Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is part of the cognitive science. It is a subfield of applied linguistics in which we sudy the relationship between the mind and languages ;that is, everything that happens in our mind concerning lge which is in our faur component (grammar, lx knowledge). Cuz lge is an internalized system, we will try to understand the mechanisms. Sychlinguistics is concerned with language processing and language acquisition. It is devided into two major areas : experimental psycholx, which has to do with lge processing, and developmental psycholx, which studies the development of lge in human beings.
Lge processing : refers to the way human beings produce and understand lge as it exposes in real time. In lge processing, psycholx are interested in understanding what is happening in the mind as far as lge is concerned. in speech chain, i speak and u as a hearer u percieve. In both production and perception, speech takes three stages or process.
Production : Perception : Conceptualizer (independent) makes a For the reciever, the input is just a noise. concept (idea). This module creates or So we start with phonology in which we generates a message and once we have the distinguish between these noise on make idea, we send it to the formulator. Its job is some of them sounds.then we move to to take care of the faur components . first, morphology which deals with inflection semantic is done in conceptualizer module, (form) ,and syntax in which we use the then we move to syntax to build a structure of the sentence. Finally, we structure for a sentence. For ex : she is late, evaluate or transmit them into a message it is put in the structure as (np,vp,and (meaning). ap).now, i have the message, the sructure, and what i need is to bring the words from the lexicon in order to fill the (np, he), (vp, to be), and (ap, late). Once i have all this, i send them to the second part of lexicon( form ,morphology). to put the sentence in the right form ; i will go to the lexicon to form the np which is feminine singular and then i have to find the appropriate form to that information. once we have idea and structure ready, we send that to the articulator which send the command fo the message to be produced. (vocal tract gives signals to the muscles). This process is called up-down processing.
THE PRODUCTION & PERCEPTION PROCESSES OF SPEECH SOUNDS: Vowels are produced in a space in the oral cavity -we call it vowel space-. We can produce one thousand vowels. But we cannot produce /i/ as high exactly in the right way; it is impossible to produce a sound in a particular point in the vowel space. Vowels are produced in continuum space. Theoretically, we can produce all vowels provided that they are continuum. But we do not do it. Why? In order to make the perception easier or clearer. [We can manipulate sounds by reducing only the sequence on which we work on].
Experiment for perception : for perception, vowels are perceived in the same way. And it is so for two reason : the first, is because the perception of vowels is limited. the second, is because the vowel space is continum. Concerning this phenomenon, there is two experiments : identification experiment, in which subjects are presented with members (10) of series in rondom order and ask them to identify or say wether they hear (pit) or (pet). And also we have not to allow them to say neither of the two applying what is called ‘force choice pardigm ‘ . 1 is corresponding to pit , 10 is corresponding to pet, and 2—9 are called the intermediate stimuli which means that the vowels are perceived in continum.the further it is from /e/ the less likely perceived as /i/. Because of the items such as 4,5,and 6 subjects relied on guessing cuz vowels are not easily distinguished. Discrimination experiment, in which subjects are presented wih pairs of adjacent stimuli from a synthesised series followed by a third stimulus which is identical to the first two. In this, the subjects are asked to say wether the third stimulus is similar to the first or the second.
Consonants perception are completly different from vowels. For ex : in voiced- voiceless contrast [p,b]. we all know that the vibration occured when the state of larynx permit the vocal cords to vibrate. P and b are both the same. Actully it is after the release of the air that make us recognize whether it is p or b. in fact, both of them are voiceless because there is no contribution of the vocal cords. In [ba], the vocal cords does not begin to vibrate until a short time after the release of the bilabial closure. Whereas for [pa], there is a long time between the release of the bilabial closure and the vocal cords’ vibration.thus, the dinstinction between voiced and voiceless is determined by the time interval between the bilabial closure and the begining of the release of the air. This interval is called [vot]. The experiments that are used in this phenomenon are based on time. In identification experiment, in the VOT value from 1 to 40 ms. The subjects have to say whether they hear (p,b).VOT value about 25 ms subjects shift suddenly from reporting /b/ to reporting /p/. any vot less than 20 ms is heard as [b], while any VOT greater than about 30 ms is reported as [p].in discrimination experiment, hearers can discriminate the phonetics categories [voice-voiceless] very well but they can not make distinction within this categories. This type of perception we call IT categorical perception. In this type, the hearer perceive in terms of categories rather than in terms of gradations of sounds.
Experiment for production :
Language production is concerend with how an intended message is translated into a linguistic form. The speaker forms a prelinguistic concept of what he wants to say, selects the appropriate words, and then specifies the sounds of the words. A phenomenon such as slips of the tongue which are speech errors made in normal speech ; throw a considerable light on the nature of speech production. slips of the tongue may occur at the level of the phrase, word, morpheme, syllable, phoneme, or features, and can of several type, such as speech errors that are made in the context of tongue-twister.in every language there are certain sequences of sounds or syllables, which, for some reason, are particularly hard to pronounce as ( beggy babcock).an dthere are others such as :
Exchange : you have hissed all my mistery lectures
You have missed all my history lectures
What is happening here is that two sets of sound are being exchanged. In exchange, the syllable structure is important in analyzing the speech since it is only onsets that get exchanged for onsets and codas for codas. We don’t find constituents of the syllable getting confused with each other in exchanges. All the errors of exchange occurred at the level of copying the structure and that we call it a scan copier model in which , first, we form an abstract representation of the next phrase we are about to say. Then we copy that representation into a buffer which then get translated into movements of the representation. Now we need to fill in the appropriate slot in the copied syllable structure. The system scan the content of the buffer from left to right and copies onset to onset slot and coda to coda slot and so on. Afterward, it monitors its progress by checking off each of the segment it copies, and after the copies is done, the system has made an error by running ahead of itself and has selected as onset of the first syllable the onset of the final one.
