Another study on Chaser was published in 2013. In this study, Chaser demonstrated flexible understanding of simple sentences. In these sentences, syntax was altered in various contexts to prove she had not just memorized full phrases or inferred the expectation through gestures from her evaluators. Discovering this skill in a dog is noteworthy on its own, but verb meaning can be fast mapped through syntax. This creates questions about what parts of speech dogs could infer, as previous studies focused on nouns. These findings create further questions about the fast mapping abilities of dogs when viewed in light of a study published in Science in 2016 that proved dogs process lexical and intonational cues separately. That is, they respond to both tone and word meaning.


However, excitement about the fast-mapping skills of dogs should be tempered. Research in humans has found fast-mapping abilities and vocabulary size are not correlated in unenriched environments. Research has determined that language exposure alone is not enough to develop vocabulary through fast-mapping. Instead, the learner needs to be an active participant in communications to convert fast-mapping abilities into vocabulary.


It is not commonplace to communicate with dogs, nor any non-primate animal, in a productive fashion as they are non-verbal. As such, Chaser's vocabulary and sentence comprehension is attributed to Dr. Pilley's rigorous methodology.


An experiment was performed to assess fast mapping in adults with typical language abilities, disorders of spoken/written language (hDSWL), and adults with hDSWL and ADHD.


The conclusion draws from the experiment revealed that adults with ADHD were the least accurate at "mapping semantic features and slower to respond to lexical labels."


The article reasoned that the tasks of fast mapping requires high attentional demand and so "a lapse in attention could lead to diminished encoding of the new information."


Research in artificial intelligence and machine learning to reproduce computationally this ability, termed one-shot learning. This is pursued to reduce the learning curve, as other models like reinforcement learning need thousand of exposures to a situation to learn it.


Autoclitics are verbal responses that modify the effect on the listener of the primary operants that comprise B.F. Skinner's classification of Verbal Behavior.


An autoclitic is a verbal behavior that modifies the functions of other verbal behaviors. For example, "I think it is raining" possesses the autoclitic "I think," which moderates the strength of the statement "it is raining." Research that involves autoclitics includes Lodhi & Greer (1989).


Skinner describes grammatical manipulations, such as the order or grouping of responses, as autoclitic. The ordering of patterns may be a function of relevant strength, temporal ordering, or other factors. Skinner speaks to the use of predication and the use of tags, contrasting the Latin forms, which use tags—and English, which uses grouping and ordering. Skinner proposes the relational autoclitic as a descriptor for these kinds of relationships.


Composition represents a special class of autoclitic responding, because the responding is itself a response to previously existing verbal responses. The autoclitic is controlled not only by the effects on the listener but upon the speaker as listener of their own responses. Skinner notes that "emotional and imaginal" behavior has little to do with grammar and syntax. Obscene words and poetry are likely to be effective, even when emitted non-grammatically.


Self-editing as a compositional process follows the autoclitic process of manipulating responses. After the responses are changed with autoclitics they are examined for their effects and then "rejected or released." Conditions may prevent self-editing, such as a very high response strength.


The physical topography of the rejection of verbal behavior in the process of editing varies from the partial emission of a written word to the apparent non-emission of a vocal response. It may include ensuring that responses simply do not reach a listener, as in not delivering a manuscript or letter. Manipulative autoclitics can revoke words by striking them out, as in a court of law. Similar effects may arise from expression like "Forget it."


A speaker may fail to react as a listener to their own speech under conditions where the emission of verbal responses is very quick. The speed may be a function of strength or of differential reinforcement. Physical interruption may arise as in the case of those who are hearing impaired, or under conditions of mechanical impairment such as ambient noise. Skinner argues the Ouija board may operate to mask feedback and so produce unedited verbal behavior.


The main use of language is to transfer thoughts from one mind, to another mind. The bits of linguistic information that enter into one person's mind, from another, cause people to entertain a new thought with profound effects on his world knowledge, inferencing, and subsequent behavior. Language neither creates nor distorts conceptual life. Thought comes first, while language is an expression. There are certain limitations among language, and humans cannot express all that they think.


Language of thought theories rely on the belief that mental representation has linguistic structure. Thoughts are "sentences in the head", meaning they take place within a mental language. Two theories work in support of the language of thought theory. Causal syntactic theory of mental practices hypothesizes that mental processes are causal processes defined over the syntax of mental representations. Representational theory of mind hypothesizes that propositional attitudes are relations between subjects and mental representations. In tandem, these theories explain how the brain can produce rational thought and behavior. All three of these theories were inspired by the development of modern logical inference. They were also inspired by Alan Turing's work on causal processes that require formal procedures within physical machines.


LOTH hinges on the belief that the mind works like a computer, always in computational processes. The theory believes that mental representation has both a combinatorial syntax and compositional semantics. The claim is that mental representations possess combinatorial syntax and compositional semantic—that is, mental representations are sentences in a mental language. Alan Turing's work on physical machines implementation of causal processes that require formal procedures was modeled after these beliefs.


Another prominent linguist, Stephen Pinker, developed this idea of a mental language in his book "The Language Instinct" (1994). Pinker refers to this mental language as "mentalese". In the glossary of his book, Pinker defines mentalese as a hypothetical language used specifically for thought. This hypothetical language houses mental representations of concepts such as the meaning of words and sentences.


Different cultures use numbers in different ways. The Munduruku culture for example, has number words only up to five. In addition, they refer to the number 5 as "a hand" and the number 10 as "two hands". Numbers above 10 are usually referred to as "many".


Language may influence color processing. Having more names for different colors, or different shades of colors, makes it easier both for children and for adults to recognize them. Research has found that all languages have names for black and white and that the colors defined by each language follow a certain pattern (i.e. a language with three colors also defines red, one with four defines green OR yellow, one with six defines blue, then brown, then other colors).


The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the premise of the 2016 science fiction film "Arrival". The protagonist explains that "the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the theory that the language you speak determines how you think".


A psycholinguist is a social scientist who studies psycholinguistics, which connects psychology and linguistics. Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience and many more. The main aim of psycholinguistics is to outline and describe the process of producing and comprehending communication.


