Counting

I found it very intriguing that counting is innate knowledge, at least in small numbers. In the reading, it talked about infants’ understanding of small numbers. There are many studies that have been done on children’s understanding of counting and numbers, including Starkey’s experiment with numerical abstraction. The thing that I found particularly interesting about these experiments, and the knowledge gained from them, is that children’s ability to count seems to coincide with the preoperational stage of development. In the text, they discuss cardinality, and suggest that children grasp understanding of larger numbers as they age, which makes sense. The older they get, the more experience they have with numbers, and the more opportunities they have to assimilate knew information into their old schemas for counting.

The rules that children observe for counting are very interesting also, because it shows how much complexity there is to human thinking. I’m sure that most adults have never considered how they go about the counting concept, but we are able to determine, through observing children, how proficiency is gained in counting, and how much of it we are born with, and how much is gained through experience.

One thing that I did not understand from the text was how it could be useful that a child can use an incorrect counting system (1, 3, 6, etc.), though I did find it interesting that they would consistently use that system. I also wonder how they could come up with such an incorrect counting system that still incorporated numbers. What is it that keeps them from using letters or colors or shapes or other unspecified sounds to count? Is that something that is innate, or learned through hearing others count?

Another particularly interesting concept is that children can understand simple arithmetic as early as five months old. The thing that sparks my interest is that they have a basic understanding of the concept so early, but cannot explain their understanding much later in life, and often have trouble replicating it, for example on math tests in early school years.

It does seem like useful knowledge for a child to have, and perhaps there is an evolutionary explanation for why children are able to grasp only small numbers. Perhaps it has to do with being able to maintain a count of your family unit. I would assume that in the days of early humanity, family units were not very big, because excess numbers of children could not be provided for. This may cause infants to develop familiarity with just a few people early in their lives, and this leads to their basic understanding of the concept of numbers. I, of course, don’t really know how this came about, but I like to speculate about things like that. The comparison between the aboriginal children and the schooled children of Australia provided some interesting evolutionary understanding of spatial understanding, and perhaps could have been expanded to include basic number tasks as well. It has been mentioned that uneducated people in other countries are capable of doing math and taking measurements, but they often live in caste systems, or other types of systems where professions are handed down through families, and perhaps an informal education of mathematics occurs from generation to generation, in order to make each person’s job that much easier. Regardless, it is good to know that our concept of numbers isn’t completely socialized, but that experiences lead to further understanding and expansion of basic knowledge.

And on a completely different topic, I also was under the impression that both doors on a racecar are traveling at the same speed. I’m glad I was able to learn something about myself from the text as well. :-)

Second language and critical period

The study by Johnson and Newport (1989) had suggested that people who learn a second language is better when they learn it before the critical age 7. As an international student, my comment to their study is “tell me about it”. I strongly agree that it is better to start learning a second language as early as possible. Take myself as an example. I came to United States when I was 19 years old. Although I have been studying English since I was 11, I still cannot speak English as fluently as native speaker do. On the other hand, my friends who came here before the age of 17 could always speak more fluently than I do. As Johnson and Newport suggested, maturational state might be one of the factors to learn a second language proficiently. However, I suggest that external environment and self- motivation might affect the level of proficiency of a second language in the study by Johnson and Newport(1989).

Clearly, it is undeniable that people who learn a second language in young age have better foundation, such as pronunciation, accent, and grammar, than others who learn a second language later in life. Yet, it is necessary to consider the social lives of participants in the study by Johnson and Newport (1989), because the social network of a participant might influence his or her proficiency of a second language in later life. For example, one of my American friends learned both Japanese and Chinese very well because not only he went to study abroad in Japan and China but also due to the fact that most of his friends from college are Japanese and Chinese. It is the effort he made to be surrounded in an environment that he can practice foreign languages as much as possible that made him achieved a high level of fluency in foreign language. Similarly, regardless of age differences, the participants in the study by John and Newport(1989) would have better performance in studying English as second language if their friends are mostly native-speakers. So, our social networks would have strong influence on the proficiency of acquiring a second language even though we already passed the critical period.

Nevertheless, the participants who started learning English as a second language in young age in the study by Johnson and Newport (1989) might have more friends who are native-speaker than the participants who started after age 17. First of all, the participants who came to the United States before age 7 could blend into the culture and society in the United States better than their parents because they do not have strong influence from their own cultures as their parents do. On the other hand, the adults might feel more comfortable to hang out with people who share with the same cultural background. Thus, adults might have more friends with same culture and language background even if they have stayed in the United States for several years already. As a result, it is easier for the participants who came to the U.S in their early-life than the participants who came after age 17 to be friends with native-speakers.

Furthermore, the goal of learning a second language might be different between children and adults. For the participants who came to the U.S after age 17, their main goal may be to obtain college degrees or to make a living. Thus, their priorities lie on learning sufficient English to cope with the language requirement of works and school. Unlike adults, children do not have time or work pressure. Therefore, the participants, who came to the U.S in young age, could focus on making friends with native-speakers and learning a second language without pressure.

In conclusion, age is one of determining factors for achieving fluency in a second language. In addition, it is almost impossible to have native level of pronunciation learning a language after puberty. However, effort and willingness to completely submerge in a culture and speak only the learning language can make a tremendous difference in fluency level regardless of age. Therefore, future study should investigate proficiency among people not only by age difference but also by external environment and self-motivation.

The advantages of a second language

There are several advantages to knowing and learning a second language throughout your life. Research has shown that the best time to learn a second language is before you hit puberty. At this time in your life your brain is more adapt to learn and process more things. With more research being done to prove this, it is in our best efforts to start a dual language learning system. One of the earlier researchers on this topic was Lenneberg.

Lenneberg theorize that there was a critical period in an individual’s life that they could learn a second language. Lenneberg hypotheses were that the critical age for learning the second language was between early infancies and puberty. Lenneberg theory was based off of two points. The first point was that the evidence to date only showed strong learning in children before they reached puberty. His second point came from the theory that your brain matured at puberty. The maturation of the brain loses its ability for “the plasticity and reorganization capacities necessary fro acquiring language” (Johnson & Newport p. 62). Lenneberg studied native Korean or Chinese speakers that arrived in the United States at various ages. Lenneberg studied the proficiency of the English that these individuals acquired as their second language. His finding showed that the participants that began learning English at an earlier age showed a better proficiency compared to the participants that learned English at a later stage in life.

Lenneberg theory stated that learning a second language was easier during infancy and puberty. One reason for this is that your environment helps shape your learning. During the years that Lenneberg suggested for optimal amount of learning would be considered your leaning years. At this stage in your life, all you are doing is going to school to learn and experiencing new things. If the learning can start early in life and begin in the home, then the child will have an advantage in school. An example of this concept is a friend of mine that spoke French to his wife for an hour each day in front of his children. During this time the parents would allow the children to play among themselves while they carried on conversations. The conversations continued until they began teaching their children French. The results of the children put them ahead of their peers when they entered school.

The children of my friend will more likely have multiple advantages in life in addition to the head start they had in school. One advantage is the global possibility that comes with a second language. It is becoming more common for languages other than English to be spoken in urban America. The skill of a second language will also help children when they reach adulthood. The second language will propel them into an international job. At the minimum, the second language will help them in school where foreign language is needed for most degrees.

Our society is beginning to revolve around a two language environment. The known benefits of learning a second language heavily outweigh the disadvantages of not learning the second language. This raises the question of why a second language is not taught in grade school. The exercise hypothesis states that if you don’t use it, than you will lose it. The foundation that my friend gave his children can easily be lost if the education system doesn’t begin teaching foreign language at an earlier age.

What about cognitive development for children with disabilities?