Anticipation : it is a meal mystery [ real mystery]
In anticipation, the speaker uses an element before its correct use which means a sound is anticipated from afollowing word. Perservation : give the goy [give the boy]
In perservation, a sound is repeated from the earlier one
Subtitution : his retters [ letters]
In subtitution, the speaker subtitute one element for another.
Addition or insertion : country presents [peasants]
In addition, we add another new element in a word.
Omission : the brit-ch [the britich]
In omission, we delete an element from the word.
LEXICAL PROCESSING: Lexicon LEMMAS FORMS
The lexicon is the mental dictionary of a language. It stores the entries of the lexemes of a given lge. A lexical entry consists of two levels. The first level is the meaning or content, and the second level is the phonological properties and the morphological make-up. The first is called the lemma and the second is called the form. “The lemma and form are connected though lexical pointers: each lemma points to its corresponding form.”(Radford et al.,2009:206). Lemma and form are separate component in the lexicon. We can use each one without the other ; we activate lemma without form ,and we activate form without lemma. And both of them are independent of the content which can be shared among different lexicons.
For each lexeme in the lexicon, we have information (semantic,syntax,phono, and morpho). The lexeme child, we know that it is a noun and we know for morphology if we add the morpheme (en), we make plural, and we know the different shapes of the word in this lge ex : childish, childhood.. which means whene we do syntax, morphology, phonology here, we found them in the lexicon.
Q : how words are produced and how are they perceived ? there are two approaches to how lexemes are processed in the mental lexicon which are serial autonous model and parallel interactive model.
lexical priming is when you hear a word and you say the first word that comes to your mind = this is a method that is used to analyze how words are stored in our lexicon
1. Serial autonomous model :
This approach claims that the decisions that are made during the lexical processing are taken in sequence, with all the decisions of a certain type being taken before the decisions of the next type. Information which may be available in later decisions cannot inform earlier decisions. That’s to say that all the components work in a linear way, one after the other and the output of the previous components is the input of the next one. This model involves a series of steps in which information is passed from one component to the next.
2. Parallel interactive model :
What this approach claims is completely the opposite of the previous model. In this approach, information relevant to any decision is available at any point in processing and there is no place for a strictly set of sub- processes. Thus, language perception (and production) involves the activation of some or all the sources of relevant information at the same time.
Experiments of perception:
1) (Krrrrrrrrrk): two people are talking on the phone, the person A wanted to say: are you still coming next Wednesday? But for some reason the person B heard: are you still krrrrrrrk next Wednesday? So according to the serial autonomous model the person B would stop completely from processing due to lack of phonological input and he would probably ask the person A to repeat the question. But according to the parallel interactive model the person B would have multiple ways to realize what the question was such as the linguistic context and shared knowledge … etc. so this experiment supports the parallel interactive model. (Page 201, the last 2 paragraphs) Experiment of production: First, words are composed of lemma and form. In the lexicon, we store almost thirty thousand words. Words are produced quickly .when we want to produce a word, we select it from the lexicon, we get the lemma first and build tree for that word and then we go to the form to fill the tree. we know that the relation between the form and lemma is arbitrary. Slips of tongue as we already know, help us understand how lexemes are stored and processed. Speech errors in words (morphology), we don’t substitute or swap the order to tenses or from verbs to nouns. We do swap and substitute at the level of morphemes.
Ex : qalbi kan ghayskut for [Sukti kan ghayqlab] (exchange)
It has to do with syntax, we retrieve two forms and exchange them.
Ex : bama for [baba & mama] (blends)
In blends, the errors occurred at the level of retrieving the word from the lexicon. Bama is an output of baba & mama. We get that output because we want to pick up the word that means parent ( singular or whatever) in the lemma. Cuz we retrieve the word quickly from the form , we picked both of them cuz they share the same lemma (parent : baba & mama). And cuz we don’t have chance to go back and retrieve only one, we put them together and get bama as the output for the lemma in which we have a one place word. From this example, we can say that blends affects synonyms, this error occurred at the level of conceptualizer. So we can understand from this that lexemes are stored in synonyms.
Ex: mythology for [methodology] (substitution)
In substitution, the word that is more frequently used is more likely to be used instead of the intended word.
Language processing take place in different modules, stages and each one take care of a specific function. As the errors are done quickly, they can take places at one of these stages. Sentence processing:
An idiom is a ready-made expression which is stored as one lexeme.
Sentences are processed in the formulator (syntax)
Each word that comes to mind is assigned to a grammatical function on- line (immediately) Sentence parsing is very fast, efficient, and automatic.
Parser :
is a mental device which has the ability of assigning a grammatical function to any string of words, which means it has access to grammar to check or judge sentences.
A parser is also acquired.
Experiment: click studies (page 367/368)
This study was conducted to know whether sentence processing involves segmenting the sentence into units, as postulated in the syntactic theory.
In this study, subjects hear a sentence and within the sentence there is an imposed beep or click in different places in the sentence, for example:
A. The * man who you hate is leaving soon
B. The man * who you hate is leaving soon
C. The man who * you hate is leaving soon
And immediately after hearing the sentence, subjects are asked to determine where the click was. The result was that most of the subjects said that the click was at the border between the “man” and “who”. The result is:
a. When processing a sentence, it is segmented into units
b. The major sentence processing unit is the clause
Processing Empty Categories Syntactic dependencies are traces that we saw in syntax with Mr.Essafi
A syntactic gap is invisible and inaudible. And therefore its existence can be inferred indirectly. In order to receive an interpretation, a filler-gap (empty category) has to be associated with an antecedent phrase.