More specifically, a psycholinguist studies language, speech production, and comprehension by using behavioral and neurological methods traditionally developed in the field of psychology, but other methods such as corpus analysis are also widely used. Psycholinguists typically receive undergraduate degrees in linguistics or psychology and then seek a higher degree. Psycholinguistics is not usually a degree of its own; graduate degrees range from scientific studies to criminal justice. The majority of students who become psycholinguists receive a master's degree or a Ph.D.; however, there are also some opportunities available for those who choose not to attend graduate school.


Psycholinguists currently represent a widely diverse field. Many psycholinguists are also considered to be neurolinguists, cognitive linguists, neurocognitive linguists, or are associated with those who are. There are subtle differences between the titles, though they are all attempting to use different facets of similar issues. Psycholinguists are sometimes categorized into separate groups by the models and theories in which they believe. The two main groups, either interactive or autonomous, are based on ideas of language processing. Psycholinguists who support the interactive side, believe that our levels of processing for language work side-by-side and share information as words are received. The other argument is the autonomous side, which believes that the levels of processing for language occur independent of one another.


When conducting research, psycholinguists use a variety of techniques that can involve qualitative and/or quantitative data. Typical methods of research include: observation (language recording), experimentation (issuing language tests), and self-reports (participants report what they are experiencing). The research tends to result in either theoretical evidence or a realistic application.


There are many associations that include professionals in the psycholinguist field worldwide, such as the following:


In psycholinguistics, the collaborative model (or conversational model) is a theory for explaining how speaking and understanding work in conversation, specifically how people in conversation coordinate to determine definite references.


The model was initially proposed in 1986 by psycholinguists Herb Clark and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs. It asserts that conversation partners must act collaboratively to reach a mutual understanding – i.e. the speaker must tailor their utterances to better suit the listener, and the listener must indicate to the speaker that they have understood.


In this ongoing process, both conversation partners must work together in order to establish what a given noun phrase is referring to. The referential process can be initiated by the speaker using one of at least six types of noun phrases: the elementary noun phrase, the episodic noun phrase, the installment noun phrase, the provisional noun phrase, the dummy noun phrase, and/or the proxy noun phrase.


Once this presentation is made, the listener must accept it either through presupposing acceptance (i.e. letting the speaker continue uninterrupted) or asserting acceptance (i.e. through a continuer such as "yes", okay", or a head nod). The speaker must then acknowledge this signal of acceptance. In this process, presentation and acceptance goes back and forth, and some utterances can simultaneously be both presentations and acceptances. This model also posits that conversationalists strive for minimum collaborative effort by making references based more on permanent properties than temporary properties and by refining perspective on referents through simplification and narrowing .


The collaborative model finds its roots in Grice's cooperative principle and four Gricean maxims, theories which prominently established the idea that conversation is a collaborative process between speaker and listener.


However, until the Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs study, the prevailing theory was the literary model (or autonomous model or traditional model). This model likened the process of a speaker establishing reference to an author writing a book to distant readers. In the literary model, the speaker is the one who retains complete control and responsibility over the course of referent determination. The listener, in this theory, simply hears and understands the definite description as if they were reading it and, if successful, figures out the identity of the referent on their own.


This autonomous view of reference establishment wasn't challenged until a paper by D.R. Olson was published in 1970. It was then suggested that there very well could be a collaborative element in the process of establishing reference. Olson, while still holding to the literary model, suggested that speakers select the words they do based on context and what they believe the listener will understand.


Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs criticized the literary model in their 1986 paper; they asserted that the model failed to account for the dynamic nature of verbal conversations.


In the same paper, they proposed the Collaborative Model as an alternative. They believed this model was more able to explain the aforementioned features of conversation. They had conducted an experiment to support this theory and also to further determine how the acceptance process worked.


The experiment consisted of two participants seated at tables separated by an opaque screen. On the tables in front of each participant were a series of Tangram figures arranged in different orders. One participant, called the director, was tasked with getting the other participant, called the matcher, to accurately match his configuration of figures through conversation alone. This process was to be repeated 5 additional times by the same individuals, playing the same roles.


The collaborative model they proposed allowed them to make several predictions about what would happen. They predicted that it would require many more words to establish reference the first time, as the participants would need to use non-standard noun phrases which would make it difficult to determine which figures were being talked about. However, they hypothesized that later references to the same figures would take fewer words and a shorter amount of time, because by this point definite reference would have been mutually established, and also because the subjects would be able to rely on established standard noun phrases.


The results of the study confirmed many of their beliefs, and outlined some of the processes of collaborative reference, including establishing the types of noun phrases used in presentation, and their frequency.


The following actions were observed in participants working towards mutual acceptance of a reference;


Grounding is the final stage in the collaborative process. The concept was proposed by Herbert H. Clark and Susan E. Brennan in 1991. It comprises the collection of "mutual knowledge, mutual beliefs, and mutual assumptions" that is essential for communication between two people. Successful grounding in communication requires parties "to coordinate both the content and process".


The parties engaging in grounding exchange information over what they do or do not understand over the course of a communication and they will continue to clarify concepts until they have agreed on grounding criterion. There are generally two phases in grounding:


Subsequent studies affirmed many of Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs' theories. These included a study by Clark and Michael Schober in 1989 that dealt with overhearers and contrasting how well they understand compared to direct addressees. In the literary model, overhearers would be expected to understand as well as addressees, while in the collaborative model, overhearers would be expected to do worse, since they are not part of the collaborative process and the speaker is not concerned with making sure anyone but the addressee understands.


The study conducted by the pair mimicked the Clark/Wilkes-Gibbs study, but included a silent overhearer as part of the process. The speaker and addressee were allowed to converse, while the overhearer attempted to arrange his figures according to what the speaker was saying. In different versions of this study, overhearers had access to a tape recording of the speaker's directions, while in another they simply all sat in the same room.


The study found that overhearers had significantly more difficulty than addressees in both experiments, therefore, according to the researchers, lending credence to the collaborative model.


The literary model described above still stands as a directly opposing viewpoint to the collaborative model. Subsequent studies also sought to point out weaknesses in the theory. One study, by Brown and Dell, took issue with the aspect of the theory that suggests that speakers have particular listeners in mind when determining reference. Instead, they suggested, speakers have generic listeners in mind. This egocentric theory proposed that people's estimates of another's knowledge are biased towards their own and that early syntactic choices may be made without regard to the addressees' needs, while beliefs about the addressees knowledge did not affect utterance choices until later on, usually in the form of repairs.


