PSYC20008 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Language Development, Morpheme, Phoneme
14 Jun 2018
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Lecture 9 - Tuesday 28 March 2017
PSYC20006 - DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
LECTURE 9
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
BACKGROUND
•By 5 years children have mastered the basic structure of their language, whether spoken or
manually signed.
LANGUAGE DISTINCTIONS
•Language Comprehension
•Understanding what others are saying
•Language Production
•Actual speaking
•Language comprehension precedes language production
COMPONENTS FOR LEARNING LANGUAGE
PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
•The acquisition of knowledge about phonemes, the elementary units of sound that distinguish
meaning
SEMANTIC DEVELOPMENT
•Learning the system for expressing meaning in a language, beginning with morphemes, the
smallest unit of meaning in a language
•Expressing meaning in language, beginning with morphemes;
the smallest meaningful unit of language.
•Syntax: The rules for the ways in which words can be
combined to make sense.
•Syntactic development: Learning the rules for combining
words in a given language.
SYNTACTIC DEVELOPMENT
•Learning the syntax or rules for combining words
•Grammar.
PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT
•Acquiring knowledge of how language is used, which includes
understanding a variety of conversational conventions.
•Acquiring knowledge about how language is used, such as the rules for conversation.
•Adults have metalinguistic knowledge, knowledge about the properties of language and language
use, that children do not have.
•Children often have awareness that they don’t have metalinguistic language. Often will say ‘I
don’t know how to say it’.
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
•Language development mastery of components:
•Language generativity
•Semantic development: long term developmental process
•Pragmatic development: long term developmental process
•Idea of language generativity is still going on.
•Phoneme: The basic unit of sound
used to produce language.
•Phonological development: The
acquisition of knowledge about the
sound systems of one’s own language.
•Morpheme: The smallest unit of
meaningful sound, usually one or two
phonemes.
Lecture 9 - Tuesday 28 March 2017
PSYC20006 - DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN
•Language is a species-specific behavior.
•Only humans acquire language in the normal course of
development, although some primates have been taught to sign
and recognize words.
•Language seems to be localized in the brain.
•For 90% of right-handed people, language is primarily
controlled in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex.
•Damage to these areas leads to language difficulties.
BROCA’S AREA
•Broca’s area is responsible for the production of articulate speech, movement of muscles required
for speech, understanding grammatical structure of sentences.
•Damage results in slow, short sentences lacking adjectives and conjunctions and difficulty
comprehending sentences with abnormal structure.
BROCA’S APHASIA
•In Broca’s aphasia (non fluent aphasia, expressive aphasia or motor aphasia),!
a person has difficulty speaking, although they continue to understand speech, and their speech
consists of very short sentences, (typically three or four words), which are lacking conjunctions
and word endings and consist mainly of nouns and verbs.
WENICKE’S AREA
•Wernicke’s area is a cortical area in the rear of the lobe in the left hemisphere connected to
Broca’s area involved in speech production, comprehension of speech, location of appropriate
words from memory to convey meaning.
WENICKE’S APHASIA
•Wernicke’s aphasia (fluent aphasia, sensory aphasia, receptive aphasia) is a type of aphasia
whereby a person has considerable difficulty comprehending speech and speaking in a meaningful
way.
•A person with Wernicke’s aphasia will often have fluent and grammatically correct speech, but
what is said is nonsense.
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: IS IT SPECIAL?
•Until the 1940s and 1950s, general view that learning language was like any other form of
learning.
•Behaviourist traditions - form associations between sounds and meanings.
•But various experiences (mainly failures...) led to the realisation that something different was
going on with language.
LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
CRITICAL PERIOD/S FOR LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
•There seems to be a critical period (between the ages of 5 and puberty) during which language
develops readily and after which language acquisition is harder and less successful.
•Example is how kids can learn friends’ languages easily. Probably up until about puberty you can
learn another language with facility but after this it is very difficult.
•Evidence:
•1. The effect of language deprivation during the critical period
•2. The effects of damage to language areas in the brain (children recover more readily than
adults).
•3. The ages at which a second language is acquired.
Document Summary
Background: by 5 years children have mastered the basic structure of their language, whether spoken or manually signed. Language distinctions: language comprehension, understanding what others are saying, language production, actual speaking, language comprehension precedes language production. Phonological development: the acquisition of knowledge about phonemes, the elementary units of sound that distinguish meaning. Syntactic development: learning the syntax or rules for combining words, grammar. Often will say i don"t know how to say it". Language development: language development mastery of components, language generativity, semantic development: long term developmental process, pragmatic development: long term developmental process, idea of language generativity is still going on. Broca"s area: broca"s area is responsible for the production of articulate speech, movement of muscles required for speech, understanding grammatical structure of sentences, damage results in slow, short sentences lacking adjectives and conjunctions and difficulty comprehending sentences with abnormal structure.