These empty categories are a bit problematic because:
. They are not realized phonologically
. Related to a distant constituents in the sentence
Some experiments were conducted to know whether filler-gaps are involved in sentence processing:
o Probe recognition
In these experiments, subjects are exposed to a sentence and then, they are shown a word and if the word exists in the sentence they were exposed to, they are supposed to click on a button. And time reaction is calculated. What was notices was that if the word is close to the end of the sentence, the reaction time is short. And if the word is far from the end of the sentence, the RT is longer. This is called the recency effect; if the word heard recently, it is recognized faster. Surprisingly, the RT of a sentence with an empty category is fast too even if the word that should be recognized in far from the end. (See example 477: page 369)
Strategies of sentence processing:
There are multiple difficulties that we face during processing sentences. We always face ambiguous expressions like: “Scotsman like whisky more than Welshmen” in our everyday live but we don’t really give it a lot of thought because some strategies are used to get over these difficulties such as: “Relying on non-linguistic clues”. There are 3 difficulties that show that some sentences are difficult to process: Structural ambiguity
Ex: Scotsman like whisky more than Welshmen
The grammar permits two or more different analysis. The parser needs to make quick decision as to which analysis to select.
Attachment ambiguity:
Ex: someone that the servant (NP1) of the actress(NP2) who was n the balcony.
We attach the new coming element to the most recently processed phrase. And this is so called local attachment.
We attach the new element to the head of the predicate. And this is so called non-local attachment.
Center Embedding :
Ex: the question the girl the lion bit answered was complex.
Ex: the question that the girl who the lion bit answered was complex.
Attachment cannot be processed locally, so working memory is heavily taxed. It is difficult to understand.
Garden-path sentences
Ex: the question the girl the lion bit answered was complex.
Ex: the question that the girl who the lion bit answered was complex.
Attachment cannot be processed locally, so working memory is heavily taxed. It is difficult to understand. Other notes:
Local attachment is favored in processing sentences, and if attachment cannot be local, the memory is heavily taxed.
In syntax everything we hear and process, we get rid of it.
1st language acquisition
Children acquire the four components of a language. All children are borned with UG, which is an innate capacity in human brain that enables them to acquire language. Each component has sounds and process (cons, vowel, stress ...). But what they are ? the child have to know them by himself, nobody will teach him what the sounds are, nobody will teach him what to do with sequencing, stress, morphophonemic, sounds when they are together. They have to find out by themselves. We know what the child knows, but we cannot ask him to say things. What do they know? are they silent because they dont know ? or, silent, because they have not set the parameters yet. In stress for example, the child keep trying all possibilities until he get the right stress. This process is unconscious, the child do not know that he is doing this. UG is the one that enable human being to acquire language quickly. Deliberately, we don’t have choice. UG means the exposure to language and during this exposure we adjust the parameters until we get the target language. They have not designed a grammar to be able to use and speak.
All children do acquire lge at the age of five. And they all spend the same amount of time in each stage. All children go by stages : cooing, babling, one word stage, two word stage, and finally multiple word stage.
Why are they stages ?
Cooing and babbling are not linguistics stages. When we say that they are not linguistics, we mean that what they produce is not a language. Children can produce sounds, but those sounds do not reflect language.
In cooing stage that is from the birth time to 6 month, the child produces cries and cooing noses that would express his bodily needs. Most scholars agree that the earliest cries, whimpers, and cooing noises of the newborn cannot be considered early language. Such noises are completely stimulus-controlled; they are the child’s involuntary responses to hunger, discomfort, the desire to be cuddled, or the felling o well-bein. Although those children seem to produce velar consonants like (kooku, gaga), they are not real language. Deaf children also produce these same sounds even though they receive no auditory stimuli. How ever, on the perception level, this stage shows that children can perceive linguistic stimuli. Thats’ why linguists consider this stage as a prelinguistic stage because the infant does not produce any real language.
In babling, this stage start from six month of age and may continue until one year. Even though Babling is charcterized by the repetition of the same sounds, it is not linguistic stage. we can see some sounds appearing as libial for ex ( mama, baba) but many of which do not belong to his native language. Moreover, « it is clear that child isn’t learning to produce these sounds from the speaking population surrounding it. Babies born profoundly deaf also go through a normal period of babling ».( radford et al, 2009 :96)
Cooing and babling are a prelinguistic stage. That is there is no grammar to produce language. They look upset but they just trying the system working, they are just training their muscles.
The one word stage, which extends from one to one and half years of age, is a stage in which children start to produce one word utterances. this stage is referred to as the holophrastic stage. As opposed to the previous stages, the one word stage is characterized by the production of the actual speech signals. The child would use the same string of sounds to mean the same thing. At this stage many words are simplified, many others are systematically mispronounced; the first words of a child may include the names of persons, objects, and activities in his immediate environment. The child learns those words by mapping process. At this stage, the words used by the child not only to name objects but also to engage in social interaction and to convey emotion as well. Furthermore, the produced stand for sentences. For example, when an English speaking child says ‘milk’ he may mean, i want milk ; bring me milk ; i drink milk ; or she did not give me milk.
