Lecture 9

Language and the mind

Prepared by Duong Minh Hoang

1. Language areas in the brain
 The language areas are located in the cerebral
cortex of the left hemisphere:

▪ Broca’s area controls the production of speech

▪ Wernicke’s area controls the understanding of

speech

▪ Motor cortex controls movement of muscles for

speech

▪ Arcuate fasciculus forms connections between

Language areas in the brain (Yule, 2020)
Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas.
1. Broca’s area 2. Wernicke’s area

3. Mortor cortex 4. Arcuate fasciculus

 Aphasia is a language disorder resulting from certain areas in the brain being damaged.

▪ Global aphasia results in the whole language being lost.

▪ Broca’s aphasia results in problems in the production of speech and a loss of some grammatical understanding
of language.

▪ Wernicke’s aphasia results in the patient making a lot of lexical errors and saying nonsense words despite fluent
speech.

▪ Conduction aphasia results in difficulties in repeating a word or phrase spoken by someone else.
2. Universal grammar
2.1. The logical problem of language acquisition
 Some observations about children’s language acquisition:

▪ Children use the data available to them in the environment to develop their language;

▪ Children acquire their language quickly;

▪ Children go through similar stages when they develop their language;

▪ Children’s linguistic errors are very similar;

▪ Children are very creative with their language;

▪ Children tend to ignore explicit corrections from their parents.

→ Children are able to construct the grammar of a language in a short amount of time, in a uniform manner, with
ease, and without explicit instruction.
 2.2. The problem of induction
 The problem of induction: How can children figure out a grammatical rule from the examples they hear?

E.g. Auxiliary inversion in forming yes-no questions in English

Hypothesis 1 (Rule based on linear order): Move the first verbal

element to the front of the sentence.
- Is the man tall?
- Can you do it? The
- Is the boy sad now child
that the girl’s gone?
Input Hypothesis 2 (Structure-dependent rule): Move the verbal element
(primary linguistic data – PLD) in the main clause (i.e. after the subject) to the front of the sentence.

- Is mommy sad?
- Will dad come home soon?
Output
- Is the boy crying because his mom is gone?
- Is the man who is tall happy?
2.3. The poverty of the stimulus
 The POS argument: The input to children is insufficient for them to figure out the full grammar of a language.

E.g. Possessive construction

Hypothesis 1: The maximum number of possessors is two.

- John’s cat The

- John’s aunt’s cat child
Input (PLD) Hypothesis 2: The number of possessors is unlimited.

- John’s cat
- John’s aunt’s cat Output
- John’s aunt’s husband’s cat
- John’s aunt’s husband’s friend’s cat
2.4. The language faculty and Universal Grammar
 To solve Plato’s Problem (rich linguistic capacity despite poor PLD), Noam Chomsky and generative
grammarians argue that children are born with a language faculty – the genetically given human cognitive
capacity to acquire language.

 Universal Grammar (UG), the “genetically determined initial state of the language faculty” (Chomsky, 2014,
p. xiii), is the set of invariant general principles that determine a possible human language.

 UG can be viewed as “a function that takes PLD as input and delivers a particular grammar (of English,
Brazilian Portuguese, German, etc.), a GL, as output” (Hornstein et al., 2005, p. 3).

PLD → UG → GL

 One important property of UG is structure dependence.

 UG, experience, and principles not specific to the language faculty are the three factors that “enter into the
growth of language in the individual” (Chomsky, 2005, p. 6).
2.5. Merge
 Generative grammarians assume that the language faculty has two components:

▪ A lexicon: a mental “dictionary” which contains all the words a person knows and their linguistic
properties;

▪ A computational system: combines lexical items from the lexicon using Merge – the operation that puts
two items together, forming a set with the two items as members.

E.g. in
the [+past]
the
dog room the
big big in the big room
in
cat love big
room
chase in to room

The lexicon Selected lexical items The computational system (Merge) Output
 The computational system generates an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions which are
mapped into the conceptual-intentional interface for semantic interpretation and the sensorimotor interface
for externalization (Chomsky, 2016, p. 4).

The interfaces with the computational system (Cook & Newson, 2007, p. 6)
 References

Chomsky, N. (2005). Three factors in language design. Linguistic inquiry, 36(1), 1-22.

Chomsky, N. (2014). Aspects of the theory of syntax (50th anniversary edition). The MIT Press.

Cook, V., & Newson, M. (2007). Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (3rd ed.). Blackwell Publishing.

Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2017). An introduction to language (11th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Hornstein, N., Nunes, J., & Grohmann, K. K. (2005). Understanding minimalism. Cambridge University Press.

O’ Grady, W., & Archibald, J. (2021). Contemporary linguistic analysis: An introduction (9th ed.). Pearson.

Radford, A., Atkinson, M., Britain, D., Clahsen, H., & Spencer, A. (2009). Linguistics: An introduction (2nd ed.).
Cambridge University Press.

Rowe, B. M., & Levine, D. P. (2018). A concise introduction to linguistics (5th ed.). Routledge.

Yule, G. (2020). The study of language (7th ed.). Cambridge University Press.