In class we talked about NSL, the Nicaraguan Sign Language or also called in Spanish, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN). This new sign language is different and unique, which was created by young deaf children who grasped their own concepts from their community and translated into pidgin home like forms and gestures. Although NSL was created only for young children, there was some adult intervention in shaping young deaf children's basic word concepts and meanings. Now a more challenging task is to help and show concepts and word meanings to deaf-blind children. Here we can recreate a story of how a child might develop concepts. " The story goes like this: Four blind men touch an elephant. The one who touches the trunk says, “An elephant is like a thick wiggling vine.” The one who touches an ear says, “No, an elephant is like a big leathery fan.” The one who touches the body says, “No! An elephant is like a big brick wall!” And the one who touches the tail says, “How could you all be so wrong?! An elephant is like a hanging, swaying rope!”(Miles and McLetchie. 2004, p 1). These two author gives us an introduction of concept development and how important is to not only direct these kids with concepts, but to enter into a relationship with them and try to understand their concepts and their world. This is important because based on how we perceive concepts we perceive our world; therefore in creating a more useful and meaningful way to redirect these children to acquire concepts, the more useful skills they will get.
The authors also make a remark on how important positive relationships are for heightening a child self-concepts and social concepts. For a child who has these disabilities takes longer time to get concepts right about their own environment. Then it is important to be aware about our own unconscious reactions and criticism and or negative remarks. Some of the techniques they suggest are to show tactual close up of things and describe them accurately, demonstrate actions before asking the child to do, document children concepts, how they understand this concepts and how the way they express themselves, so it could be useful to other kids.

As adults we transmit the knowledge of language, concepts and communications and these kids needs even more guidance and patience in assessing them with any need they want. There are places where they attend, but every single person they get in touch with are person who would lead them to get more sense about themselves and their own word. Be mindful and thoughtful in what we consciously or unconsciously redirect children in gaining language, self concept and meaning in their world.

Baby-Media Products versus Social Interaction

Baby-media products business is growing rapidly, with companies that produce videos such as Baby Einstein, Baby Genius, and Brainy Baby earning millions of dollars annually. Such companies claim that they provide parents with tools that would boost up babies’ cognitive development, including language acquisition. They assert babies can acquire a broader vocabulary by passively watching their videos. However, research on the effects of social interaction is challenging these marketing claims by demonstrating both the contribution of social cues and the effects of lack of social interaction on language acquisition.
Social cues contribute to language acquisition by providing infants an interactive learning environment for mapping words to meanings. According to Baldwin (1991, 1993), infants as young as 16 to 19 months use nonverbal cues to label objects by the means of joint reference. They also use their understandings of other people’s intentions to label words (Tomasello & Barton, 1994). They associate a word with an action only if the action is performed intentionally, and avoid such association if a word is uttered accidentally during a novel action. By looking at a screen and listening to matching voices instead of social interaction, infants are deprived of such joint visual attention and communicative intentions.
The effects of such lack of social interaction in language acquisition are demonstrated by a study which compared live social interaction with televised foreign-language material (Kuhl, 2003). In this study, a group of nine-month-old infants, whose native language is English, listened to native speakers of Mandarin as the speakers read the infants books or interacted with them by showing toys. Another group of infants either saw the same speakers on a television screen or heard them over loudspeakers. Then, the infants were tested with a Mandarin phonetic contrast that does not occur in English. The infants who interacted with Mandarin speakers performed on phonetic tests better than both the control group which was not exposed to any Mandarin, and the auditory and visual exposure groups. This study suggests that regardless of which language the infants are being exposed to, language acquisition is enhanced by social interaction.
It is not only the presence of social interaction, but also its quality that affects language acquisition. To demonstrate this, Tomasello and Ferrar (1986) compared vocabularies of infants between 12 to 18 months whose mothers tend to label more or fewer objects. This study revealed that mothers who labeled fewer objects also followed their infants’ interest instead of redirecting it and such an interaction appeared to benefit the infants. Their infants performed better on language tasks than infants of mothers who labeled more things and did not follow their infants, interests. As suggested by this study, infants acquire language better through opportunities of social interaction in which they play an active part.
Infants are not recording machines. They play an active role in their own learning experience both by observing and interacting with other human beings. Companies that sell baby videos appear to ignore this active nature of language acquisition; they treat babies as passive agencies that emit information regardless of the source. They tend to ignore that their two-dimensional products cannot follow an infant’s gaze or show facial expressions in sync with the baby. As supported by infant research, current baby-media products cannot replace the social interaction infants need to prosper in language acquisition.

18 Month Old Vocab Explosion

In class the other day we were talking about how children learn words slowly and then have an explosion in there vocabulary. But I was very curious as to how and why children experience a vocabulary explosion around 18 months of age. In an article on ScienceDaily there was an article on just this topic. Professor Bob McMurray at the University of Iowa found that it is not a complex explanation for this phenomenon but is rather simple. He said that “The field of developmental psychology and language development has always assumed that something happens at that point to account for this word spurt: kids discover things have names, they switch to using more efficient mechanisms and they use their first words to help discover new ones.” He says that simply by repeating words over time along with varying the difficulty of the words and the fact that children are learning multiple words at once all account for this dramatic increase in vocabulary. “Children are going to get that word spurt guaranteed, mathematically, as long as a couple of conditions hold,” McMurray said. “They have to be learning more than one word at a time, and they must be learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy words. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if those two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion.” As long as there are more difficult words than easy ones, the vocabulary explosion is guaranteed. But since there are few words in any language that are used an overwhelming number of times in ordinary speech the frequency of use is considered as a measure of degree of difficulty, and thus showing that languages have many more difficult words than easy ones according to McMurray.

I found this article to be very interesting about the explosion of vocabulary. I also thought that it was interesting in class when we were talking about when parents orient to their children’s gaze and then tell them the word that they will understand it better than if the parent just shows them an object and tells them the name of it. It makes sense that this would happen because the child would already be interested in the object and wants to learn more about it. I also think that reading at least one book to your child every day, encouraging the child to repeat short sentences, and reading rhymes with interesting sounds, especially those accompanied by actions or pictures would also increase the vocabulary for the child. It is just amazing to me the whole developmental process and how language is acquired.

Patterns in Frequency and Pitch

I especially appreciated the article “Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants” by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport. It was interesting to read more evidence that what infants are first hearing and discerning are patterns in speech. This makes sense to me because this is a standard method of decryption or understanding and categorizing a new and unfamiliar observation. An infant has to learn to identify separate words, and has to figure out how to assign meaning to the words once they are identified.

I also found it very interesting that infants could identify differences between a string of nonsense words, and the same string with some errors. The infants are recognizing familiar patterns, and learning to separate those out from the rest of the unfamiliar sounds. The article also mentions that infants use the pattern of sounds (as in the phrase “pretty#baby”) to identify where one word ends and another starts.

A similar concept and learning tool that has been discussed in many of my psych classes is motherese (Infant Directed Talk). This form of speaking is slower and does tend to use smaller words, but I think the most significant and helpful aspect is the “sing-song”-like nature of the speech. A previous class showed a video from a study involving mothers from different cultures and languages. The mothers were recorded while talking with their infant. There were four basic types of communication found: soothing, attention-getting, cautioning/saying no, and I think the fourth was questioning, but I cannot recall.

What fascinated me about this study was that when the pitch of the mother’s voice was analyzed, the same pattern was found to apply to the same meaning of the speech, regardless of the language (unfortunately, I cannot recall the specific study). Other studies have indicated that infants pay more attention to IDT as opposed to normal adult-directed speech, and that they understand more when listening to IDT (again, I don’t remember the name or authors of the study).

This information suggests to me that tone and pitch is another way infants analyze patterns in language when they are learning to understand the sounds around them.

