier language were
you using. And that's what this critical period is.
And this is one argument against the idea, that it's just behavioristic.
Because you have this period of time, very early in life where you can learn
language easily. In fact, Noam Chomsky said, that by the
time a person is four years old, they already have the complex adult language
learned. Well, I took four years of German in
college. And, believe it, I, I can't use the
language hardly at all. So I needed to be much much younger, if I
wanted to learn that language. Now, language acquisition, in this first
four years, is. First, we know that, even prenatally,
before an infant is born, they can respond to human la, voices.
They respond differently to human voices in the womb, than they do other sounds.
Then, there is prenatal cooing, in the first four months, where, they're simply
using all the phonemes, all, all the phonemes, all the basic units of
language. And then starting later, there's babbling
where they start narrowing down the phonemes of those phonemes that are used
in that language, because languages, different languages use a different set
of phonemes. This is why we have dialects.
Because you're using phonemes in the second language, that you hadn't babbled
in the first, in the first language when you had your first language.
And then after babbling, we have the first word.
It tends to be a frontal consenant. Something that you do with the front of
your mouth, followed by a vowel. Things like I called my nother Bawba.
My gradmother I called Gaga. My grandkids call me Geegee.
So we tend to use those very first words, in identifying with people that we're
around a lot. then we have sort of holophrases, these
are words that really are identification, like baba or gaga.
And sometimes, you have overextensions, because I might say dada for my father.
But then every male becomes dada. Or every animals becomes dahdah, even
though that was originally used to identify my dog.
But it, then we start having multiword phrases, or telegraphic speech, like want
cookie, two word phrases that actually have meaning to it.
And then, between two and three we really develop vocabulary.
At age two, it's usually about 300 words, and at age, I'm sorry, age two, it's 300
words and age three it's up to 1,000 words.
So, very quickly we're acquiring a vocabulary of words.
And then at age four, we have adult sentence structure.
So very quickly we learn, the basic grammatical structure of language.
Now, let's talk a little bit about brain and language.
The language center is located for most people, in the left hemisphere.
And it's weakly associated with your handedness, but only weakly.
For example, if you're strongly right handed, almost everybody has in the left
hemisphere. If you're ambidextrous, it reduces it to
85% meaning 15% have it in the right hemisphere.
And even if you're strongly left handed, almost 3 4ths of the people have it in
the left hemisphere. So it's, it's not a bilateral kind of
thing. Language is located in one hemisphere or
the other, and for most people, it's in the left hemisphere.
There are some special abilities that are located in the right hemisphere, so these
are asymmetrical. Now there are two areas of the brain, and
they're where you would expect them to be, that deal with language.
There's Broca's area, which is the frontal lobe very close to the motor
cortex. This is the motor cortex.
If you remember, the[UNKNOWN] that we saw spread out across the cortex, there was a
very large area in this end of the motor cortex, that dealt with the mouth, and
the tongue. And these areas associated heavily with
language. We use the tongue and the mouth, to, in
the larnyx, to create language sounds, and the broca's area is very heavily
associated with that. And there's also Wernicke's area, which
is in the temporal area of the brain, very close to the auditory cortex.
And so we speak and we listen and we understand, and we have to use the
auditory cortex. Now, we know these areas exist because of
people have lesions, and when they have lesions in either Broca's areas or
Wernicke's area it creates something called aphasia or dysphasia.
These are words that are used synonymously, really dysphasia's a better
word, but aphasia is the word that's more commonly used.
If, if the lesion in the brain is in Broca's area, people have difficulty in
producing speech. If the lesion is in Wernickes' area, they
have, they are fluent, they can produce speech, but it doesn't make much sense
most of the time. And they certainly can't comprehend,
sounds coming in easily, because of lesions in the area that actually
receives that, those sounds and interprets them.
In the, in your readings, it has a film, which demonstrates both an aphasic person
with, with Broca's areas lesions. And one with Wernicke's area lesions, and
you can really detect the differences very clearly.
So, now we want to ask the question, are humans the only animals that can use
language, or can non-human animals use language?
Without a doubt, animals have a very strong communication ability.
For example, the bee, even a honey bee, has a dance that it does when it comes
back into the hive, after getting pollen from the flowers, and the honey bee
dances and tells other bees where the flowers are.
There are certain monkeys, that have very different calls for different predators.
For example, it might have one call, if the predator's a snake out there in the
wild, it might have another one if it's a leopard, and have, have another one for
other predators. Very different, and we can identify what
they are. Most of the work, experimental work, has
been done with chimps. First, Psychologists tried to actually
live with chimps from when they were infants, to see if they could acquire
language, but they don't really have the vocal apparatus to do that.
And there are other people that are actually used American Sign Language,
that is they teach sign language and they were able to develop a very large
vocabulary of items. So representing things after they're in
their environment, and then the very sophisticated work with Sue
Savage-Rumbaugh, who used lexigrams. That is a symbol in a, in a array of, of
keys and the animal could press a key to represent those symbols.
Hundreds and hundreds of different symbols that represent lexigrams.
So, if we look at the evidence, are there languages by other organisms other than
humans? It really depends upon your definition of
language. If you say that language is the ability
to communicate through sequence of symbols, the answer's clearly yes.
But if you say a symbolic expression of complex grammar, then the evidence is not
clear. They can come up with phrases, like, you
give me candy. Or it might say candy you give me.
Or, me give you candy. It's just the, the, grammar is sort of
arbitrary in most of these representations.
There are some evidence of that, especially with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's
work, but it seems to be not as strong as you would get with a four year old child.
So when we go back to the first slide which says the six properties of
language. What do non-humans show?
Well they clearly are communicative. They clearly are using sounds to
represent things out there in the environment.
They are arbitrary. They're something which really doesn't
represent the actual thing, but I mean represents the actual thing but isn't
equal to it. The question is whether it's meaningful
structured. Do we have grammar, or do we not have
grammar? And whether it's creative.
There is some, some sort of anecdotal evidence that it's creative.
For example, some of the moneys, excuse me, some of the chimpanzees would do
things like, when they saw. A doll, which is Pinnochio doll with a
long nose, they might say, elephant doll. So that's pretty creative.
But, it seems to be anecdotal. Not, not very strong evidence for it.
So, whether it's meaningfully structured is doubtful, and whether it's creative is
debated and typically used by anecdote. And it is dynamic, they can learn new
symbols. So, it's up to you whether it's, it's
language, or it's not language, but I think most people say, the debate is
still out there, and it's still contraversial.
And humans might in fact be, the only animal that uses language as we define
it. Thank you.
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