Cognitive Science 301

Applied Cognitive Science and Education
Fall 2006

Language

Importance of language (p 140-141)

• critical for receiving information
• needed for transmitting ideas, feelings or information to others
• mediates social interaction
• language is a "prime catalyst for memory"
• is a "valuable code for reasoning, problem solving, and creativity"
• facilitates metacognition
• introspection
• helps in learning new motor skills

Components of language (See Figure 5-1 and Table 5-1)

• phonology: sounds that we produce in language
  • involves auditory discrimination
  • awareness of sound/symbol relationships (phonological awareness)
  • phonics: association of sound with specific graphemes (letters, visually)
• morphology: system of rules for combining morphemes
  • morphemes: the smallest units of meaning to form words and/or phrases
• semantics: the meaning of words in language (shades of meanings and relationship between words)
• syntax: system of rules for joining words to make sentences
• discourse: the capacity to organize large volumes of language (understanding and expression)
• pragmatics: understanding the context of specific language
  • social and cultural values and attributes re: language
  • this involves recognizing context, interpreting gestures, and by previous remembered experiences
• metalinguistic awareness: the use of language to think about language
• prosody: the rhythm, speed, and tone involved in speaking

Language processing and production:

• receptive processing = comprehension (understanding of incoming information)
• expressive production (talking or writing)

Developmental aspects of language processing (summarized on page 150): 
  "Language disabilities in children are some of the most common impediments to learning and fulfillment during school years." (p 150, citing Johnson & Myklebust 1967 and Wiig & Semel 1984)

• verbal communication with a child at home (before school age) is usually highly contextual and one-on-one
• verbal communication in school demands "increasingly sophisticated, context-devoid language" (p 144)
  • "children are also expected to make good pragmatic judgments about their teachers' intentions"
  • adolescent language demands include:
    • following the teacher's directions
    • focusing and determining the salient facts and main ideas from the teacher's lecture/presentation
    • organizing and remembering the facts and main ideas for retrieval
    • mastery of rules of grammar
    • understanding of figurative language
    • identifying irony, humor, and literary tone
  • As you know, language in written and oral form needs to be assimilated and produced under the often trying conditions of exams
• Phonological growth
  • breaking words into syllables
  • recognizing phonemes (which involves very rapid processing)
  • associating the sounds of phonemes with letters, letter combinations, and graphemes
• Semantic growth
  • new vocabulary is constantly learned and hopefully integrated with already learned words (into categories?)
  • subject-specific vocabulary becomes important: math, science, English
• Syntactic growth
  • preschool: canonical order strategy (p 146)
    • "Preschool children are inclined to assume that in sentences with a noun-verb-noun sequence, the first noun is the actor and the second noun is the recipient of the action."
    • 4 year olds have the ability to understand sentences that "violate canonical order"
    • 5-6 year olds "have a tendency to act out [respond to] the main clause only" in a complex sentence and may not 'hear' or recognize the subordinate clause.
    • identifying the main clause, subordinate clause(s) and their relationship becomes progressively better during elementary school years
• Pronominal growth: use of pronouns
• Minimal distance principle: subjects closest to an infinitive are assumed to be the subject of that infinitive
  • 5 year olds misunderstand sentences such as, "Mary promised Jane to buy the candy." (p 148)
  • 6 - 9 year olds gradually learn that Mary will buy the candy.
• Drawing inferences: using context and prior experience to understand reading
  • at earlier ages there is often difficulty with implied content
  • higher-order cognition is necessary for processing sentences containing
    • abstraction
    • symbolization
    • metaphors
    • ambiguity within the sentence
• Pragmatic growth: occurs throughout life, understanding language in its social context, paying attention to the speaker's point of view.
• Metalinguistic growth (thinking about language):
  • phonological awareness
  • appreciation for ambiguity, jokes, sarcasm
  • use of metaphor, simile, analogy, proverbs, and symbolism
  • ability to correct one's own language (does it sound right?)

Problems with efficient language processing can produce other problems that affect attention, memory, socialization, self-esteem, affect, an behavior.

• Receptive language (See Table 5-2, p 151)
  • weak verbal (auditory) attention: problems focusing on verbal detail, poor listening skills, fatigue and distractibility.  Is this due to language difficulties or generalized attention problems?
  • weak verbal memory:
    • weakness of memory for words (recalling vocabulary, synonyms, antonyms, definitions)
    • problems with sentence retrieval (this might also occur because of poor comprehension, active-working memory weaknesses, organizational problems)
    • semantic encoding (problems with word meanings, poor reading comprehension, trouble with word problems in math)
    • verbal sequential recall (difficulty recalling multistep verbal directions in the stated order)
    • memory for language rules (recall and recognizing rules of grammar, may involve metalinguistic awareness deficiencies)
  • inadequate phonological awareness:
    • processing of first and last phonemes only (skipping the middle of the word)
    • auditory discrimination problems (bald vs. bold)
    • sequential organization of phonemes (problems detecting sequence of sounds within words)
    • could also be due to weakness in holding language sounds in active working memory until the entire word and its meaning are said/read
  • segmentation deficits:
    • lack of awareness of syllables within words
    • lack of awareness of phonemes within syllables
  • semantic and morphological dysfunctions:
    • problems with weak vocabulary lexicon
    • problems using words flexibly (not concretely and literally)
    • problems with word prefixes, suffixes, plurals, etc.
  • syntactic weaknesses:
    • problems detecting that word order affects the meaning of a sentence
    • difficulty relating clauses and their meanings within a sentence
    • may lead to the person over relying on semantics to extract word and sentence meaning
  • problems with pragmatics:
    • can cause overly literal interpretation of sentences, due to inability to appropriately comprehend the speakers' intentions
    • this may cause difficulties understanding others at school and in social situations
    • this may impair reading comprehension
  • reduced metalinguistic awareness:
    • can cause trouble at any level of language processing
    • may result in "trouble interpreting ambiguous sentences, idioms, puns, metaphors, and words with multiple meanings." (p 157)
    • may be expressed as problems with detecting errors in speech and/or writing
  • weakness of verbal reasoning:
    • difficulty reasoning or problem-solving verbally
    • weakness understanding verbal systems of classification or categorization

Main ideas

1. Levine classifies 7 main components of language processing: phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, discourse, pragmatics, and metalinguistic awareness.  Also add prosody.
2. The chapter explains each of these and the behavior that someone might show if s/he had specific language processing difficulties in these areas.
3. Language weaknesses affect every aspect of life, including learning and social relationships.
4. Language weaknesses may be due to auditory processing difficulties, attention, anxiety, weak working memory or be present in combination with these.

Questions

1. How could one discover weaknesses in phonological awareness in a child?
2. How would problems with auditory discrimination be manifested in school?
3. Explain why metalinguistic awareness is of great importance in successful language development.
4. What is receptive language?  Could someone have a receptive language problem and no difficulty with language production?  Explain.