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Related Concept Videos

Language Development01:22

Language Development

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Children master language quickly and with relative ease, supported by both biological predisposition and reinforcement. B. F. Skinner (1957) proposed that language is learned through reinforcement, while Noam Chomsky (1965) argued that language acquisition mechanisms are biologically determined.
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
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Components of Language01:24

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Language, whether spoken, signed, or written, consists of specific components: lexicon and grammar. The lexicon is the vocabulary of a language, comprising its words. Grammar is the set of rules used to convey meaning through the lexicon. For example, English grammar adds “-ed” to most verbs to indicate past tense. Words are formed by combining phonemes, which are the basic sound units of a language. Different languages have different sets of phonemes (e.g., “ah” vs.
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Language and Cognition01:27

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Language serves as a bridge between ideas and communication, influencing how individuals perceive and interact with the world. Psychologists have long debated whether language shapes thought or vice versa. This discussion gained grip with Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1940s, who proposed that language determines thought, a concept known as linguistic determinism. They suggested that the vocabulary and structure of a language influence how its speakers think and perceive reality.
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Naturalistic Observations

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If you want to understand how behavior occurs, one of the best ways to gain information is to simply observe the behavior in its natural context. However, people might change their behavior in unexpected ways if they know they are being observed. How do researchers obtain accurate information when people tend to hide their natural behavior? As an example, imagine that your professor asks everyone in your class to raise their hand if they always wash their hands after using the restroom. Chances...
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E. C. Tolman emphasized the purposiveness of behavior — the idea that much of our behavior is goal-directed. For instance, employees who aim for a promotion work diligently to meet their targets. Tolman argued that when classical conditioning and operant conditioning occur, the organism acquires certain expectations. In classical conditioning, a child might fear a dog because they expect it to bite. In operant conditioning, a person might consistently work overtime because they expect a...
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To understand intra-specific interactions in populations, scientists measure the spatial arrangement of species individuals. This geographic arrangement is known as the species distribution or dispersion. Highly territorial species exhibit a uniform distribution pattern, in which individuals are spaced at relatively equal distances from one another. Species that are highly tied to particular resources, such as food or shelter, tend to concentrate around those resources, and thus exhibit a...
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Updated: Aug 29, 2025

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation tDCS of Wernicke's and Broca's Areas in Studies of Language Learning and Word Acquisition
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Naturalistic speech supports distributional learning across contexts.

Kasia Hitczenko1, Naomi H Feldman2,3

  • 1Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Département d'Études Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, CNRS, Paris Sciences et Lettres Research University, 75005 Paris, France.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
|September 12, 2022
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Infants learn language-specific sounds by detecting contextual acoustic variations. This research reveals how babies differentiate crucial speech sounds from noise, even with overlapping acoustics.

Keywords:
distributional learninglanguage acquisitionphonetic learning

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Speech Perception

Background:

  • Infants lose the ability to discriminate non-native speech sounds by age one.
  • It is unclear how infants identify which acoustic features are important for their native language.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how infants learn to distinguish contrastive speech sounds despite acoustic variability.
  • To identify the acoustic cues infants use to differentiate language-specific sounds.

Main Methods:

  • Analysis of acoustic distributions in different linguistic contexts.
  • Comparison of acoustic variations along contrastive versus noncontrastive sound dimensions.

Main Results:

  • Acoustic distributions vary more by context for contrastive sound dimensions than for noncontrastive ones.
  • This contextual variation provides a detectable signal for infants.

Conclusions:

  • Infants can learn language-specific sound contrasts by utilizing contextual acoustic variations.
  • This study offers a novel explanation for how infants acquire phonemic contrasts in naturalistic settings.