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Stephanie Tavira's showMyth 5Similar to another myth discussed, people believe that the younger a child is when they start to acquire a second language, the more skilled or successful they will be. This is why most individuals will tell you to ensure your child learns other languages as soon as possible. However, there is no research to support this claim. One example stated in the article was that children who had only studied the French language for five years performed better than children who had been studying it for a longer period of time. However, the article does state that younger children do...
2018-12-0303 minStephanie Tavira's showChapter 20Continuing on what we discussed in the last chapter, sociolinguistic variation can also be associated with cultural differences. The book defines culture as the ideas and assumptions about the nature of things and people that we learn when we become members of social groups. Culture can be defined as socially acquired knowledge. We acquire this similar to how we acquire our first language, which is to say without conscious awareness. In order to develop words, we must have a system that includes people, things, and ideas as distinct and identifiable categories. A category is a group with certain features in...
2018-11-3005 minStephanie Tavira's showChapter 19Unlike the last chapter, this chapters focuses on the fat that not every person in the same geographical area will speak in the same way. Language variation may differ due to education or economic status, as well as gender. These are indicators of a membership in different social groups or speech communities. A speech community is a group of people have the same rules and expectations regarding the use of language. The term sociolinguistics is used to describe the study of the relationship between language and society. Just as discussed in the last chapter, dialects are not only different regionally...
2018-11-3005 minStephanie Tavira's showPodcast Ch. 18While our book has mainly been focused on a whole language, such as English or Spanish, it is also important to note the variety that each language has. For example, the English languages used in America is different that the English spoken in Australia or Britain. Geographically, even if a language is the same, it will be different. One example I can think of is how in Australia they use the word thong to refer to sandals, or rubber to refer to as an eraser. While Australia and the United States both use the English language, they are different because...
2018-11-3004 minStephanie Tavira's showPodcast Ch. 17The English language was not always the one that we are familiar with to this day. The study of older languages and how they developed into modern languages is known as philology. The study of philology lead to the creation of “family trees” to show how languages were related to one another. In 1786, a British official suggested that languages from different areas have to have a common ancestor. This was revolutionary at the time. The term used to describe the common ancestor was Proto-Indo-European, which is the hypothesized original form of a language that was the source of many languages in I...
2018-11-3004 minStephanie Tavira's showPodcast Ch. 16Writing, according to our text, is defined as the symbolic representation of language through the use of graphic signs. This system has to be learned through sustained conscious effort. Writing is a relatively new phenomenon, and not every language has a written form. In fact, even among people whose language has a writing system, there is a large majority of people who can’t use the writing system. Writing may be able to be traced back at least 20,000 years ago to cave drawings, or 10,000 years ago to clay tokens. However, they are most likely precursors to writing. The earliest clear ev...
2018-11-3005 minStephanie Tavira's showPodcast Ch. 15Most commonly, when we consider language acquisition, we think of speech. However, language can also be acquired through sign, or sign language. Some of these children even sign in their sleep, similar to how children will talk in their sleep. Like spoken language, sign language is different in various parts of the world. In America, it is referred to as American Sign Language, which was developed from French Sign Language. While ASL is used by about two million people, it was not initially considered a real language. Rather, people thought they were merely gestures. While they are similar in the...
2018-11-3005 minStephanie Tavira's showPodcast Ch. 12Neurolinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and the brain. Obviously, the capacity for language is located in the brain, but as evidenced by Phineas Gage, it is not located in the front. Our texts states that the parts of the brain related to language exist in the areas above the left ear. To make it easier to discern, the brain is basically split into two separate parts, the right and left hemisphere. Language functions are located in the left hemisphere. There are four major parts of the brain that our text focuses on. The first is Broca’s...
2018-11-3005 minStephanie Tavira's showPodcast Ch. 11In chapter 10, we discussed how language users successfully interpret what one another is trying to convey. They study of language beyond the sentence, in text and conversation is referred to as discourse analysis. Typically, one is concerned with accurate representation of forms and structures in language. However, the phrase No shoes, no service can be understood even if it is not grammatically correct. This is a fragmented linguistic message. These forms, or messages, aren’t rejected even if they are ungrammatical, rather we try to make sense of them. This is the basis of the study of discourse. While we do...
2018-11-3005 minStephanie Tavira's showPodcast Ch. 10According to our text, communication relies on recognizing what speakers mean when they use a certain word. This is termed pragmatics, which is the study of speaker meaning. Pragmatics is how we interpret what is meant even if it is not explicitly said or written. This relies on shared assumptions and expectations when communicating, which is to say that individuals assume and expect that people have the same meaning for a word as they do. In terms of pragmatics, there is always more to what is being communicated than what was actually said. In pragmatics, context is important. There needs...
2018-11-2906 minStephanie Tavira's showStudy of Language: 2An interesting point brought up in chapter one of our text is whether humans are the only ones capable of language. While there have been instances where people have thought that animals have spoken, these animals have been shown to simply be imitating something they have heard humans say. It begs the question on whether animals could learn to communicate with humans using language. Or perhaps there are properties to the human language that make it impossible for other animals to learn. To answer these questions, we must first look at the properties of human language. One of these properties...
2018-10-2405 minStephanie Tavira's showStudy of Language: 1Where does language come from? Does it come from a divine source or are we, as humans, genetically predisposed with the capability to speak? According to Charles Darwin, the earliest known humans already had a musical ability of communicating with each other. While humans do have the ability to produce sounds and simple vocal patterns due to an ancient part of the brain that we share with all vertebras, the reality is that we simply don’t know where language originated from. There are, however, a few theories. The first theory states that language originates from a divine source. If th...
2018-10-2305 min