The two-word stage starts from approximately one and half to two years of age. The child can use two words to express the same idea. Here now the content is necessary to understand the massage of the child. Two word stage is made of two sentences. These sentences contain one word for the predicate and the other is for the subject. For example ‘doggie walk’ for the sentence of ‘the dog is walking’. And ‘there rabbit’ instead of ‘there is a rabbit. At this stage, the child does not use the morphemes that express the grammatical relations. Also in this stage we can see overextension and underextension. For the last one, the child thinks that a word is referring only to a specific type rather than for all other types. As an example, the dog for a child is only the one that is in his house and the dog which is in the park is not a dog, he think that he has another name. By contrast, overextension is the opposite of the first in the sense that a child names any animal that has four legs as a dog and not something else. In overextension, the child starts identifying by using features.
After the two word stage, the children start to produce multi-word sentences that are characterized by an increase in the length of the utterance. At this stage, children’s sentences mostly contain « content » words and make limited use of « function » words as in the sentence ‘sara read book’, mommy juice drink’. This is why speech at this stage is called telegraphic stage. During this stage a child’s vocabulary expands from 50 words to up to 13,000 words. At the end of this stage the child starts to incorporate plurals, joining words and attempts to get a grip on tenses.
The child does not repeat the sentence before the age of five. They simply generate new sentences. If acquisition was simply imitation, they wouldn’t produce new sentences. All children spend the same period of time at each stage. At the age of eleven, the language should be acquired completely. Because after this age, they would not be able to acquire the language. Those who were discovered before this age, they could acquire the language.
Phonology development:
Perception: the child have to know the sounds by himself, nobody will teach him what the sounds are, nobody will teach him what to do with sequencing and sounds when they are together. he have to find out by himself. Before eight month, the child can do anything. He can distinguish all kinds of sounds, and he can perceive all phonemic contrast
Experiment : the early discrimination of speech sounds. The researchers took sounds from the native language of the child for example (k,g) and (p) which is not in Moroccan Arabic. During the producing of those sounds, the child show a reaction when he hears (k & g) and not when he hears (p). which means that a child can distinguish sounds, he can do this up to 8 months. A few weeks after this period, the child will not be able to distinguish sounds ( critical period).
Production : before the age of one year, there is no language. So that , language production will be studied after cooing and babling. The study will be done at the one word stage. Words such as ( oba for omar ; mawa for marwa ; yaya for rqiya …) this would seem to be nothing. Yes, semanticly it is nothing. But phonologicaly, it is something significants. All children speak funny. They use rules to speak easily and simplify their language. They do not imitate what we tell them, they simply speak the version of their language. The children produce what the grammar is built so far ( setting parameters). If the child knows something, he will say it. At this stage, the child still trying to acquire the language. The child says non-sense but this non- sense has a sense , he trys to do something like adults.They do not acquire the correct form because if they do acquire the right form, they will start speaking from the begining. What simply the child do ? is picking up a rule and applying it on the word. For example if the child’s rule is [ CV], after applying the rule, the output is a word that consist of [CV] but the input is not [CV]. One major process that the child do is syllable simplification. in branching onset, the child tend to delete one of the sound sequence in order to simplify. for example, «tuck for truck ; keb for kelb » . moreover, it seemed simpler for a child to finish a word with voiceless sounds (without vibration). And for the initial sounds, it is easier for them to carry out vibrating because the child know that there is a vowel coming. And there are other processes that a child use for the sake of simplification such as :
Cluster reduction : the child tend to delet the member that has a high sonority to perceive the sonority extreme between the nuclues and coda. Because children make a lot of effort to say exactely what they hear.
Fronting : the /k/& /g/ which are velar are produced as alveolars /t/ & /d/. for ex : car as tar and game as dame.
Word reduplication : Reduplication is very common at the age of 3 in children’s language production. In Children grammar, maximal word size is three syllable. For longer words, the child make three syllable,but to simplfy it by reduplication.
Stopping : As you already know, children takes all fricative and affricates and turn them into stops. For example, « tout for jouj »
Harmony : Ex : /sukaina/ → becomes→ /nina/
The first syllable is deleted
/i/ is kept because it’s high and front just like /n/
Eperiment: amahl ( smith,1973)
A voiced consonant is deleted after a nasal consonant such as (winu: for window).
/l/ is deleted finally and before a consonant such as (bo: for ball and mik for milk).
/s/ is deleted before consonants such as (bu:n for spoon).
All consonants are voiced. Lexical development: vocabulary growth
From 2 to 4 years, amounts of words are learnt at this stage. In both production and comprehension. In production, 200 words are acquired by children while in comprehension, 1000 words are acquired. Vocabulary growth is doubled each six month later. Children often create novel words for action which are derived from the name of the objects.
Semantic development : Children and words
At the age of one, the child’s early vocabulary items (words) that are produced seemed to be recognizable, but still there is no rules (repeating). These words are not really well-formed, but they are recognizable (holophrastic stage). One characteristic of children’s early word development is to engage in semantic overextension. It is this at which children would overextend the reference of some of their nouns meaning to include an appropriate objects. For example, ‘doggie’ would be over extended to refer to any animal that is hairy and medium-sized, water would be used to include also ‘juice’ lemonade’ and ‘milk’, and ‘ball’ to include all circular objects such as ‘the moon’. This shows that for the child, nouns referring to concrete objects have a wider meaning than they have in adult language.
Prototype theory:
Feature theory: it is used by children for semantic development. That is the child acquire what has more general features first. the example of doggie that i mentioned before for instance, is a doggie which is [ medium sized, hair-covered, four-legged] those features are easily perceived by a child beacause the child at this age derive the meaning from their sensory perception that is what he sees, what he touches, and what he hears. Thus, the child confronts with creatures such as sheep,cats and refer to them as a doggie. But if we add another feature which is not part of their sensory perception such as [carnivorous], the child will not refer to sheep and cats as a doggie. To sum up, the children rely on their sensory perception, adding more features, and reconstructing their lexical representation. some verbs appear in their earlier production as nouns, but these verbs are generally action verbs like ( run, laugh) for example, instead of saying ‘put it on’ he says ‘ do it’ that is they use ‘do’ for any action.