My View on the Unique Process of Language Development

Language has been proven to be a highly unique form of learning within human beings. However, it is necessary to question if language is indeed a special form of learning in comparison to all other forms of cognitive development. It is also necessary to determine which view on language development stands to be the most universally accepted and appropriate. Chomsky’s theory, people possess a "language organ," seems a bit unrealistic. Personally, before even reading Chomsky’s theory in depth, I questioned why he coined the term language organ to describe how the rapid learning process of language occurs, the title doesn’t seem cognitively appropriate. However, he does have points which bring resolution to the topic in question. His concept surrounds the idea that language is too complex and inconsistent for infants to develop it so quickly. This organ holds the innate knowledge of aspects of grammar that apply universally, and allow infants to learn their particular native language quickly. Conversely, it seems his term of "universal grammar" is a variable concept unable to be definitively explained by psychologists. While Chomsky’s theory gave an answer to the question into how language development occurs at the rate it does, it also displays a very narrow view into the reasons behind why language development occurs, a strictly nativist view.
I feel we must consider all ends of the spectrum when it comes to a concept so deeply complex as language acquisition development. I am more accepting of a connectionist view which embodies a multitude of language learning. Yes, I believe there is some innate and universal nature to an infants’ rapid development of their native language. However, I am in firm belief that not only does this form of learning hold innate properties, but it also must require social presence for this ability to develop at the rate it does. It must stem from and be influenced by both a behavioral and native basis. Without infant’s exposure to the adult language occurring around them, they would not have the ability to develop language. A child must be exposed to aspects of grammar before he/she can reiterate forms of language. However, there must also be something stemming from our six million years of evolution as humans that has produced teh ability to desire communication. Language development is indefinitely one of the most unique forms of cognitive development. It should not be limited to one view explaining why it is so indefinitely unique and extensive.

Children and language

Learning about language over the past week has been a great experience and very helpful as well. I am currently in an internship where I help with early intervention with 2 years. It is nice to be able to apply the stages of language to the stage they are in developmentally. For instance seeing the conversational babbling and knowing that they are learning up to 9 new words a day is absolutely amazing. I have been trying to watch to see if I could notice just by looking if they show any left symmetry when they speak. This can be at times difficult because they are always moving. But after reading the article titled “Left Hemisphere Cerebral Specialization for Babies while Babbling” I found it much easier to understand what the different movements of their mouth mean. And I know that at this age it is already well established that they are not just moving their mouth for motor skills but because they really are trying to talk. However it is still neat to see when they smile its slightly more to the right and when they babble or even say actual words that it is predominately on the left side of their mouth.

With that being said I was trying to apply this concept to the one we discussed about children being able to rebound easier from a stroke or injury to their left hemisphere. How is it then if at 5 months that they are already showing signs that their brain has already assigned a certain area for language that they are able to still compensate for the injury? For example the little girl that was rescued at the age of 6 and was still able to sort of go on and make sentences. Was this possible because she was able to babble even if she wasn’t getting the social interactions that she needed or is it just a completely unrelated topic? Is It possible that someone who has no social interaction will still develop their left hemisphere for language? Is it innate or learned? Obviously the social and physiological tie into one another because without someone to guide us as children through the stages of development we will probably be stunted in some way. I also recently read somewhere that children who are born premature will not develop at the same rate as another child who is also 18 months old but was carried to full term. They said this was because depending on how premature the baby was they are actually that far behind. I will have to find the place I read this and site it later. I just thought it was an interesting idea.

Another interesting thing that I learned in class was about in class is that when teaching children words to go along with what the word is associated to it is important to tell them the words of what they are looking at instead of calling their attention away to show them what we are looking at. I am working on this with the two year old to see how much they can learn just by doing this with them instead of making them look at something they are not interested in. Then also rewarding them with praise when they get something correct. It is nice to see the children progress and I can’t wait to see how everything goes over the next couple of months. Not only do I get to help these children develop their language skills but also their social skills, which I have found can be important in teaching language. Teaching them how to speak correctly in order to express their frustrations, happiness, and needs so that other children and adults can understand what it is that they are need.

Second Language Aquistion and the maturational state hypothesis

I found this topic to be extremely interesting mainly because one of my best friends has experienced the development of several languages over the course of her life. Her first language and the one that she speaks at home with her family is Farsi (the language spoken in Iran). When she was two she was relocated to Italy where she learned to speak Italian almost fluently, later when she was about seven her family again moved to the United States where she learned to speak English. This is the language that she speaks most because she had been in this country since then and uses it on a day to day basis. She then learned Spanish in college. Although she speaks English extremely well and most people would think that it was her first language, she still has some interesting grammatical mistakes which I find to be fascinating. What I also find to be fascinating about her story is the fact that English is the only language which she can read and write fluently (she does fairly well with Spanish however this is a newly acquired language). She also no longer remembers how to speak or understand Italian.
After reading the Johnson and Newport article on critical periods of language acquisition I felt that the maturational state hypothesis seemed to be more supported by this particular case study. I feel that the fact that she was able to learn so many completely new languages in such a short span of her life shows the ability of children to adapt their language to the environment in which they are in. Her brother who is only four years older than she, never learned Italian and still has a very thick accent. I find this to show that children really do have a critical period in which they are able to learn language, and learn it with ease. I felt that the exercise theory would be hard to prove because of the fact that so much research has shown that adults have a harder time learning a new language, even if they live in a new country. My friend's parents for example still are not very comfortable speaking English and they have been in this country for a very long time, and know English. I relate it to when I was learning to speak Spanish and even though I could understand what was being said I still was not comfortable converstating.
I feel that this critical period could be used to better improve the way in which ESL students are treated in schools. My friend had a very difficult time adjusting when she first came to this country and I feel that part of it had to do with the insensitivity of our school systems when it comes to non native English speakers.

Spanglish

Out of pure coincidence I got into a discussion this week about how our country should deal with Spanish speakers in areas like southern California. The stance I took was that we should make efforts to teach the incoming Hispanic population English, but that we should not make changes that make it difficult for some one from another region in America to manage. My girlfriends stance was a lot more humanitarian, claiming that there a necessary part of our agriculture industry, which aught to make their native language a priority as well. I still hold my views, mainly because I believe that while this is thoughtful in the short-run, it does nothing to encourage emigrants to learn English, or teach it to their children. There is a division in those areas, and while it is due to a whole lot of things, it’s probably safe to say that a majority of these are caused by not being able to communicate.
I still hold all of my opinions the core of which that English should be maintained as our countries dominant language in all of its regions, but I’ll admit that the way to do this isn’t to make managing without it impossible. I have my own experience learning a language and I really don’t think that without being immersed in it I would have any chance, and even then I would be marginal at best. So I can’t honestly say that Mexican adults can be expected to master English. It also can’t really be expected that they don’t speak to their children for fear of passing along Spanish. Spanish is obviously going to be the first language for a majority of second-generation Mexican-Americans. It’s not until the third generation that it can be reasonably expected that English will be the child’s first language. When someone mentioned Spanglish the other day it made me curious why it’s not considered a pidgin language. I don’t know too much about the Hawaii case but it doesn’t seem to me that the situations are all that different. There are two groups that speak different languages that need to be able to understand each other. Maybe pidgin languages also require an isolation factor, like an island or secluded area, so that there is not an established language being used. It will be interesting to see if the best thing to do is nothing, and allow the generations to work this out.

Language

This week has been spent discussing how children learn language. This is a particularly interesting topic for me. I have always wondered how we acquire what we know about language. Are we destined to learn language? We have focused on several viewpoints, including the nativist, behvaiorist, and new approaches that find a compromise between the two. I believe that a compromise between the two views appears most accurate when examining language. It wouldn’t make sense thinking that language was only part of nature because that view completely denies the large role language plays as a social construct. While I do believe that certain aspects of language are inherent and innate, there are other parts that are learned through culture and experiences within one’s environment. When learning new words or how to use those words children look to their parents to provide them with the proper social cues utilizing their ability to social reference. The study by Baldwin found that when mentioning a new word that children haven’t heard before they follow the gaze of the person who is talking. This suggests that children use their parents as a referencing tool and know that whatever a person is talking about they are most likely looking at it as well.

I found all of the information this week particularly interesting because I can directly apply it to my life. My friend has daughter who recently turned two and she doesn’t talk much, in fact she rarely talks at all. She knows single words, but hasn’t reached that point in which she strings at least two of them together. Her favorite words happen to be stop, no, open, and push. We are currently trying to teach her to use her words instead of pointing, while trying to teach her words for other objects. She appears to understand what we are saying when we ask her to do something, but for some reason she just won’t use her words. Something I took from last lecture that I think will greatly help my friend in his quest is to use follow in labeling, as well as making sure that whatever he is referring to he should be looking at.