Another study, in 2002 by Barr and Keysar, also criticized the particular listener view and partner-specific reference. In the experiment, addresses and speakers established definite references for a series of objects on a wall. Then, another speaker entered, using the same references. The theory was that, if the partner-specific view of establishing reference was correct, the addressee would be slower to identify objects(as measured by eye movement) out of confusion because the reference used had been established with another speaker. They found this not to be the case, in fact, reaction time was similar.


In neuroscience and psychology, the term language center refers collectively to the areas of the brain which serve a particular function for speech processing and production. Language is a core system, which gives humans the capacity to solve difficult problems and provides them with a unique type of social interaction. Language allows individuals to attribute symbols (e.g. words or signs) to specific concepts and display them through sentences and phrases that follow proper grammatical rules. Moreover, speech is the mechanism in which language is orally expressed.


Information is exchanged in a larger system including language-related regions. These regions are connected by white matter fiber tracts that make possible the transmission of information between regions. The white matter fiber bunches were recognized to be important for language production after suggesting that it is possible to make a connection between multiple language centers. The three classical language areas that are involved in language production and processing are Broca’s and Wernicke's areas, and the angular gyrus.


Broca's Area was first suggested to play a role in speech function by the French neurologist and anthropologist Paul Broca in 1861. The basis for this discovery was the analysis of speech problems resulting from injuries to this region of the brain, located in the inferior frontal gyrus. Paul Broca had a patient called Leborgne who could only pronounce the word “tan” when speaking. Paul Broca, after working with another patient with similar impairment, concluded that damage in the inferior frontal gyrus affected articulate language.


Broca’s area is well-known for being the syntactic processing  “center”. It has been known since Paul Broca associated speech production with an area in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus, which he called “Broca’s area”. Although this area is in charge of speech production, its particular role in the language system is unknown. However, it is involved in phonological, semantic, and syntactic processing and working memory. The anterior region of Broca’s area is involved in semantic processing, while the posterior region in the phonological processing (Bohsali, 2015). Moreover, the whole of Broca’s area has been shown to have a higher activation while doing reading tasks than other types of tasks.


In a simple explanation of speech production, this area approaches phonological word representation chronologically divided into segments of syllables which then is sent to different motor areas where they are converted into a phonetic code. The study of how this area produces speech has been made with paradigms using both single and complex words.


Broca’s area is correlated with phonological segmentation, unification, and syntactic processing, which are all connected to linguistic information. This area, although it synchronizes the transformation of information within cortical systems involved in spoken word production, does not contribute to the production of single words. The inferior frontal lobe is the one in charge of word production.


Furthermore, Broca’s area is structurally related to the thalamus and both are engaged in language processing. The connectivity between both areas is two thalamic nuclei, the pulvinar, and the ventral nucleus, which are involved in language processing and linguistic functions similar to BA 44 and 45 in Broca’s area. Pulvinar is connected to many frontal regions of the frontal cortex and ventral nucleus is involved in speech production. The frontal speech regions of the brain have been shown to participate in speech sound perception.


Broca's Area is today still considered an important language center, playing a central role in processing syntax, grammar, and sentence structure.


Wernicke’s area was named for German doctor Carl Wernicke, who discovered it in 1874 in the course of his research into aphasias (loss of ability to speak).This area of the brain is involved in language comprehension. Therefore, Wernicke’s area is for understanding oral language. Besides Wernicke’s area, the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), middle temporal gyrus (MTG), inferior temporal gyrus (ITG), supramarginal gyrus (SMG), and angular gyrus (AG) participate in language comprehension. Therefore, language comprehension is not located in a specific area. Contrarily, it involves large regions of the inferior parietal lobe and left temporal.


While the finale of speech production is a sequence of muscle movements, the activation of knowledge about the sequence of phonemes (consonants and vowel speech sounds) that creates a word is a phonological retrieval. Wernicke’s area contributes to phonological retrieval. All speech production tasks (e.g. word retrieval, repetition, and reading aloud) require phonological retrieval. The phonological retrieval system involved in speech repetition is the auditory phoneme perception system and the visual letter perception system is the one that serves for reading aloud. The communicative speech production entails a phase preceding phonological retrieval. The speech comprehension implicates representing sequences of phonemes onto word meaning.


The angular gyrus is an important element in processing concrete and abstract concepts. It also has a role in verbal working memory during retrieval for verbal information and in visual memory for when turning written language into spoken language. The left AG is activated in semantic processing requiring concept retrieval and conceptual integration. Moreover, the left AG is activated during problems of multiplication and addition requiring retrieval of arithmetic factors in verbal memory. Therefore, it is involved in verbal coding of numbers.


The insula is implicated in speech and language, taking part in functional and structural connections with motor, linguistic, sensory, and limbic brain areas. The knowledge about the function of the insula in speech production comes from different studies with patients who suffered from apraxia of speech. These studies have led researchers to know about the involvement of different parts of the insula. These parts are: the left anterior insula, which is related to speech production; and the bilateral anterior insula, involved in misleading speech comprehension.


Many different sources state that the study of the brain and therefore, language disorders, originated in the 19th century and linguistic analysis of those disorders began throughout the 20th century. Studying language impairments in the brain after injuries aids to comprehend how the brain works and how it changes after an injury. When this happens, the brain suffers an impairment that is referred to as “aphasia”. Lesions to Broca's Area resulted primarily in disruptions to speech production; damage to Wernicke's Area, which is located in the lower part of the temporal lobe, lead mainly to disruptions in speech reception.


There are numerous distinctive ways in which language can be affected. Phonemic paraphasia, an attribute of conduction aphasia and Wernicke aphasia, is not the speech comprehension impairment. Instead, it is the speech production damage, where the desire phonemes are selected erroneously or in an incorrect sequence. Therefore, although Wernicke’s aphasia, a combination of phonological retrieval and semantic systems impairment, affects speech comprehension, it also involves speech production damage. Phonemic paraphasia and anomia (impaired word retrieval) are the results of phonological retrieval impairment.


Another lesion that involves impairment in language production and processing is the “apraxia of speech”, a difficulty synchronizing articulators essential for speech production. This lesion is located in the superior pre-central gyrus of the insula and is more likely to occur to patients with Broca’s aphasia. Dominant ventral anterior (VA) nucleus, another type of lesion, is the result of word-finding and semantic paraphasia’s difficulties engaging in language processing. Moreover, individuals with thalamic lesions experience difficulties linking semantic concepts with correct phonological representations in word production.