In the acquistion of lexemes, children do different things. There are two types of children : Referential, in which children start by concrete objects. Their job is to find a word and map it with the object and that’s done. and Expressive children, are those who develop syntax quickly. They wouldn’t say happy instead of ‘smile’ or ‘laugh’.
Semanatic devolepment models :
The ostensive model
This is the “look and name model”, and it claims that children acquire much quicker if parents point at objects as they speak. And our cognitive system provides some strategies that guide semantic development: a. Reference: words refer to actions/objects/attributes b. Extendibility: one words labels more than one item c. Objectsscope: words map the whole object not just proportions of it d. Categoricalscope: words can be extended to objects from the same level e. Namelesscategory: new words are mapped to concepts which haven’t been occupied yet.
Learning Through Context
In this model, it is believed that children learn the most frequent words in adult speech and the context helps narrow the meaning. For example, the syntactic context determines whether a lexeme is a noun or a verb → give clues to meaning.
Experiment: SIB (I forgot this experiment, sorry, if you have it in mind please let me know)
Utility learning model According to this model, children acquire the important things in his society (environment) first:
→ Kin system (father, mother, sister….)
→ Pronouns (I, you, he, she….)
→ Space and time
Morphological development :
One of the most important aspects of this section is the order in which morphemes are acquired:
2 years
ing
prepositions
plural /s/
2.6 years
Irregular past
Possessive /s/
Uncotrasted copula → Ex: “is kitty there?”
3 years
Articles → a, an, the
3.6 years
Regular past
Regular 3rd person /s/
Irregular 3rd person /s/ → Ex: “has, does
At the gae of 2 years, the children acquire the progressive morpheme first. Its regularity is one possible reason for this. And also because the ing morpheme has no variant realisations unlike the past tense and third person singular morphemes. Furthermore, it can be added in a fixed form to the majority of english verbs. Although Irregular forms which are relatively small in number, including some of the most frequently occurring verbs in English (was, had, and came), the regular forms does indeed prevail but only after a period during which the irregular forms are correctly produced. (overregularisation)
U-shaped Curve :
Overregularisation : When the child acquire a rule, he uses it in every possible case. For example, when the child incorrectly applies the regular past tense formation rule to a base form which, for adults language, requires an irregular process.The best way to illustrate this is by examples: a child would say *mouses instead of mice / *you hurt my foots instead you hurt my feet.
And here are some principles that guide children’s acquisition of compounds:
Principle of transparency: tent-man instead of camper
Principle of simplicity: wash-machine instead of washing machine
Principle of productivity: bicycler instead of bicyclist
Comprehension proceeds production : /fog/ → meaning → /frog/
Syntactic development:
1. Negation: the child has to know where to put the negation in the tree separated from the verb.
. Stage one: {1.6 – 2.2 years, two word stage }
No I can go
No sit here
No fall
o He adds the negation before the sentence. The child acquired the negation but he cannot put in the right place in the tree.
o No(t)+sentence . Stage two: {1.10 – 2.6 years}
He no bite you
I can’t go
I don’t wait it
o Now, the child has understood that the negation has to be inserted after the subject. And when the auxiliary appears, the negation will be attached to it.
o No(t) + verb
o Auxiliary + not + don’t / can’t
. Stage three: {2.0 – 3.3}
I didn’t caught it
He not taking it
This not ice-cream
o Not + verb
o Aux + not + doesn’t; didn’t; won’t; isn’t…
2. Questions
1. Stage one: {1.6 – 2.2}
I can go?
This is it?
Where Kitty?
At this stage, the child produces the sentence with question intonation. Moreover, he put the wh-words at the beginning of each sentence and with no inversion.
o Intonation
o Wh-words at the beginning
o No inversion 2. Stage two: {1.10 – 2.6}
What book name?
Why you smiling?
You want eat?
At this stage, when the question appears, the auxilaries are omitted.
o More wh-words
3. Stage three: {2 - 3}
Where can I go?
Will you help me?
What did you do?
The child takes all statement starting in wh-words as question and applies the inversion.
o Inversion and interrogation.
o Inversion and subordinates
4. Stage four: {3 - …}
I know what I can do
At this stage, the child knows when to block the inversion in subordinate clause.
o He knows when to block the rule
o No inversion in the subordinates
A general notice is that the child keeps adjusting and modifying the parameters until he say it correctly.
L1 & L2 acquisition Learning= consious Acquisition= unconsious L1 and L2 differences:
Children adults Acquire L1 unconsiously. Adults must be taught L2, consciously. L1 is genetically triggered for children to acquireL2 is not genetically triggered. L1, the same as walking and and other abilities. The cognitive development has already For children the cognitive development Founded. is still in process. They can resist. L2 is not genetically triggered. It is a choiceL2 is necessary for living. ( exception of bilingual children). L1 can influence positively ( positive L1 has a critical period to be acquired. transfer) and negatively( negative Motivation is not a necessary criteria in thetransfer) L1 in L2 acquistion. acquisition. After proberty, it becomes difficult to The input is attended to what the acquire L2 successfully as a native. child can understand. Morphology is acquired in order. Morphology of L1 acquired in order. L1 is necessary for living. There are 4 factors involved when acquiring a language
o Cognitive: we transfer lx knowledge to L2 to help acquiring.
o Psychological
o Biological
o
L2 learners → already have a system acquired → cognitively mature → that has analytic abilities
Positive transfer and negative transfer:
The second lge is not acquired, it is rather possessed already. The learners use the rules of the acquired lge to perform the second one. They do not know that the nature of this new lge is different from the first. This can be explained by the notion of transfer. If those two languages happen to be the same and the learner makes mistakes (phonology, syntax, and semantic), then it is called negative transfer. But if the leaner did not make mistakes, then we call it positive transfer and that’s because those languages have a strong resemblances to each other.