I have a question about the Nicaraguan sign language. It was stated that it started out as home signs that the children developed themselves within their homes to help them communicate with their family. However, I would think that these home signs weren’t simply of the child’s construct. Wouldn’t the parents and those around them have played a role in their child’s home signs? Those around the children would have to know what they meant when certain signs were used so possibly they aided in creating those signs. And if this was the case than the pidgin becoming a creole was influenced by social factors.

The Critical Period Regarding Language Acquisition

While sitting thru lecture this past Wednesday I kept having flashbacks to a class I took about a year ago. It was a language acquisition class and we were discussing the "critical period" of developing language. Up to that point in my life I had never really put any thought into such a notion but it sounded like a good idea. One thing jumped into my head, that was my nephew Jalen and how quickly he picked up words growing up. Thinking about him and comparing that to myself trying to learn Spanish helped me to wrap my head around the concept.

Spending time with my nephew growing up gave me a little insight to how quickly children develop the ability to learn new words. I would go over to see him and anything new that he saw would cause him to point and say, "wha dat?" he wouldn't even think about saying the word but he would point at the same thing over and over again. By the time I would leave he would have driven a couple of words into his head and mine, I remember the first time he did this I couldn't stop thinking about frogs (that was his discovery of the afternoon). Sure enough, the next time I went over Jalen pointed at the frog on his chair and uttered the word to me with a reassured smile on his face, then he pointed at the turtle and said, "wah dat?"

That story doesn't mean much but it unlocked something for me with regards to children and language. They go about their business one word at a time. Learning words like ball, cat, momma, and more. Eventually they build up enough they start to put together combinations and small simple sentences. Learning the grammatical rules as they go, making mistakes and correcting them eventually. All this happens during what we now call the "critical period" of language acquisition (pre puberty).

Why is the critical period important? Well, basically this is when the brain is in the entry mode of it's existence, it's all geared up for sucking in information. Our text book for class says that the average 1st grader understands 10,000 words and a 5th grader knows 40,000, break that down the the book says between 1.5 and 10 years of age you average 10 words per day.

So we all know that kids pick up language pretty quick, how about an 18 year old kid trying to learn Spanish at a community college. The first day of class (Monday) we were handed a sheet with 50 Spanish words on it, and told the quiz was Friday. If the average child can pull out 10 new words per day I should have been able to learn 50 words in 5 days. Wrong, I failed that quiz, and the class only got harder.

We really didn't spend much time learning to label the environment around us. Sure we learned what desk was and so on, but I didn't have the chance to point at something over and again like Jalen did. All the cue cards in the world don't add up to real experience like children get. Very quickly we moved onto grammatical rules, and simple phrases. The strangest thing about adults learning language is the fact that we don't really do it word by word. We do it with phrases you might use. If you were to ask me how to say library in Spanish I've got to think about it for a second, but if you ask me to utter the phrase, "Where is the library?" I can instantly say , "Donde es la biblioteca?" (if that's wrong I'm a bit rusty, but you get the idea).

My brain isn't prepared to learn a new language right now, I'm past that critical period in development. I will recommend one thing to my brother, that being Jalen needs to take a foreign language as soon as it's offered. Hopefully he won't wait till college and kill his GPA like I did for a couple of terms. People always say, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks" their wrong, you can, but when it comes to language; it's just gets a lot harder once you're out of that critical period.

Blog number 2

Something that I have found really interesting in this and other cognitive based classes, is different types of cognitive errors. How people, from infancy to adulthood, make consistent, predictable errors. Some of these errors make sense, and some adult errors you can see primitive versions of in infancy. I think that is fascinating. For example, the paper by Feigenson, Carey and Hauser about infant’s representations or more, I think really shows an elementary version of range of difficulty in adult representation of more. I am referring mostly to the fact that infants have an understanding that 2 is more than 1 and 3 is more than 2, but have trouble differentiating larger numbers, even with the same ratio and even after they accounted for other possible interactions, like motivation. I think that adults show a much more advanced version of this difficulty distinguishing differences, the more items there are, though I would guess adults would do better with ratios than infants do. It is just interesting to look at the evolution of perception, and how some things seem innate, and some things that intuitively seem simple can be more challenging than one might think, brain wiring plays a bigger role than I think people realize. This reminds me a lot of things I learned in cognition, for example, how people miss-judg steepness of a hill, especially when they think they are going to have to walk up it…I know that this is different, but I just find cognitive misjudgment to be really interesting.
Something else I have always found really interesting, that we have touched on a few times in class is brain plasticity. The brains abilities are incredible to me. To me, the best demonstration of this is how the brain processes language. First of all language is obviously extremely important evolutionarily speaking. Communication is vital to existence. So, it makes sense that the brain would spread out different components of language throughout the brain. The obvious example, seen in most psych classes, is Broca’s area versus Wernicke’s area. Broca’s area, is responsible for word production and Wernicke’s area, is responsible for language comprehension. This spreading out is important because, if there is a stroke in one area the other areas of communication may still be intact. And plasticity comes into play if that stroke is in younger kids, who can that use their more plastic brain’s to delegate space differently and possibly recover some abilities that the more cemented adult brain can’t.
This leads into the idea of a critical period. This is something that I have always found really interesting. I have wondered before why, if learning a first language is so smooth and intuitive, is it so hard to learn a second language? Admittedly, I always did really badly in second language classes, but I still wondered why it was so different. Obviously the process of learning a second language is very different because you are typically not emerged in it the same as when you learn a first language, but even when you do, if you learn a second language late, you never have the same connection to it. My best friends mom is a good example of this. She speaks only English, none of her kids know her native language and she has lived in an English speaking country most of her life, but she still speaks broken English, and holds on the grammatical and syntactical rules of her first language. And, people from the who share her first language, will make the same errors. I think this is even true for sounds, which is also really interesting, and happens really young. We loose the ability to differentiate between phonemes that don’t exist in our language, but seem completely different to people who natively speaks languages where they do exist. In class the other day we couldn’t even pick out an individual word spoken in a different language. It is incredible to me how our brain molds to our environment and looses certain things, like culturally irrelevant phonemes, probably in order for the rest of the brain to run more efficiently. And we completely loose these things. We cannot completely learn a language past a certain critical period (probably), and we will never really understand those different phonemes the way speakers of other languages do.

Crackers and Buttons.

In class, we watched a video of a four- or five-year-old child sitting opposite an experimenter, each with a graham cracker in front of them. The experimenter asks if they have shared the crackers equally, and the child nods. The experimenter then breaks her own cracker in half, and then asks the child again if they have shared the crackers equally. The child shakes her head, because now she perceives the experimenter as having two crackers, and she only having one – thus, the experimenter has “more”.

In our assigned reading about the experiments done by Feigenson, Carey and Hauser (2002), we read that 10- and 12-month-old infants who were given the choice between one large cracker versus two smaller ones (that added up to less than the bigger cracker), they preferred the large cracker. When given the choice between one cracker and two halves of a cracker the same size, they chose at chance. Thus, it appeared that they perceived “more” to be a function of the total surface area of the crackers, and not the number of crackers.

What does this mean? Why do 10- and 12-month-old infants seem to be able to represent the abstract quantity of surface area better than four- and five-year-olds? Would infants then be able to succeed at conservation tasks that much older children consistently fail to do? If so, why and how do they lose this ability?

The findings of Feigenson, Carey and Hauser (2002) suggest that babies can compare object files on the basis of continuous extent. It’s not as if they don’t have the ability to compare object files on the basis of one-to-one correspondence – there have been numerous other experiments that prove they can. Babies simply preferred to use the basis of continuous extent. It is not unconceivable, therefore, that this ability to compare abstract quantities is an innate ability, along with the other counting principles that Gelman and Gellistel (1978) suggested.