Dyslexia is a language processing disorder. It involves learning difficulties such as reading, writing, word recognition, phonological recording, numeracy, and spelling. Although having access to appropriate intervention during childhood, these difficulties continue throughout the lifespan. Moreover, children are diagnosed with dyslexia when more than one factor affecting learning, such as reading, appears visible. Children diagnosed with dyslexia that have difficulties in concrete cognitive functioning is called an assumption of specificity, and it helps to diagnose dyslexia.


Some characteristics that distinguish dyslexics are incompetent phonological processing abilities causing misread of unfamiliar words and affecting comprehension; inadequacy of working memory affecting speaking, reading, and writing; errors in oral reading; oral skills difficulties as expressing oneself; and writing skills problems like expressing and spelling errors. Dyslexics not only experience learning difficulties but also other secondary characteristics as having difficulties organizing, planning, social interactions, motor skills, visual perception, and short-term memory. These characteristics affect personal and academic life.


Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder caused by damage in the central and/or peripheral nervous system and it is related to degenerative neurological diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease, cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and traumatic brain injury (TBI). Dysarthria is caused by a mechanical difficulty in the vocal cords or neurological disease-producing abnormal articulation of phonemes, such as instead of “b” a “p”. A type of dyspraxia based on distortions of words is called apraxic dysarthria This type is related to facial apraxia and motor aphasia if Broca’s area is involved.


Improvements in computer technology, in the late 20th century, has allowed a better understanding of the correlation between brain and language, and the disorder that this entails. This improvement has permitted a better visualization of the brain structure in high resolution three-dimensional images. It has also allowed to observe brain activity through the blood flow (Dronkers, Ivanova, & Baldo, 2017).


In the past, research was primarily based on observations of loss of ability resulting from damage to the cerebral cortex. Indeed, medical imaging has represented a radical step forward for research on speech processing. Since then, a whole series of relatively large areas of the brain are involved in speech processing. In more recent research, subcortical regions (those lying below the cerebral cortex such as the putamen and the caudate nucleus), as well as the pre-motor areas (BA 6), have received increased attention. It is now generally assumed that the following structures of the cerebral cortex near the primary and secondary auditory cortices play a fundamental role in speech processing:


·       "Superior temporal gyrus" (STG): morphosyntactic processing (anterior section), integration of syntactic and semantic information (posterior section)


·       "Inferior frontal gyrus" (IFG, Brodmann area (BA) 45/47): syntactic processing, working memory


·       "Inferior frontal gyrus" (IFG, BA 44): syntactic processing, working memory


·       "Middle temporal gyrus" (MTG): lexical semantic processing


·       Angular gyrus (AG): semantic processes (posterior temporal cortex)


The left hemisphere is usually dominant in right-handed people, although bilateral activations are not uncommon in the area of syntactic processing. It is now accepted that the right hemisphere plays an important role in the processing of suprasegmental acoustic features like prosody; which is “the rhythmic and melodic variations in speech”. There are two types of prosodic information: emotional prosody (right hemisphere), which is the emotional that the speaker gives to the speech, and linguistic prosody (left hemisphere), the syntactic and thematic structure of the speech.


Most areas of speech processing develop in the second year of life in the dominant half (hemisphere) of the brain, which often (though not necessarily) corresponds to the opposite of the dominant hand. 98% of right-handed people are left-hemisphere dominant, and the majority of left-handed people are as well.


Computerized tomographic (CT) scans is another technique of the 1970s, which produce low spatial resolution but provides the location of the injury "in vivo". Moreover, Voxel-based Lesion Symptom Mapping (VLSM) and Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) techniques contributed to the understanding that specific brain regions have different roles when supporting speech processing. VLSM has been used to observe complex language functions sustained by different regions. Furthermore, VBM is a helpful technique to analysis language impairments related to neurodegenerative disease.


In summary, these early research efforts demonstrated that semantic and structural speech production takes place in different areas of the brain.


Fluency (also called volubility and eloquency) is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise.


Language fluency is one of a variety of terms used to characterize or measure a person's language ability, often used in conjunction with accuracy and complexity. Although there are no widely agreed-upon definitions or measures of language fluency, someone is typically said to be fluent if their use of the language appears "fluid", or natural, coherent, and easy as opposed to slow, halting use. In other words, fluency is often described as the ability to produce language on demand and be understood.


Language fluency is sometimes contrasted with accuracy (or correctness of language use, especially grammatical correctness) and complexity (or a more encompassing knowledge of vocabulary and discourse strategies). Fluency, accuracy, and complexity are distinct but interrelated components of language acquisition and proficiency.


There are four commonly discussed types of fluency: reading fluency, oral fluency, oral-reading fluency, and written or compositional fluency. These types of fluency are interrelated, but do not necessarily develop in tandem or linearly. One may develop fluency in certain type(s) and be less fluent or nonfluent in others.


In the sense of proficiency, "fluency" encompasses a number of related but separable skills:


So although it is often assumed that young children learn languages more easily than adolescents and adults, the reverse is in fact true; older learners are faster. The only exception to this rule is in pronunciation. Young children invariably learn to speak their second language with native-like pronunciation, whereas learners who start learning a language at an older age only rarely reach a native-like level.


Since childhood is a critical period, widespread opinion holds that it is easier for young children to learn a second language than it is for adults. Children can even acquire native fluency when exposed to the language on a consistent basis with rich interaction in a social setting. In addition to capacity, factors like; 1) motivation, 2) aptitude, 3) personality characteristics, 4) age of acquisition 5) first language typology 6) socio-economic status and 7) quality and context of L2 input play a role in L2 acquisitions rate and building fluency. Second language acquisition (SLA) has the ability to influence children’s cognitive growth and linguistic development.


Skill that consists of ability to produce words in target language develops until adolescence. Natural ability to acquire a new language with a deliberate effort may begin to diminish around puberty i.e. 12–14 years of age. Learning environment, comprehensible instructional materials, teacher, and the learner are indispensable elements in SLA and developing fluency in children. Extensive reading in L2 can offer twofold benefits in foreign language learning i.e. "reading to comprehend English and reading to learn English".


