GL

• Content


  • Concept of time in different languages [past/present/future]- cross-linguistic variation
  • The multilingual mind
  • Language and the body
  • Language and thought
• Gesture


  Communicative body movement
• Not only speech conveys meaning, we use our bodies to express a range of different meanings
• Using hands and arms [also face /feet and legs] = often but not only these placements
• Gestures are often culture-specific
• Gestures


  • German example: Micheal Fassbender video [hand =3 finger shape]
  • South Africa: driving signals: leeway
  • Facial gestures when a person does not hear you = nose gesture + position
• Different types of gestures

  • Gesticulation
  • Speech-framed gestures
  • Emblems
  • Pantomimes
  • Signs
• Gesticulation


  Conveys meaning related to accompanying speech
• Speech-framed gestures


  • Fills in slots in speech: cycling gesture: "She went..."
  • Gap in speech = gesture
• Emblems


  • Conventionalized signs: thumbs up or down [ Roman live or die]
  • Other examples: wave=hello, middle finger= anger, peace sign etc.
• Pantomimes


  Produced in the total absence of speech
• Signs


  Lexical words in sign language
• Gesture dimensions (only applies to gesticulation and speech-framed gestures)

  • Iconic
  • Metaphoric
  • Deictic
  • Beats
• Iconic gestures


  Convey images of concrete objects or actions
• Metaphoric gestures


  Convey images of abstract entities or actions
• Deictic gestures


  Locate actions and entities in space with regards to point of reference
• Beat gestures


  Highlights selected parts of the speech
• Studying gesture [gesticulation and speech–framed] can reveal things about thought
• Gesturing about time


  • Choice of right/left hand might reveal sideways timelines
  • Opposite patterns of gestures of speech: eg Morocco speakers gesture backwards for the future however they speak of it as in front of them and vice versa for the past [ Darja-speakers]
• L2 learners might gesture according to their 1st language, but at more advanced levels of L2 acquisition, they are more likely to align with native speakers and their L1 might start to show influence of their L2
• Psycholinguistics


  The psychological study of language, part of the cognitive sciences dedicated to studying the human mind
• Language, being the defining trait of humans, is a window into the human mind
• Due to differences in theoretical and methodological views, linguistics, and psychology 'divorce' for a while
• Regulation of behaviorism in favor of cognitivism [including generativists] places focus on the mind, which spawns a psychology of language
• Modern Psycholinguistics researches the psychological, social, and biological foundations of language to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite several types
• The McGurk effect shows the role of vision in language processing: What we see influences what we hear
• Modern psycholinguistics has emerged in the West, which is problematic as mostly Western languages and speakers have been studied, under the erroneous assumption that all languages are the same
• WEIRD people (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) around 10% of the world's population, so studies on non-WEIRD populations may falsify allegedly universal human behavior
• Speech production goes through a range of different processes, which are further broken down into steps: Conceptualizer, Formulator, and Articulation

  
• Macro-planning involves segmenting the situation into different events and selecting the constituents of each event, while micro-planning involves structuring the events in relation to one another and linearization
• Differences in grammatical and lexical categories lead to speakers describing the same event in diverse ways, which children acquire as they learn the language
• Speakers of some languages are prone to exhibit fine-grained retellings and to temporarily link the events in a deictic way, while speakers of other languages are prone to exhibit event retellings and to link the events temporarily in an anaphoric way
• Newborns react differently to the theme song of their mother's favourite soap, cry differently depending on their mother tongue, and by 6 months old, infants are less sensitive to speech sounds not from their mother tongues
• Infants can be tested using eye tracking, event-related potentials, sucking frequency paradigm, and head-turn preference procedure
• Delayed exposure to language, such as in the case of Genie or children with otitis media, can lead to significantly weaker language proficiency even later in life, suggesting an early start is crucial for successful language acquisition
• Languages across the world describe reality in semantically diverse ways, and the way we talk about certain phenomena can influence the way we think about them
• Early thinkers had different views on the relationship between language and thought, from Augustinus' view that language is just a tool, to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity

  
• From the 1950s onwards, research tended to focus more on what is common/universal to all human languages and human cognition, but the 1990s saw a resurgence of research into language and thought using experimental methods from cognitive psychology
• Contemporary research shows that cross-linguistic differences in grammatical and lexical categories may [but not always] give rise to cross-linguistic differences in cognition, providing partial support for the principle of linguistic relativity
• Just looking at how people talk does not necessarily tell us anything about how they think