In my opinion, one strong possibility for the apparent “loss” of this ability in preoperational children is perceptual narrowing. We have learnt that neuronal connections that aren’t exercised weaken and wither away, resulting in a decrease of perceptual ability. Connections that are used frequently, on the other hand, are strengthened. As children develop their cognitive abilities, one of the first things parents teach their children is how to count. Very rarely do parents put crackers in front of their children and say, “Cracker A is bigger than Cracker B, therefore there is more of Cracker A”, or “I have two crackers and you have one, but the total area of my two crackers is smaller than the area of your cracker, so you have more.” It is much more likely that parents would just go, “I have one cracker, and you have one… We both have a cracker each!”, or “I have one cracker, and you have one… two… TWO crackers!”. Thus, the counting principles are emphasized and exercised, whereas the more abstract quantitative analysis is often ignored when both bases are present.

It is interesting to note, however, that this preference for the continuous extent basis for comparison does not completely disappear for preoperational children. Consider the child in the same video we watched, who was given two rows of five buttons and then asked if one row had more buttons than the other. She counted them both out and confidently announced that they were both the same, because there were five buttons in each. The experimenter then spread the buttons in one row out, so that it appeared longer, and then asked the child if one row had more buttons than the other. The child, who had just counted out the buttons, now said that the longer row had more buttons, thus displaying a preference for the continuous extent basis over the one-to-one correspondence.

Is this phenomenon is another instance of U-shaped development, in which the capabilities of performing a particular task first decrease, and then increase with age? Is this capability for abstract quantitative comparison in infants limited to surface area? We know that preoperational children often fail at conservation tasks, and that the majority of concrete operational children succeed. It would be interesting to design and conduct conservation tasks for sensorimotor infants to see if the hypotheses mentioned above hold any truth.

critical period

Through extensive research, there has been strong evidence for the hypothesis of a critical period for the acquisition of language, and that this is not an all or nothing phenomena. In the article by Johnson and Newport (1989), they assessed the age of acquisition of a second language by examining Chinese and Korean immigrants, and separated them into age specific categories. This allowed them to examine their hypothesis that second language acquisition follows the same critical period as first language acquisition. They concluded that second language learners exposed to the second language by age 7 could acquire the second language with the same proficiency as native speakers of that language. They also demonstrated that there is a asymptotic digression of proficiency for second language as a function of age of exposure. Similar findings been replicated in American Sign Language (ASL) learners, since there is a large age range when deaf people acquire ASL as their first language. In many exhaustive studies of language acquisition by Helen Neville and colleagues, she has demonstrated ERP evidence that supports Johnson and Newport's findings of second language acquisition. With all of the evidence supporting a critical period for language acquisition, what factors in development determine the deficits in language proficiency after the critical period? Is there a biological neural correlate or environmental factors that inhibit the ability to fully understand what causes the deficits in language learning? Referenced in Johnson and Newport's article is the study by Hubel and Weisel of ocular dominance column formation in the visual cortex, and the critical period for its development. In their experiments they showed that dominance columns form within a specific time period, ONLY of there is asymmetric input to the visual cortex, but if the cats were raised in a dark environment (eyes sutured shut from birth) that the critical period could be delayed long after the normal time window, with normal vision developing after opening the eyes. This adjustment of the critical period hasn't been shown in the development of language. So what determines the deficits shown in language mastery in late learning of language? Combining evidence from other studies, and studies of different cognitive modalities, it appears that there is some genetic neural basis for a language critical period. Genie, a girl confined for her early life, with minimal human contact and minimal language exposure, showed severe deficits in language proficiencies. She was able to acquire new words after rescue, but with severe syntactic deficits. Since visual information reaches the V1 region, and is then sent to other areas of the brain, it is essentially a more simple system than the many systems involved in language comprehension, and production. Should we assume that there is an absolute critical window for language that is a result of neural changes globally in the brain that are involved with language acquisition, or only certain regions involved in language abilities. I feel that the latter is a better hypothesis. For instance, Genie is able to produce words without impediment, and can link words into a meaningful statement, but she is unable to link the words together in a tense specific, grammatically correct manner. This leads me to conclude that the cortical region(s) involved in syntax, are primarily linked to a critical period. This is evident in Johnson and Newport's findings as well. I have personal anecdotal evidence that supports this hypothesis. In grade school, we studied basic Spanish words (i.e. counting, greeting, basic vocabulary), but did not study any of the semantics of the language. In high school, I learned many more words easily, and studied without becoming proficient, the syntactic components of Spanish. I still have a large Spanish vocabulary, but like Genie, I make gross syntactic errors.

This research has a strong social/environmental component that is not being addressed. Are adults living in a community that uses their non-native language, that are attempting to acquire the language, are being inhibited through stereotyping and overt discrimination? Is the language barrier between them and those who they interact with to gain exposure to the second language resulting in avoidance of communicating, thus they receive less exposure than children who generally don't have as much exposure to stereotypes, and prejudice? Johnson and Newport attempted to determine if self-consciousness was a factor in their learning. After reviewing the methods of their research, there may be a cultural confound in their research, because the questioning doesn't appear to be in terms that would be culturally accurate for native Asians. It would be advantageous to conduct an assessment of this with the assistance of a culture expert to develop culturally significant questions to see what role stereotype/prejudice plays in second language development in adults.

Potentiality or Innateness?

Noam Chomsky suggested that humans are born with a “language organ” that incorporates an innate mechanism for comprehension of certain characteristics of grammar. He maintains that intrinsic “universal grammar” knowledge allows children to recognize which type of grammar is used by their native language. Without this system, Noam claims, children could not learn language as quickly and as easily as they do.

Many researchers, while agreeing that language learning is special, disagree with the notion that a special “organ” exists for language. MacWhinney asserts that language learning is special, and that varieties of aspects including neural, cognitive, and social factors play a role. I tend to agree with MacWhinney’s theory.

I believe that labeling language as innate is underestimating the social factors that are key to one’s language acquisition. I am more inclined to believe that the potential to learn language is innate. The word “innate” conveys to us that something is present at birth and initiated from the intellect rather than from experience. A child will not acquire language without experience. Breathing, crying, and sucking are but a few of the innate abilities that infants come into the world with, language is not.

Among the reasons for my dissent from the innate theory is the evidence of plasticity. If language was innate and a special organ or area were required in order for one to procure language then if that area of the brain were damaged language could not be learned. That, however, is not always the case. The research indicates that if impairment occurs in the area of a developing brain (before one year old) that is ideal for language, other parts of the brain, usually the right hemisphere will pick up the language. This in my mind negates the Chomsky theory at the very least.

Another reason for my dissent is the fact that the quality of a child’s language, particularly grammar and vocabulary, seem to have much more to do with the child’s experience as opposed to the child’s intellect. If a child incorrectly uses me and her when she and I is appropriate, or exchanges seen for saw, or say I gots instead of I have, and no one corrects them they have no innate knowledge that informs them of their error, they simply continue speaking this way until someone corrects them.

I have children who are adopted. One child in particular came into our home at the age of fourteen. His vocabulary was inferior and he had little comprehension of the rules of grammar, in fact, he spoke as if English were his second language, saying things like beltseat instead of seatbelt. This made sense when we discovered that his family had never owned a car and he had little experience with seatbelts. Although research indicates a critical period, occurring prior to adolescence this child learned rapidly through experience and correction. Two years later, he speaks quite eloquently, using a variety of words and using them correctly. I believe that experiencing proper language and being corrected was critical for him, there did not appear to be any innate functioning or universal grammar mechanisms at work to help him establish a normal functional level of language.

Is language actually special?