Positive transfer L1 property are similar to L2 property. For example, the French SVO is the same as in English grammar SVO. Negative transfer L1 # L2
Metalinguistics:
For children, they are unaware if they are acquiring the rules. They often do over regularization. Children have no construction.
Meatlinguistics for adults is conscious and knowledge of grammar is done in formal context.
Affective differences between adults and children:
Type of the input + attitudes + motivation + biological
The input for a child is usually assumed to what he can understand. No one will speak to a child about democracy instead of speaking a normal language. For adults, it is not attained; it is a less complex input.
In L1, there is no motivation because it is conscious. But for L2, the motivation must be there, it is important for L2 to be acquired. There is two types of motivation. the integrative mtv in which the learner is motivated to acquire the lge in order to integrate in a society. And the intermasive motivation in which the learner is motivated to get a job of for economy and so on.
The children have a critical period for L1. But before this period, they acquire it effectively and successfully. For adults, it becomes difficult to acquire L2 successfully as a native. And this result in ….>>>
Fascilization: is a phenomenon that is very common in second language learners. Is when someone aware of saying something in wrong way, he still saying it. The nature of this phenomenon is that the person is in a process of setting the parameters. That’s why he still doing this until he gets the right parameters. The example of stress ( French and English). Vocabularies: There are different types of vocabulary:
Passive vocabulary: which is the type of vocabulary that is not very used but still once you come across it you understand it
Active vocabulary: which is the vocabulary that is used on dailylifeusage?
Potential vocabulary: this type refers to technical words such as You never heard it but somehow we can still understand .القتراضولوجيا its meaning.
Real vocabulary: that what we learn after the exposure. Words association is related to vocabulary. Ex: wife & spouse & husband But it could also be phonological association between words such as tree and three.
Do we have access to UG in L2?
There are three theories:
The first theory: say that L2 learners have access only to their L1 and there is no UG. We go to the new experience of acquiring L2 just by using our L1 background. Another reason to illustrate this is that L2 learners never attain the proficiency of second language.
The second theory: say that L2 learner has access only to UG; they don’t have access to L1 because it is finished.
The third theory: say that L2 learners have access to L1 and subsequently to UG.
In all languages, there are constraints which are floating and when we are exposed to our L1 language, we take what we need and rank them in terms of priority (c1, c2, c3 …). And when we start learning our L2, we have the constraints which we have already ranked. But at the same time we learn the new features. Because The L1 learner has no evidence for the other constraints which are not ranked, those constraints are still floating. This means that we have the constraints, but they are floating, we didn’t have the chance to rank them because we were never exposed to them. So in L2, we can demote or promote those constraints that we have in L1. And for unranked one, supposedly they are here in the mind, but in low rank. Te rules which are new, they were exist in the mind, but we just promote them. So in this sense, UG is present in L2, but after we start with what we have already. In Arabic for example, the onset is obligatory and it is constrained, it is in a high ranked. When we start learning our L2 (English), we rank what we have already in our L1 constraints. And because onset is obligatory in Arabic, we rank it in the first constraints. We rank up UG constraints that were there in the L1.
The fourth theory: say that L2 learners have access to UG via L1. They claim that we don’t need UG because L1 was initiated by UG.
When you are learning L2, the mind should adapt or adjust the parameters to be able to produce and perceive new phonological item of the new language.
In the POP (principle of parameters) theory, the term they use is to Reset the parameters
In the OT (optimal theory) theory, the term that is used is to demote or promote the constraints
The organization of the L2 lexicon:
There are three hypothesis:
One-store hypothesis Two-stores hypothesis Three-stores hypothesis This one claims that the The claim in this In the three-stores relationship between hypothesis is that the hypothesis, there is the lexemes in the lexicon is relationship between concept + the 2 stores of phonological lexemes is semantic. lexemes Thus the 2 stores are (frequency of use) semantically associated
One store hypothesis based on phonological resemblance. For example, (experience & experiment) this error can only occur in L2 but not in L1. Cuz for that person, experiment is stored with its family (synonymy, antonomy…). So the way we store word in L2 lexicon, we store them on the basic of phonological shape, resemblance (syllable, affix ending, first sound…). Evidence is that (watch, clock, bottle…) all word information are stored centrally in one tank. And if you think in English, you will access this tank as well as if you think in English. Because all these words exist in both languages. So there is only one store. But later on, this hypothesis is proved to be wrong in the case of abstract words
In words association experiment responses were usually a translation of the given words in SL but abstract words don’t have exact translations.
Two store hypotheses claimed that L1 and L2 are stored in two different tanks which are related on the basic of semantic relation. But the problem with this theory is that not all words have equivalent translation. We can say that some words are similar like (table for a table). But in general, there is no similarity in languages because the cultures are different. A word exist in a culture doesn’t exist in another which means if you think that L2 is just a dictionary of L1 because you have the lemma and concept and you need only to do the form, you are wrong, Because you have to do everything, words do not sound equivalent across languages and cultures. House for example, both Moroccan and American people do not have the same concept for a house, each one has his own image.