Paradis (2006) study on childhood language acquisition and building fluency examines how first and second language acquisition patterns are generally similar including vocabulary and morphosyntax. Phonology of first language is usually apparent in SLA and initial L1 influence can be lifelong, even for child L2 learners.


Children can acquire a second language simultaneously (learn L1 and L2 at the same time) or sequentially (learn L1 first and then L2). In the end, they develop fluency in both with one dominant language which is spoken largely by the community they live in.


According to one source, there are five stages of SLA and developing fluency:


The process of learning a second language or "L2," among older learners differs from younger learners because of their working memory. Working memory, also connected to fluency because it deals with automatic responses, is vital to language acquisition. This happens when information is stored and manipulated temporarily. During working memory, words are filtered, processed, and rehearsed, and information is stored while focusing on the next piece of interaction. These false starts, pauses or repetitions found in fluency assessments, can also be found within one's working memory as part of communication.


Those with education at or below a high school level are least likely to take language classes. It has also been found that women and young immigrants are more likely to take language classes. Further, highly educated immigrants who are searching for skilled jobs – which require interpersonal and intercultural skills that are difficult to learn – are the most affected by lower fluency in the L2.


Fluency is a speech language pathology term that means the smoothness or flow with which sounds, syllables, words and phrases are joined together when speaking quickly. "Fluency disorders" is used as a collective term for cluttering and stuttering. Both disorders have breaks in the fluidity of speech, and both have the fluency breakdown of repetition of parts of speech.


Studies in the assessment of creativity list fluency as one of the four primary elements in creative thinking, the others being flexibility, originality and elaboration. Fluency in creative thinking is seen as the ability to think of many diverse ideas quickly.


The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923) is a book by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards. It is accompanied by two supplementary essays by Bronisław Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank. The conception of the book arose during a two-hour conversation between Ogden and Richards held on a staircase in a house next to the Cavendish Laboratories at 11 pm on Armistice Day, 1918.


The original text was published in 1923 and has been used as a textbook in many fields including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science and most recently semantics and semiotics in general. The book has been in print continuously since 1982. The most recent edition is the critical edition prepared by W. Terrence Gordon as volume 3 of the 5-volume set "C. K. Ogden & Linguistics" (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995). The full publication history, including serialised publication in "The Cambridge Magazine" prior to the first edition of the book, is in W. Terrence Gordon's, "C. K. Ogden: a bio-bibliographical study".


Richards sets forth a contextual theory of Signs: that Words and Things are connected “through their occurrence together with things, their linkage with them in a ‘context’ that Symbols come to play that important part in our life [even] the source of all our power over the external world” (47). In this context system, Richards develops a tri-part semiotics—symbol, thought and referent with three relations between them (thought to symbol=correct, thought–referent=adequate, symbol–reference=true) (11). Symbols are “those signs which men use to communicate one with another and as instruments of thought, occupy a peculiar place” (23). “All discursive symbolization involves […] weaving together of contexts into higher contexts” (220). So for a word to be understood “requires that it form a context with further experiences” (210).


The book would later influence A. J. Ayer's "Language, Truth, and Logic", an introduction to logical positivism, and both the Richards–Ogden book and the Ayer book would, in turn, influence Alec King and Martin Ketley in the writing of their book "The Control of Language", which appeared in 1939, and which influenced C. S. Lewis in the writing of his defence of natural law and objective values, "The Abolition of Man" (1943).


TRACE is a connectionist model of speech perception, proposed by James McClelland and Jeffrey Elman in 1986. It is based on a structure called "the Trace," a dynamic processing structure made up of a network of units, which performs as the system's working memory as well as the perceptual processing mechanism. TRACE was made into a working computer program for running perceptual simulations. These simulations are predictions about how a human mind/brain processes speech sounds and words as they are heard in real time.


"TRACE was the first model that instantiated the activation of multiple word candidates that match any part of the speech input." A simulation of speech perception involves presenting the TRACE computer program with mock speech input, running the program, and generating a result. A successful simulation indicates that the result is found to be meaningfully similar to how people process speech.


It is generally accepted in psycholinguistics that (1) when the beginning of a word is heard, a set of words that share the same initial sound become activated in memory, (2) the words that are activated compete with each other while more and more of the word is heard, (3) at some point, due to both the auditory input and the lexical competition, one word is recognized.


For example, a listener hears the beginning of "bald", and the words bald, ball, bad, bill become active in memory. Then, soon after, only bald and ball remain in competition (bad, bill have been eliminated because the vowel sound doesn't match the input). Soon after, bald is recognized. TRACE simulates this process by representing the temporal dimension of speech, allowing words in the lexicon to vary in activation strength, and by having words compete during processing. Figure 1 shows a line graph of word activation in a simple TRACE simulation.


Speakers usually don't leave pauses in between words when speaking, yet listeners seem to have no difficulty hearing speech as a sequence of words. This is known as the segmentation problem, and is one of the oldest problems in the psychology of language. TRACE proposed the following solution, backed up by simulations. When words become activated and recognized, this reveals the location of word boundaries. Stronger word activation leads to greater confidence about word boundaries, which informs the hearer of where to expect the next word to begin.


The TRACE model is a connectionist network with an input layer and three processing layers: pseudo-spectra (feature), phoneme and word. Figure 2 shows a schematic diagram of TRACE. There are three types of connectivity: (1) feedforward excitatory connections from input to features, features to phonemes, and phonemes to words; (2) lateral (i.e., within layer) inhibitory connections at the feature, phoneme and word layers; and (3) top-down feedback excitatory connections from words to phonemes.


The input to TRACE works as follows. The user provides a phoneme sequence that is converted into a multi-dimensional feature vector. This is an approximation of acoustic spectra extended in time.


The input vector is revealed a little at a time to simulate the temporal nature of speech. As each new chunk of input is presented, this sends activity along the network connections, changing the activation values in the processing layers. Features activate phoneme units, and phonemes activate word units. Parameters govern the strength of the excitatory and inhibitory connections, as well as many other processing details.


There is no specific mechanism that determines when a word or a phoneme has been recognized. If simulations are being compared to reaction time data from a perceptual experiment (e.g. lexical decision), then typically an activation threshold is used. This allows for the model behavior to be interpreted as recognition, and a recognition time to be recorded as the number of processing cycles that have elapsed. For deeper understanding of TRACE processing dynamics, readers are referred to the original publication and to a TRACE software tool that runs simulations with a graphical user interface.