During the course of my sophomore year, I frequently sat through Organic Chemistry class and wondered if the teacher had accidentally begun to lecture in a different language. For long periods of time, I would not be able to recognize a single word he had said and could not follow along with the lecture. This is a feeling many students may have in a foreign language class when the teacher actually is speaking a different language. While reading Siegler and Alibali's chapter on Language Development, one continually encounters the notion that language acquisiton is "special." For up to a year, babies possess the ability to learn phonemes for any particular language. After this year, they still retain the ability to master other languages with great ease. At this stage of development, children have increased brain plasticity as compared with adults and still have large areas of the brain that are both underdeveloped and undecided in function.
What if Chemistry were considered a language? Yes, the phonemes are generally from the English language, but nonetheless, the conceptual basis for the subject is completely foreign to most individuals. Do children at an early age maintain the ability to obtain all different types of information, or are they limited specifically to language? Most parents do not find it beneficial to read an infant a book on Calculus because they feel it is irrelevant and beyond the child's comprehension. However, they do feel it is beneficial to read a child fairy-tales which are still completely outside the realm of a child's comprehension. Language is taught to children on a daily basis both directly and indirectly. If we were to continually teach our children science from the day they are born their understanding of the subject matter may progress just as well as their grammatical progression occurs. Is language really special or is it simply the most commonly reinforced learning objective? Chile prodigies may be the result of such early exposure to subject matter out of the normal real of what is taught to infants.
The opening paragraph of the book states that language is internally motivated and sites an example, "No one else was in the room during Anthony's monologue. Nonetheless, he found talking sufficiently enjoyable that he spoke anyway (183)." In this passage, language is not used from communication. Language is an amusement to the baby becuase he is able to produce sounds and words although they do not make linear sense. To imply a babies motivation from a strain of words seems somewhat exaggerated to me. The child may take pleasure in the fact that he is learning a language or may be happy to know he can create sounds from within his body regardless of any meaning or communication factor these sounds may entail. If written numbers were to replace words the way sign language often does, would there be the same response? Will children absorb any concept that begins reinforcement at birth or are they truly innately determined to learn language?

How do we learn language?

As discussed in the previous class, humans already have the ability to map words to their meanings when we are just children, and this is actually a very important way of how we learn the language. This reminds me how I learned different words and their meanings throughout childhood and all the way even until now, both in Mandarin and English. Interestingly, what I have observed around me is that most people can map words with the correct meaning pretty well, so that no one would relate the word ‘dog’ with just a part of a dog but to the whole animal. I guess human’s ability and intelligent is really amazing. However, this also brings up the questions that how do people learn language when there was initially no language around? This also relates to the part in class that how a brand new language develops among deaf people; I guess this is the same as how people first come up with language.

Another question that I have is that: could some color blind patient is actually related with the wrong mapping of name of different colors? For example, if a child was taught that the color black is called ‘yellow’, wouldn’t the child believe that the color is actually yellow and be mistaken as a color blind person? As conclusion, I think that the process of learning language is really amazing.

Language abilities in infants

After reading the articles about language in this set of articles I have attempted to understand the articles alone but also to understand ways in which they might connect. The first article “left hemisphere specialization…” conducted a study in which they observed the asymmetry of babies’ mouths while the babbled. The researchers determined that when babies babbled the right side of their mouth was opened wider suggesting that the left hemisphere was more active. When I read this I found that it was compelling, yet I was left with questions. One question that I was left with was if they considered doing brain imaging to determine exactly which areas of the brain were working, and if these were known language centers. The researchers believed that babbling was somehow an exercise in speech articulation. It seems as though this can relate to the research about second languages. Babbling does not necessarily sound like any sort of language. Perhaps babbling is just preparing babies to say a multitude of different words or even different languages. It would be interesting if research was done to examine if babies utilize different phones from different languages in their babbling or if they simply utilized sounds that they commonly heard. Perhaps children who are exposed to different phones from different languages would be able to articulate these better if they were able to have this exposure during the babbling phase. The “Critical periods…” paper maintains that there seems to be a critical period for second language acquisition, where it is easier for people to learn another language. I wonder if part of this critical period is the babbling phase in which babies are able to practice articulating different sounds that may not be part of the English language but another language. Perhaps another reason why babies are better at learning a second language at a young age has to do with “statistical learning” techniques that may be stronger or more prevalent in infants than adults, or that children may rely on more than adults. Perhaps due to perceptual narrowing this ability is somewhat compromised in adults. Children are able to use this technique to learn words in almost any language because there is consistency in the way words are formed in all kinds of languages. Perhaps as we get older we rely on our already existing word bank or specific combinations or rules for the ways in which words are formed and thus do not have to rely on this technique therefore it is somewhat lost. This “statistical learning” technique also seems to be highly related to mathematical abilities which suggests that perhaps babies innately have some mathematical abilities. It would be interesting to do imaging studies to determine the extent of these mathematical abilities in language comprehension. These different concepts are all really interesting when considering them in terms of one aspect of language but when you consider how they relate to each other you begin to see how language recognition, comprehension and production are related in interesting and complex ways. a

Learning a second language

Learning a second language is not only difficult but can take a lot of time especially if the individual is older when learning the new language. Findings suggest that there is a critical age for developing a second language. Those that learn a language at a younger age usually do better than learning it at a later age. The critical age for developing a second language is 7. If a child learns a second language before the age of seven, they are able to speak it fluently just as well as native speakers.
Why is 7 the critical age? At seven the brain is still developing and forming while adults' brains are already well developed and biology does not permit people to acquire a language at a later age. Changes in brain funtioning account for the decline in language learning at later ages.

First language development has an impact on both second language development and on cognitive development. Piaget has shown that human cognitive development is achieved through maturation stages. He suggests that children can sustain socialized speech at a preoperational stage of development . At 6 or 7 children are able to begin considering others' points of view and include them in their conversation. Perhaps at 7 years old children are really able to understand the differences between their 1st language and 2nd language. Many children who do develop both languages fluently will learn the first language at home with their families, and will continue with their culture, while at school they learn the 2nd language as well as a new culture and a new set of beleifs. While children at younger ages, around 4 can not easily translate from one language to another at about 6 years when children finally reach the elemantary school years they are able to translate back and forth between the two languages.

Children's environment nurtures and shapes his or her ability to use language. Experiences at home and in other settings that the child is exposed to will determing their success in school as well as their communication skills, and school success.

Research suggest that children with bilingualism do not experience confusion. In earlier ages/ stages of the acquisition of a second language, they usually show being a little behind but it usually doensn't last very long. They are able to speak and express themselves just as well as native speakers.
Bilingual children show some advantages in socio-cognitive development when compared to children who only speak one language. They usually have a easier time understanding the beleifs of others, and can understand both cultures equally.

Learning a second language can have it's benefits but age is a crucial factor in language acquisition, the younger you learn it the better, but the critical age is seven.

Tea for Two

My friend has a baby daughter, Jazmin, who is about 7 months old. While among a group of adults who were playing a version of peekaboo with her, she started intermittently shrieking with glee. But besides being amused by the game of peekaboo, Jazmin's expression suggested she was interested in the sounds she herself was making. Babbling is a form of play that allows infants to learn what sounds they can make, what pitches and tones they can create, how loud and soft they can go. However, I think its also important to note the social aspect of this example; Jazmin was also testing out different verbal responses within the context of physical interactions.

While this is a simple example, I think it is important to note just how important social interaction is to language development. This makes a great deal of sense because in a hard-to-imagine world without social interaction, communication language would be mostly unnecessary. The experience of feral children support this view to some extent; Genie, who had almost no social contact never fully developed language, while Isabella, who had some contact on a fairly regular basis with her blind mother, developed language fully.

In class, we discussed how visual social cues can help babies learn the meaning of words. By watching where the speaker is looking when they refer to something new, the baby can often infer the meaning of the new word. What about blind babies, though? While they have the ability to sense the language of their parents (unlike deaf babies of hearing parents), they may have a difficult time learning what many of these words refer to, since they cannot see where their parents are looking. What effect might this have on language acquisition?