Three-store hypotheses say that although both languages are different, they are connected. They are related to the box of concept; they are related by the conceptual information. In this case we don’t have translation Critical period in L2:
It claimed that there is critical period in L2 and that L2 acquisition takes place by growth the same like L1 acquisition. The older we are, the less L2 acquisition is acquired. The age of exposure to L2 acquisition is important. Because as long as we have the exposure, L2 grows with us.
Experiment: this experiment was conducted on a group of native Chinese and Korean languages. They all learn L2 English. They emerge in English at least five years. And the experiment was grammatical judgment sentence, those groups were showed sentences and subjects have to respond if they grammatically correct or not. The result showed that the early arrived to US before eleven have advantages, they are better. And those who arrive after the age of puberty, they were variable from each other.
Conclusion: there are three hypotheses:
First hypothesis: say that there is a limited period in acquiring the L2. They say that after puberty, the L2 acquisition decline which means that it is similar to L1.
Second hypothesis: say that there is no certain period in which the L2 decline. As we grew, the acquisition of L2 decline which means that the older we are, the worst it becomes.
Third hypothesis: say that L2 acquisition takes longer because we already have the grammar. We acquire the L2, but after the age of 20, it start decline.
Specific language disorders:
SLI is a disorder in which language does not develop normally. It is a developmental language disorder that involves difficulties with language production and language comprehension. It is a pure language impairment that involves no brain damage no hearing impairments. Children with SLI start acquiring their L1 at the same age as normal children, but they are slow in their undertaking, and they show difficulties with phonology, syntax, morphology, and vocabulary. At the phonological level, they find it difficult to combine speech sounds to form meaningful units. They were also found to have problems with inflectional morphemes. They leave off bound morphemes that indicate person, number, gender, etc. or use them wrongly. In addition to this, SLI children inflectional morpheme is also selectively impaired. They have more problems with regular rules of inflection than irregular forms because while the latter are easily retrieved from memory, the former are generated by applying rules. In syntax and vocabulary, SLI children tend to produce short sentences, and find it difficult to produce and understand complex sentences. They also have a poor vocabulary because they find it hard to learn new words. While normal children increase their vocabulary knowledge by incidental vocabulary learning, SLI children cannot learn the meaning of words from context.
Dyslexia:
Dyslexia refers to a cluster of symptoms which causes people to have difficulties in specific language skill particularly reading. Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that has a neurological origin. It is not a disease or result of an accident or injury, but rather it describes a kind of mind often gifted and productive mind that learns differently. Students with dyslexia can learn, but just in different way.
Models of visual word recognition: is pattern-recognition process that involves the computation of representation of a written stimulus which is then matched against an abstract representation – lexical entry) stored in long-term memory.
1. Autonomous Serial Search Model {Foster; 1976-79}
2. Subsequent search through the mental lexicon
3. Lexical entries are stored in an easy way to facilitate the search of the basics.
4. This process is Independent
There are 2 stages according to this model:
o The first one is searching to finding out about the desired entry. o Access the entry itself in its actual location and retrieve all necessary information about that word.
Access files are modality specific (orthographic, syntax, semantic). And these files are sub-divided into separate bins on the basis of the initial sounds or letter of a word to speed up this process. In each bin the words are ordered depending on the frequency of use (Frequency). The more frequent used words
this word is orthographically ممرخاص :are on the top of the bin. For ex recognized. We access the file in which the word is written like this.
Non-existing words are often rejected after an exhaustive search of the lexicon; you can read a German word but you can’t recognize it because it’s not part of your lexicon.
The Logogen Model {Morton; 1969-79}
This is an interactive direct model. The basic idea is that every word represented in the mental lexicon has its own simple feature counter called( logogen) which passively accumulates evidence from language until its individual threshold value is reached. When this happens, the word is recognized. More frequent words have lower threshold. Logogen are sensitive to auditory and visual properties of words. There is a continuous two-way interaction between cognitive and logogen system; connecting to response system is for naming of words; no word will be rejected a deadline is reached. The threshold value of logogen is reduced every time the logogen is activated, this happen when the word is spoken, seen, heard, written, or merely thought, which when I see this word, I can’t recognize if it is جزر :account for frequency effects. For ex I recognize that ,سافرت الى جزر الكناري an island or carrot, but when it is written like this .means island and not carrot جزر the word
Reading:
Reading is a linguistic skill and problem with decoding generally reflect language disorder difficulties. Decoding deficit in a child leads to a difficulty in learning to identify printed words and this is causally related to the affected child in acquiring phonological analysis skills and mastering the alphabetic code. Reading difficulties such as reading slowly, words moving around the page, and lack of concentration while reading.
The basic unit of written languages is the grapheme. A letter or a combination of letters that represent a phoneme. Sometimes grapheme-morpheme correspondence is more direct. (Language that’s use alphabetic script).
There are three hypotheses on how the mentioned correspondence functions:
Grapheme encoding hypothesis: a printed word is recognized directly from the visual representation.
Changed orthography takes longer to translate.
Phoneme encoding hypothesis: recognition involves converting a visual representation of the word into a phonological one. The latter of which provides access to the lexical memory.( evidence: unpronounceable stimuli are rejected faster than pronounceable ones).
Dual encoding hypothesis: lexical memory can be accessed through both visual and phonological representation.
Meat & meet caused to subjects more errors which means that they converted the two words to the phonological representation.
I. Stages of Reading
In stage one, perceptual analysis: isolates letters and encode them for example gh is isolated, then rearranged again.