Models of language processing can be used to conceptualize the nature of impairment in persons with speech and language disorder. For example, it has been suggested that language deficits in expressive aphasia may be caused by excessive competition between lexical units, thus preventing any word from becoming sufficiently activated. Arguments for this hypothesis consider that mental dysfunction can be explained by slight perturbation of the network model's processing. This emerging line of research incorporates a wide range of theories and models, and TRACE represents just one piece of a growing puzzle.


Psycholinguistic models of speech perception, e.g. TRACE, must be distinguished from computer speech recognition tools. The former are psychological theories about how the human mind/brain processes information. The latter are engineered solutions for converting an acoustic signal into text. Historically, the two fields have had little contact, but this is beginning to change.


TRACE’s influence in the psychology literature can be assessed by the number of articles that cite it. There are 345 citations of McClelland and Elman (1986) in the PsycINFO database. Figure 3 shows the distribution of those citations over the years since publication. The figure suggests that interest in TRACE grew significantly in 2001, and has remained strong, with about 30 citations per year.


Baby talk is a type of speech associated with an older person speaking to a child. It is also called caretaker speech, infant-directed speech (IDS), child-directed speech (CDS), child-directed language (CDL), caregiver register, parentese, or motherese.


CDS is characterized by a "sing song" pattern of intonation that differentiates it from the more monotone style used with other adults e.g., CDS has higher and wider pitch, slower speech rate and shorter utterances. It can display vowel hyperarticulation (an increase in distance in the formant space of the peripheral vowels e.g., [i], [u], and [a]) and words tend to be shortened and simplified. There is evidence that the exaggerated pitch modifications are similar to the affectionate speech style employed when people speak to their pets (pet-directed speech). However, the hyperarticulation of vowels appears to be related to the propensity for the infant to learn language, as it is not exaggerated in speech to infants with hearing loss or to pets.


CDS is a clear and simplified strategy for communicating to younger children, used by adults and by older children. The vocabulary is limited, speech is slowed with a greater number of pauses, and the sentences are short and grammatically simplified, often repeated. Although CDS features marked auditory characteristics, other factors aid in development of language. Three types of modifications occur to adult-directed speech in the production of CDS —


The younger the child, the more exaggerated the adult's CDS is. The attention of infants is held more readily by CDS over normal speech, as with adults. The more expressive CDS is, the more likely infants are to respond to this method of communication by adults.


A key visual aspect of CDS is the movement of the lips. One characteristic is the wider opening of the mouth present in those using CDS versus adult-directed speech, particularly in vowels. Research suggests that with the larger opening of the lips during CDS, infants are better able to grasp the message being conveyed due to the heightened visual cues.


Through this interaction, infants are able to determine who positive and encouraging caregivers will be in their development. When infants use CDS as a determinant of acceptable caregivers, their cognitive development seems to thrive because they are being encouraged by adults who are invested in the development of the given infants. Because the process is interactive, caregivers are able to make significant progress through the use of CDS.


Studies have shown that from birth, infants prefer to listen to CDS, which is more effective than regular speech in getting and holding an infant's attention.


Some researchers believe that CDS is an important part of the emotional bonding process between the parents and their child, and helps the infants learn the language. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Wisconsin found that using basic “baby talk” may support babies in picking up words faster. Infants pay more attention when parents use CDS, which has a slower and more repetitive tone than used in regular conversation.


CDS has been observed in languages other than English.


Purposes and benefits of CDS include support the ability of infants to bond with their caregivers. In addition, infants begin the process of speech and language acquisition and development through CDS.


Children learn fastest who receive the most acknowledgement and encouragement of what they say, who are given time and attention to speak and share, and who are questioned. Infants are able to apply this to larger words and sentences as they learn to process language.


CDS aids infants in bonding to caregivers. Although infants have a range of social cues available to them regarding who will provide adequate care, CDS serves as an additional indicator as to which caregivers will provide developmental support. When adults engage in CDS with infants, they are providing positive emotion and attention, signaling to infants that they are valued.


CDS can also serve as a priming tool for infants to notice the faces of their caregivers. Infants are more sensitive to the pitch and emphasized qualities of this method. Therefore, when caregivers use CDS, they expand the possibility for their infants to observe and process facial expressions. This effect could in part be due to infants associating CDS with positive facial expressions such as smiling, being more likely to respond to CDS if they expect to receive a positive response from their caregiver.


CDS may promote processing of word forms, allowing infants to remember words when asked to recall them in the future. As words are repeated through CDS, infants begin to create mental representations of each word. As a result, infants who experience CDS are able to recall words more effectively than infants who do not.


Infants can pick up on the vocal cues of CDS and will often pattern their babbling after it.


The use of baby talk is not limited to interactions between adults and infants, as it may be used among adults, or by people to animals. In these instances, the outward style of the language may be that of baby talk, but is not considered actual "parentese", as it serves a different linguistic function (see pragmatics).


Baby talk and imitations of it may be used by one non-infant to another as a form of verbal abuse, in which the talk is intended to infantilize the victim. This can occur during bullying, when the aggressor uses baby talk to assert that the victim is weak, cowardly, overemotional, or otherwise inferior.


Baby talk may be used as a form of flirtation between sexual or romantic partners. In this instance, the baby talk may be an expression of tender intimacy, and may perhaps form part of affectionate sexual roleplaying in which one partner speaks and behaves childishly, while the other acts motherly or fatherly, responding in "parentese". One or both partners might perform the child role. Terms of endearment, such as "poppet" (or, indicatively, "baby"), may be used for the same purpose in communication between the partners.


A significant difference is that CDL contains many more sentences about specific bits of information, such as "This cup is red," because they are intended to teach children about language and the environment. Pet-speech contains perhaps half the sentences of this form, as rather than instructive, its primary purpose is as a social function for humans; whether the dog learns anything does not seem to be a concern.


As well as the raised vocal pitch, pet-speech strongly emphasizes intonations and emotional phrasing. There are diminutives such as "walkie" for walk and "bathie" for bath.