The phenomenon of conversational babbling also supports an interactionist view, as infants imitate the rhythm and intonation of adult dialogue. Adults will often engage infants at this stage in mock conversations, where the child babbles, and the adult gives some verbal expression suggesting they understand (i.e. "You don't say!", "Really! That is so interesting.", etc.). Interestingly, intonation and rhythm are the first parts of language babies hear inside the womb. As adults, we often don't think about how important these elements are to communication, especially social relationships. And yet infants go through a stage of babbling that is all about emulating the "style" of conversation. Are babies trying to convey meaning at all or are they simply "practicing" these social elements of dialogue? Whichever is true, this form of babbling reflects the social nature of language.

Social interaction and language are so intertwined that it seems almost impossible to develop a test (at least, a morally sound one) that would determine if and how language could develop. The closest example seems to be that of feral children in comparison with children involved in Nicaraguan Sign Language. Feral children had little to no language exposure or social interaction, while deaf children in Nicaragua had social interaction, but no language exposure (to a language they could sense). The Nicaraguan children had "home signs", but once they were grouped with other deaf children without a language, they developed an entirely new language.

Language and Chimpanzees

In learning about and discussing language acquisition and development you will inevitably hear something about apes and monkeys and their language capabilities. Most of the psychology textbooks that I have encountered briefly mention something about the language capabilities of signing chimpanzees or other apes or monkeys and quickly dismiss the idea that apes possess true language and that their language will never resemble human language. In my opinion, the field of psychology does not pay enough attention to language acquisition and development in apes like chimpanzees. Although chimpanzees will never possess verbal language, they are indeed capable of language, not just simple communication. I have personally witnessed chimpanzees using American Sign Language (ASL) at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI) at Central Washington University.
Siegler and Alibali, in their book, Children’s Thinking, claim “humans seem to be the only animals who are interested in communicating information that is of no direct importance for survival” and that “even chimpanzees who have learned to communicate quite well through sign language rarely communicate just for the sake of communicating.” At Pacific University, I took a class called Chimpanzee Behavior and Sign Language With Chimpanzees with Dr. Mark Bodamer who has worked extensively with the Chimpanzees at CHCI. I even had the opportunity to visit CHCI twice. In the class and through direct experience I witnessed Chimpanzees using ASL to communicate both with humans and their fellow Chimpanzees about random things that had nothing to do with survival. For example, on my first visit to CHCI, a chimpanzee named Tatu noticed that a fellow student of mine had a lip piercing. Tatu, while looking at my classmate repeatedly signed “ouch” “ouch.” The fact that Tatu was able to recognize that a ring through a lip probably hurts and to sign about it was amazing and it also convinced me that chimpanzees are capable of language.
In addition to this, the chimpanzee Washoe, one of the most famous chimpanzees and a pioneer in the area of signing chimps, recognized and was elated to see our professor Mark. At the first sight of him, she signed “friend” “friend.” Not only was this incredibly touching, it showed be that chimps have the ability to remember a person who was important to them and to pull a word from their vocabulary to refer to that person.
Something else that I found fascinating in my studies of signing chimps was the fact that there are documented accounts of chimpanzees signing to themselves when they are alone. This makes me think about the definition of language: a shared system of arbitrary symbols that refer to things even in the absence of those things. The chimpanzees in this study signed to themselves about objects without holding or observing the object. In other words, the chimps were signing to themselves about objects in the absence of those objects. Mark Bodamer and his colleagues discovered this by videotaping the chimpanzees who were not aware of the cameras.
Although chimpanzees do not share most of the characteristics of human language, from what I have experienced, they do share some. They seem to be able to pull from their vocabulary to comment on novel things such as a lip piercing and to recognize that the piercing might hurt. They are also, from what I have seen, able to sign about objects when the object was no where to be seen, which is what makes up a large part of language.

Deaf children and CODAs

The point that I would like to focus on for this week is language acquisition. Even though there are other views besides the behaviorist view and the nativist view, I would like to focus on these two. Each of these views seems to focus on just one assumption. The behaviorist view focuses on the idea that language is learned like anything else. On the contrary, the nativist view focuses on the idea that language develops so quickly that regular learning cannot account for this speed. Of course both of these views have problems explaining certain aspects of language. I would like to discuss a reason why I believe that it is both. (This is aside from the other views that we discussed in class that seem to combine a little of both of these views). We had some discussion about deaf children and CODAs (children of deaf adults). But one thing that we did not talk about was how many CODAs have to undergo language therapy to learn to speak correctly. This suggests that, to some extent, language needs some “help” in order to develop normally. This rejects the nativist view. However, as we talked about in class, deaf babies still babble out loud and use their voices even though they cannot hear. This rejects the behaviorist view. This is why I suggest that it really is a little of both. One other way of studying deaf children that can help support the behaviorist view is looking at children that have had cochlear implants. A cochlear implant is a device that is inserted into the child’s brain that uses electrical impulses that get translated into sounds that the brain can recognize. In order to learn anything about these children, we have to look at children that have been implanted that have deaf parents, and children that have been implanted and have hearing parents. If we look at implanted children that have deaf parents we can see how this information would support the behaviorist view. When a child is implanted and begins to use the implant they start to use their voice. However, when children are implanted and have deaf parents they will still carry on their “deaf accent.” With time, the accent will start to diminish but it will never go away. When comparing children of deaf parents and children with hearing parents there is a large difference in how these children speak. Since children with deaf parents do not hear language in their home, they have to rely on practice and learning outside the home in a hearing situation. They do not hear language enough at their primary place of residence and their language develops much more slowly, and it might never be at the level of children with hearing parents. This supports the behaviorist view because these children are not learning at the same rate because of the exposure they have to language. Also, one other important piece of information about language and deaf children is their ability to read. If a deaf child is in a Deaf (refers to the Deaf community that uses sign language) home then their first language is ASL. Since ASL has a different structure than English these children learn to read at a slower rate. It is also known that some of the Deaf community will never read past the fourth grade level. This again supports the behaviorist view by demonstrating that grammar must also be learned when English is not the first language and ASL is. This information about deaf children and CODAs suggests that both views are right about some aspects and wrong about others.

Complexity of language acquisition

Language development in infancy is by far the most intriguing aspect of cognitive development. Infants must use very unfamiliar information from their environment, in this case language, and break it into pieces, parts, rules, meanings, process it, categorize it, and eventually use it to adapt to their surroundings. Because this process contains so many complex parts it seems amazing that language development occurs so rapidly and at such a young age. We have discussed in lecture that although infants’ capacity to learn is very high the amount at which they can learn at a single instance is much slower and more tedious than adults. Plausible research has also shown that a critical period may exist between birth and adolescence, in which an infants’ ability to acquire language skills (i.e. naïve physics) is at a heightened rate. Because of their limited capacity for learning from their environment it seems unusual that that critical period would exist during this time.

Another interesting idea about infant language acquisition is how infants are able to learn such a complex system of symbols when their existing knowledge about the world is so limited. As we know babies are not smart! Just the ability to learn the syntax of sentences and morphology of words is in itself an intricate and multifaceted process. There is something about the necessity and purpose of language that seems to force a difficult process, like language acquisition, to occur during a period of life when knowledge their knowledge system is basic and simple. Because of this reasoning I tend to agree that a deep and innate existence of some type of language structure exists within us from the time we are born. This is not to say that we know how to comprehend and produce language at birth. But I do believe that an innate structure containing a body of mechanisms is responsible for our ability to rapidly learn language and all its profound parts. This mechanism is like a sponge and when we dip the sponge into water it immediately sucks up all the water is can hold. Language is the water to the sponge.

The bottom line is, infants could not adapt and survive in their environment without the ability to communicate their needs. Later in early adolescence, without language, infants would have a hard time establishing connections and relationships with others around them. After all, social relationships with parents, family, and friends are one of the most important aspects of an individuals’ identity in life. Although research cannot explain exactly how the acquisition of knowledge occurs it seems there is an endless number of possibilities for why knowledge is one of the most critical and fascinating parts of cognitive development.