In stage two, letter recognition: the physical shape that’s to say “gh” is encoded to an abstract letter which is /F/
Then, the central processing involves matching the visual stimulus to the stored graphological, phonological, semantic representation The orthographic lexicon is organized differently → by previously encountered words and by visual word forms
II. The Development of Reading
Difficulties learning to read → Developmental Dyslexia
Difficulties learning to spell → Developmental Dysgraphia
When children are learning to read they:
Discriminate and recognize letters
Associate words with meaning
Associate words with grammatical properties (syntax)
Recognize words written with different fonts…
Children also use tacit linguistic knowledge to facilitate fluent reading by:
Storing rules for the order in which letters are organized in the orthography
Storing redundant combination ex → cat, fat…
Storing redundant combinations of letters ex → th / sh / gh …
Storing unitized representations ex → -tion / -ing …
III. Stages of learning to read
The proto-literacy period
+ Improve rhyme, alliteration, segmentation, syllable and sound
+ Vocabulary expands, discriminating recognized letters, and some words are recognized by guessing
The Logographic stage + Visual recognition of familiar words on the basis of their salient visual features. (Attractive)
+ Unknown words are inaccessible
+ Words are remembered as a Logo
The Alphabetic Stage + Make use of information about letters = reads
The Orthographic Stage + Make use of Grapheme-phoneme correspondences
+ Rules in a systematic and adult-like way
Ex → when → C → is → /k/ → or → /s/ Dyslexia
Developmental: impairment in acquiring reading abilities
Acquired : from brain damage, and usually occurs with dysgraphia
(inability to spell)
Some general notes:
Grapheme-phoneme conversion is at least partially impaired in dyslexic children because they failed to move from the logographic stage to the alphabetic stage.
Dyslexic people are a homogeneous group
Some suggested causes of dyslexia:
Lack of motivation/attention
General cognitive deficits. Ex → memory
Other genetic deficits Reduction in sensory capabilities. Ex → visual problems
An example of a dyslexic girl:
She is called Brenda and she was: o Very smart, Very slow at any written work, Afraid, Unable of spelling (spell them in the wrong order), But her vision was very good
We analyzed some of her writings but, unfortunately, I didn’t copy them.
However, I took note of the results of the analysis:
o With vowels there is no visual input
o Dyslexic people can read with difficulty
o The letter “e” is a guess work
o With consonant → substitution of incorrect letters → c / s &
c / k
o Addition of incorrect letters → p & b (problems of mapping)
o Omission of a letter “l” “m” “n” “r” (not pronounced letters)
Reading Disorders
Neglect alexia: is an attention disorders characterized by:
. A disturbance in visual perceptual processing
. Neglect words pseudo (I forgot what this note was about) . Difficulty processing word finally and word initially
. Letter deletion → can → an
. Letter substitution → wine → mine
Alexia without agraphia: (pure alexia)
. Disturbed recognition of letters
. Impaired recognition
. Reading is very labored
. They read with difficulty
. They write without problems
. Problems encoding grapheme to phoneme
Surface Alexia:
. Difficulties reading words which have an exceptional
pronunciation such as → Thought → Enough
Other notes:
Stored orthographic information may not be accessed through the visual modality and this accounts for a disconnection between orthographic lexicon and visual letter recognition.
Neurolinguistics: language disorders
Language is located in the left hemisphere Broca’s area &Wernicke’s area
In psycholinguistics → experiments whereas is Neurolinguistics → disorders & neuro-imaging.
I. The effects of normal aging on people’s language:
a. Too much slips of the tongue
b. Speaking slower (production)
c. lexical retrieval
d. Problems having a conversation
e. Difficulty naming things
f. Comprehension problems
Old people tend to produce simple sentence because less memory is needed, and they have difficulty producing imbedded sentences; they can’t even repeat them sometimes.
Now, we will list some explanations of the mentioned effects of Normal people’s aging on language {lexical retrieval, production, and comprehension}:
II. Linguistic factors
Temporary inaccessibility to the phonological representation of lexemes
Difficulty activating semantic, syntactic, or phonological nodes.
Difficulty in priming → connection weakens
III. Extra-linguistic factors
a.i.1. The Working Memory
Syntax needs memory because it is a linear process In an experiment subjects were asked to repeat some long sentences and they couldn’t
a.i.2. Cognitive slowing
Basic cognitive processes’ speed becomes slower
The result of an experiment was that all cognitive operations are slower
IV. Neurological factors
The brain anatomy changes:
Old people’s brain becomes lighter
Changes in subcortical area
Changes at the level of the area that represents the auditory system
Decline in the dopamine {neuro-chemical change}
o Thus:
Comprehension issues are due to loss or reduction in connections between components which in turn results in difficulty in retrieving lexemes → difficulty in accessing meaning → difficulty in processing
Old people are more likely to have strokes in posterior area {Wernicke’s area} → fluency but no meaning in Wernicke’s aphasics
Broca’s aphasics are youngers {Broca’s area → interior area}
V. Alzheimer
There are similarities between Alzheimer patients and aphasic people
This disease’s patients are not the same
It appears between somewhere between 50 to 70
The patients are nor a homogeneous group Early Stage Mid-Stage Late Stage . Confused about time but not . Confused about time and place . Confused about time, place, and about people but no about people people . Loss of short-term memory . They can’t think of less common . Short-term memory doesn’t work . They forget a lot words and concepts . Forget family members . Problems of what to say . They can’t remember a list of . Meaning of words lost . Longer time for all language more than 3 items . Unaware of being spoken to processes . Unable to process rapid speech . Repeat echo of what others said . Mid-naming difficulties . Difficulty focusing . Make use of poor grammar . They correct themselves . Distracted by noise . Non-sense speech . Use grammar . Distracted by multiple speakers . They become mute . Fluent speech . Always ask for repetitions . They don’t conceptualize . Can read but mechanically . Miss facial cues . Miss emotional meanings . Difficulty finding words . Use related words more than related words
The End