Researchers Bryant and Barrett (2007) have suggested (as have others before them, e.g., Fernald, 1992) that CDL exists universally across all cultures and is a species-specific adaptation. Other researchers contend that it is not universal among the world's cultures, and argue that its role in helping children learn grammar has been overestimated, pointing out that in some societies (such as certain Samoan tribes), adults do not speak to their children at all until the children reach a certain age. Furthermore, even where baby-talk is used, it has many complicated grammatical constructions, and mispronounced or non-standard words.


Other evidence suggests that baby talk is not a universal phenomenon: for example Schieffelin & Ochs (1983) describe the Kaluli tribe of Papua New Guinea who do not typically employ CDS. Language acquisition in Kaluli children was not found to be significantly impaired.


The extent to which caregivers rely on and use CDS differs based on cultural differences. Mothers in regions that display predominately introverted cultures are less likely to display a great deal of CDS, although it is still used. Further, the personality of each child experiencing CDS from a caregiver deeply impacts the extent to which a caregiver will use this method of communication.


As noted above, baby talk often involves shortening and simplifying words, with the possible addition of slurred words and nonverbal utterances, and can invoke a vocabulary of its own. Some utterances are invented by parents within a particular family unit, or are passed down from parent to parent over generations, while others are quite widely known and used within most families, such as "wawa" for water, "num-num" for a meal, "ba-ba" for bottle, or "beddy-bye" for bedtime, and are considered "standard" or "traditional" words, possibly differing in meaning from place to place.


Baby talk, language regardless, usually consists of a muddle of words, including names for family members, names for animals, eating and meals, bodily functions and genitals, sleeping, pain, possibly including important objects such as diaper, blanket, pacifier, bottle, etc., and may be sprinkled with nonverbal utterances, such as "goo goo ga ga". The vocabulary of made-up words, such as those listed below, may be quite long with terms for a large number of things, rarely or possibly never using proper language, other times quite short, dominated by real words, all nouns. Most words invented by parents have a logical meaning, although the nonverbal sounds are usually completely meaningless and just fit the speech together.


Sometimes baby talk words escape from the nursery and get into adult vocabulary, for example "nanny" for "children's nurse" or "nursery governess".


Moreover, many words can be derived into baby talk following certain rules of transformation. In English, adding a terminal /i/ sound at the end, usually written and spelled as ‹ie›, ‹y›, or ‹ey›, is a common way to form a diminutive which is often used as part of baby talk. Many languages have their own unique form of diminutive suffix (see list of diminutives by language for international examples).


Still other transformations, but not in all languages, include elongated vowels, such as "kitty" and "kiiiitty", (emphasized /i/) meaning the same thing. While this is understood by English speaking toddlers, it is not applicable with Dutch toddlers as they learn that elongated vowels reference different words.


Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which is the way a language system is used in communication. Noam Chomsky introduced this concept in his elaboration of generative grammar, where it has been widely adopted and competence is the only level of language that is studied.


According to Chomsky, competence is the ideal language system that enables speakers to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences in their language, and to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. This is unaffected by "grammatically irrelevant conditions" such as speech errors. In Chomsky's view, competence can be studied independently of language use, which falls under "performance", for example through introspection and grammaticality judgments by native speakers.


Many other linguists – functionalists, cognitive linguists, psycholinguists, sociolinguists and others – have rejected this distinction, critiquing it as a concept that considers empirical work irrelevant, leaving out many important aspects of language use. Also, it has been argued that the distinction is often used to exclude real data that is, in the words of William Labov, "inconvenient to handle" within generativist theory.


Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its (the speech community's) language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of this language in actual performance. ~Chomsky,1965 (page 3)


Chomsky differentiates competence, which is an idealized capacity, from performance being the production of actual utterances. According to him, competence is the ideal speaker-hearer's knowledge of his or her language and it is the 'mental reality' which is responsible for all those aspects of language use which can be characterized as 'linguistic'. Chomsky argues that only under an idealized situation whereby the speaker-hearer is unaffected by grammatically irrelevant conditions such as memory limitations and distractions will performance be a direct reflection of competence. A sample of natural speech consisting of numerous false starts and other deviations will not provide such data. Therefore, he claims that a fundamental distinction has to be made between the competence and performance.


Chomsky dismissed criticisms of delimiting the study of performance in favor of the study of underlying competence, as unwarranted and completely misdirected. He claims that the descriptivist limitation-in-principle to classifying and organizing data, the practice of "extracting patterns" from a corpus of observed speech, and the describing of "speech habits" are core factors precluding the development of a theory of actual performance.


Linguistic competence is treated as a more comprehensive term for lexicalists, such as Jackendoff and Pustejovsky, within the generative school of thought. They assume a modular lexicon, a set of lexical entries containing semantic, syntactic and phonological information deemed necessary to parse a sentence. In the generative lexicalist view this information is intimately tied up with linguistic competence. Nevertheless, their models are still in line with the mainstream generative research in adhering to strong innateness, modularity and autonomy of syntax.


Ray S. Jackendoff's model deviates from the traditional generative grammar in that it does not treat syntax as the main generative component from which meaning and phonology is developed unlike Chomsky. According to him, a generative grammar consists of five major components: the lexicon, the base component, the transformational component, the phonological component and the semantic component.


Against the syntax-centered view of generative grammar(syntactocentrism), he specifically treats phonology, syntax and semantics as three parallel generative processes, coordinated through interface processes. He further subdivides each of those three processes into various "tiers", themselves coordinated by interfaces. Yet, he clarifies that those interfaces are not sensitive to every aspect of the processes they coordinate. For instance, phonology is affected by some aspects of syntax, but not vice versa.


In contrast to the static view of word meaning (where each word is characterized by a predetermined number of word senses) which imposes a tremendous bottleneck on the performance capability of any natural language processing system, Pustejovsky proposes that the lexicon becomes an active and central component in the linguistic description. The essence of his theory is that the lexicon functions generatively, first by providing a rich and expressive vocabulary for characterizing lexical information; then, by developing a framework for manipulating fine-grained distinctions in word descriptions; and finally, by formalizing a set of mechanisms for specialized composition of aspects of such descriptions of words, as they occur in context, extended and novel sense are generated.


Katz and Fodor suggests that a grammar should be thought of as a system of rules relating the externalized form of the sentences of a language to their meanings that are to be expressed in a universal semantic representation, just as sounds are expressed in a universal semantic representation. They hope that by making semantics an explicit part of generative grammar, more incisive studies of meaning would be possible. Since they assume that semantic representations are not formally similar to syntactic structure, they suggest a complete linguistic description must therefore include a new set of rules, a semantic component, to relate meanings to syntactic and/or phonological structure. Their theory can be reflected by their slogan "linguistic description minus grammar equals semantics".