Language Development through Social Interaction

One question that stood out to me from our textbook was “How do children make sense of the blooming, buzzing confusing of speech sounds?” (Page 184) In response to this question I have a somewhat Piaget approach, that is as a child develops language they go through a process of first being able to somewhat physically control the movement of their mouth. Second perceive actions and their responses. Third be able to combine the two and experience and learn from the sounds they make and the responses those sounds get in return. The reason why I say that I see the development of language through a Piaget perspective is that I believe they learn language through experience with the outside world. I believe children learn this at a very young age, for example crying when they are hungry or uncomfortable, or simply to get attention. It seems that because a child knows that crying is an effective way of getting what they want crying builds into babbling and eventually leads to conversing as means of connecting with the outside world. I believe that most of this learning of language is guided by the people who care for the child, or are around the child in general. A child’s experience of learning language comes not only in the verbal manner of responding to the child but also in the non-verbal manner of responding. An example would be feeding a baby when it cries of making a shocked face if an infant says something inappropriate.
My personal experience of learning language can also support learning a majority of language through social experience. I was born in the Philippines and spoke Tagalog fluently. Then when my parents moved to Oregon when I was 6 years old I transitioned into speaking and understanding English through social interaction with my classmates, and simply observing what words and sounds they used along with the responses they got in return. I can vividly remember staying in the back of the room knowing in my head what I wanted to say but couldn't put the words together in my head in english, so I listened to my classmates and teacher talk and commuicate with eachother. After a while I was putting sentences together and before I knew it I was capable of conversing with my classmates. I never took English Second Language (ESL) classes and was never “formally” taught English besides what everyone learned at school. It amazes me how smooth the transition was for me. Now I struggle to speak Tagalog but understand it completely because after learning English I rarely ever spoke Tagalog again. When I’m in an environment where Tagalog is spoken a lot I find myself catching on fairly quickly.
My experience with language deals with a lot of the concepts mentioned in class this Thursday. Concepts such as social cues and a child learning how to understand the world around them by listening to their parents or looking at their parents reaction when they say something. Babies are put into this world and from the start they start to develop the needed social skills to help them survive (e.g. crying), and then they become more complex with sounds that turn into babbling and babbling that turn into actual words that later turn into complex sentences. I know that the ability and means of learning language is different for many different people but I believe a key ingredient is social interaction and observation, by both the child and the parents (finding ways to effectively communicating with the child by calling attention to what the child is looking at). My personal experience shows the importance of learning language through social interaction and observation, and how I put my abilities and understanding together to effectively communicate with others.

Infants' Knowledge of Numerical Concepts

After reading the first article, “Numerical abstraction by human infants” by Starkey, Spelke and Gelman, my impression was that infants are very intelligent in terms of mathematics. The fact that every culture has some evidence of mathematical abilities suggests strongly that the knowledge may by innate. Starkey brings up a couple of possibilities to explain infants’ knowledge of numbers; including cultural diffusion, reflective abstraction (“child will abstract properties from the action schemes, interiorize and organize them, and form an operational scheme. The child’s subsequent coordination of operational schemes would produce a structure capable of supporting deductive numerical reasoning”) and that mathematical competence may exist in human infants. Reflective abstraction is based on the internal reflection of knowledge available. If relationships are constructed between objects, could it be possible that the experiments in the article, “The representations underlying infants’ choice of more: Object Files vs. Analog Magnitudes” by Feigenson, Carey and Hauser, that combined sound and visual activity showed results of reflective abstraction instead of knowledge of numbers?

Another question to ask is why infants are better at detecting differences in the number of object displays when they hear drum beats that correspond with the number of objects in the display. Is it because infants relate a pattern of sound to a pattern of visual activity? Do they innately know that the sounds equal the number of objects, or do they recognize the pattern of both (sound and visual activity) and compare the two?

Starkey hypothesizes that “the emergence of the earliest numerical abilities does not depend upon the development of language or complex actions, or upon cultural experience with number.” To test this hypothesis, Starkey performed five experiments where the “solution depends on the recognition of one-to-one correspondence between the members of different collections of items.” In each experiment, the infants were shown displays with either 2 or 3 objects. After reading Feigenson’s article, I wondered how different the results of the first article may be if they had used more than 2-3 object displays. Feigenson performed an experiment where the infant had a choice of fewer crackers or more, starting with 1 vs. 2, 2 vs. 3, and 3 vs. 4. In the first two instances, most chose the option with more crackers. When comparing 3 vs. 4 crackers, infants had a hard time determining the difference. This difference in research methods leads me to believe that if Starkey had used more than 2-3 object displays, the infants might not have detected the differences.

Another difference in these sets of experiments is that Feigenson suggests that “for sets within the object file range, infants at least sometimes compare object file representations on the basis of the physical variables bound to those representations, rather than via one to one correspondence.” This contradicts Starkey’s study that depends on one-to-one correspondence between collections of items. If infants rely on object file representations and compare volume and surface area rather than one to one correspondence like Feigenson suggests, one question to ask is how Starkey decided in the first experiment that the determining property between the collections could not have been the brightness, contour density, or surface area. He says because the properties of the objects varied, these things didn’t matter. However, in Feigenson’s experiment, the crackers varied in size and surface area was a determining property. After reading both of these articles and thinking about the findings, it seems that infants’ knowledge of numbers and less/more is a deeply complex system that must be studied in more detail and with different kinds of experimental methods.

Developmental Cognition: Correspondence, Freud, and Religion

Cognitive functions such as “correspondence” can be demonstrated wherein an infant looks at a picture of a knobby pacifier, if he has one, or a smooth pacifier if he has one; or looking at small circles that “correspond” with the same number “beats” of sonic rhythm. The developing child learns that similar things go together – two beats, two circles, knobby pacifier, knobby picture. This phenomenon is established during the Piaget’s sensori-motor stage (0-2 years old). “Correspondence” later evolves into or becomes the basis for, the development of the Freudian super-ego around age seven, approximately the beginning of the Piaget’s stage III of development – concrete operational. This has also been termed the existential age or the age of “discretion.”

At this age the concept of doing what is done because it should be done becomes part of thinking. This is part of the Freudian super-ego or what a stage III – concrete operational (7-12 + years old), as well as, stage IV – formal operation. In other words, “being good results in feeling good (ultimately going to Heaven),” and “being bad results in bad feelings (going to Hell).” From this the child develops the capacity for human compassion and caring for others; or the personal ego (self) feeling joy and goodness not only with the self, but with the group dynamic caring for/with other people. Knowing that to choose good behavior and feeling good are correspondent. Discretional/caring cognition evolves from, at the sensori-motor stage – love of mother into the Freudian super-ego.

Discretion: the quality of being discrete – freedom of action or judgment. Should be caring and non-dysfunctional. Just like a second trimester fetal brain evolves into a thinking person, the pre stage III – the pre-concrete, evolves into a stage III and post-stage III yielding -- a discretional/sociological entity of diplomacy, circumspection, thoughtfulness, tact, caution, prudence, foresight, responsibility, maturity, freedom, liberty, pleasure, choice, preference, wish, desire, will, option, license, purpose, and ego-intent. All governed by the functional super-ego.

As relates to the later cognitive development of some of the things spoken of in class, “Verbal Numerical Cognition” and “Nonverbal Numerical Cognition;” verbal numerical cognition in which the developing brain counting “corresponds” with the number ten and the ten commandments (rules for going to heaven). Abstraction. Non-verbal numerical cognition – “Weber’s Law,” a detectable difference is a constant proportion…relates to living a few mortal years compared to (a greater difference) eternity in Heaven. The environment or the setting influences the set or the expectations. Exposure to the Bible influences good behavior. The word “identity” is used to convey “corresponding” of me, the self, ego, with the group sociological ramifications and the ultimate super-ego, part of the greatest existence in this universe.

The English language uses the word “good” to correspond with quality and behavior. Do good, feel good; children are taught to “correspond” non-dysfunctional behavior with eternity in Heaven. Set/setting ramifications? Kids expect to never be bad and gain a Freudian utopia. Group dynamic? Little angels. Functional society. A Heaven here on earth.