Lecture

• Language differs from communication in these 4 ways: 1. Its symbolic and has arbitrary units of meaning 2. Structured and meaningful (Grammar/order of the words)3.Shows displacement(Talks about all tenses) 4. Characterized by generativity(creates new combinations of language)
• General Communication is moreso about how animals communicate and language is a step up and is how humans communicate.
• Younger jits, can't hear low pitches of sound as well as adults can
• Between 2000 to 4000 Hz is the pitch of speech, so the brain is specifically tuned into those frequencies; meaning we could hear those frequencies better at a lower threshold
• Infant-directed speech is consistent across cultures and ages
• Infant-directed speech is done to draw out the infant's attention and exaggerating speech sounds which may help them learn languages/sounds easier.
• Phonemes: individual speech sounds that are joined to create words; can use habituation/dishabituation techniques to measure them
• Perceptual narrowing for phonemes: As a lil jit, you can distinguish many speech sounds but as you glow up, brain becomes more specialized and you distingush only what you've heard in your environment
• Its easier to learn languages, the younger you are
• By 5 to 6 months, babies start responding to their own names. By 6 to 9 months, they start attaching meaning to words
• Word comprehension has to occur before production
• Word production develops twice as slow as word comprehension
• Children understand 50 words before producing 10
• Cooing occurs at around of 2 months.
• By 4 to 6 months, there's simple babbling(more complex than cooing).
• By 7 to 9 months, babies start complex babbling where they combine different sounds
• At 8 to 11 months, there's babbling with intonation in which there are pitch dynamics
• First words of a jit comes about 12 months of age
• 10 months olds communicate thru pointing(can help jits learn new words)
• There are cultural differences in gesture use
• At around 18 months, there's an exponential growth in word production
• How do babies associate words with specific things?

  They use heuristics(mental tricks) and fast mapping(Guessing what's being labeled)
• Fast mapping is aided by social cues(Pointing), also assume labels are nouns and not features of it and context(exclusion word learning in which there's a link between an unknown object and unknown word within a sentence)
• Early word learning is somewhat heritable, related to phonological memory and very receptive to a rich language environment
• Holophrases: A phrase that contains a single word or phrase but may mean something more in the context
• Holophrases develop around 1 years old
• Telegraphic speech develops around 1.5 years and it incorporates stringing along words w/o grammar n shit
• Transition to sentences occurs at around 2.5 years and multiple words with some grammar comes in
• Grammatical morphemes are units of speech and fall within rules of the language syntax
• Overregularization errors: Using syntax rules in an inappropriate context; dumbass jit says there are 2 womens but its lowkey not his fault cuz english is wack
• Understanding of non-literal meanings(metaphors and sarcasm) develops into adolescence.
• There are some word-retrieval issues in later adulthood
• In general, language skills remain stable in healthy older adults
• Operant conditioning doesn't fully explain language acquisition because language is generative
• Noam Chompsky, has the nativist perspective in which he proposes that humans have the language acquisition device(innate verbal processor that gets activated by input).
• Noam Chompsky mainly proposes that language learning is special and the brain is operating on a different level than it would in other contexts
• Wernicke's(speech comprehension) and Broca's area(speech production) are parts of the brain are uniquely human
• Broca's area is closer to the motor cortex while Wernicke's area seems to be closer to the auditory/temporal lobe.
• Grammar is extremely human specific in language. Animals can't really do this
• Humans have a sensitive period for grammar learning; Genie case study