A broad front of linguists have critiqued the notion of linguistic competence, often severely. Functionalists, who argue for a usage-based approach to linguistics, argue that linguistic competence is derived from and informed by language use, performance, taking the directly opposite view to the generative model. As a result, in functionalist theories emphasis is placed on experimental methods to understand the linguistic competence of individuals.


Sociolinguists have argued that the competence/performance distinction basically serves to privilege data from certain linguistic genres and socio-linguistic registers as used by the prestige group, while discounting evidence from low-prestige genres and registers as being simply mis-performance.


Noted linguist John Lyons, who works on semantics, has said:


Dell Hymes, quoting Lyons as above, says that "probably now there is widespread agreement" with the


Many linguists including M.A.K. Halliday and Labov have argued that the competence/performance distinction makes it difficult to explain language change and grammaticalization, which can be viewed as changes in performance rather than competence.


Another critique of the concept of linguistic competence is that it does not fit the data from actual usage where the felicity of an utterance often depends largely on the communicative context.


Neurolinguist Harold Goodglass has argued that performance and competence are intertwined in the mind, since, "like storage and retrieval, they are inextricably linked in brain damage."


Cognitive Linguistics is a loose collection of systems that gives more weightage to semantics, and considers all usage phenomenon including metaphor and language change. Here, a number of pioneers such as George Lakoff, Ronald Langacker, and Michael Tomasello have strongly opposed the competence-performance distinction. The text by Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green write:


"In rejecting the distinction between competence and performance cognitive linguists argue that knowledge of language is derived from patterns of language use, and further, that knowledge of language is knowledge of how language is used." p. 110


Numerous experiments on infants in the last two decades have shown that they are able to segment words (frequently co-occurring sound sequences) from other sounds in a stream of meaningless syllables. This together with computational results that recurrent neural networks can learn syntax-like patterns, resulted in a wide questioning of nativist assumptions underlying psycholinguistic work up to the nineties.


According to experimental linguist N.S. Sutherland, the task of psycholinguistics is not to confirm Chomsky's account of linguistic competence by undertaking experiments. It is by doing experiments, to find out what are the mechanisms that underlie linguistic competence. Psycholinguistics generally reject the distinction between performance and competence.


Psycholinguists have also decried the competence-performance distinction on the ability to model dialogue:


The narrow definition of competence espoused by generativists resulted in the field of pragmatics where concerns other than language have become dominant. This has resulted in a more inclusive notion called communicative competence, to include social aspects – as proposed by Dell Hymes. This situation has had some unfortunate side effects:


The major criticism towards Chomsky's notion of linguistic competence by Hymes is the inadequate distinction of competence and performance. Furthermore, he commented that it is unreal and that no significant progress in linguistics is possible without studying forms along with the ways in which they are used. As such, linguistic competence should fall under the domain of communicative competence since it comprises four competence areas, namely, linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic.


Linguistic competence is commonly used and discussed in many language acquisition studies. Some of the more common ones are in the language acquisition of children, aphasics and multilinguals.


The Chomskyan view of language acquisition argues that humans have an innate ability – universal grammar – to acquire language. However, a list of universal aspects underlying all languages has been hard to identify.


Another view, held by scientists specializing in Language acquisition, such as Tomasello, argues that young children's early language is concrete and item-based which implies that their speech is based on the lexical items known to them from the environment and the language of their caretakers. In addition, children do not produce creative utterances about past experiences and future expectations because they have not had enough exposure to their target language to do so. Thus, this indicates that the exposure to language plays more of a role in a child's linguistic competence than just their innate abilities.


Aphasia refers to a family of clinically diverse disorders that affect the ability to communicate by oral or written language, or both, following brain damage. In aphasia, the inherent neurological damage is frequently assumed to be a loss of implicit linguistic competence that has damaged or wiped out neural centers or pathways that are necessary for maintenance of the language rules and representations needed to communicate. The measurement of implicit language competence, although apparently necessary and satisfying for theoretic linguistics, is complexly interwoven with performance factors. Transience, stimulability, and variability in aphasia language use provide evidence for an access deficit model that supports performance loss.


The definition of a multilingual is one that has not always been very clear-cut. In defining a multilingual, the pronunciation, morphology and syntax used by the speaker in the language are key criteria used in the assessment. Sometimes the mastery of the vocabulary is also taken into consideration but it is not the most important criteria as one can acquire the lexicon in the language without knowing the proper use of it.


When discussing the linguistic competence of a multilingual, both communicative competence and grammatical competence are often taken into consideration as it is imperative for a speaker to have the knowledge to use language correctly and accurately. To test for grammatical competence in a speaker, grammaticality judgments of utterances are often used. Communicative competence on the other hand, is assessed through the use of appropriate utterances in different setting.


Language is often implicated in humor. For example, the structural ambiguity of sentences is a key source for jokes. Take Groucho Marx's line from "Animal Crackers": "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas; how he got into my pajamas I'll never know." The joke is funny because the main sentence could theoretically mean either that (1) the speaker, while wearing pajamas, shot an elephant or (2) the speaker shot an elephant that was inside his pajamas.


The Hopi time controversy is the academic debate about how the Hopi language grammaticalizes the concept of time, and about whether the differences between the ways the English and Hopi languages describe time are an example of linguistic relativity or not. In popular discourse the debate is often framed as a question about whether the Hopi "had a concept of time", despite it now being well established that they do.


The Hopi language is a Native American language of the Uto-Aztecan language family, which is spoken by some 5,000 Hopi people in the Hopi Reservation in Northeastern Arizona, US.


In the large ' there is no word exactly corresponding to the English noun "time". Hopi employs different words to refer to "a duration of time" ("pàasa "for that long"), to a point in time ("pàasat" "at that time"), and time as measured by a clock ("pahàntawa"), as an occasion to do something ("hisat" or "qeni"), a turn or the appropriate time for doing something ("qeniptsi" (noun)), and to have time for something ("aw nánaptsiwta" (verb)).


Time reference can be marked on verbs using the suffix "-ni"


The -ni suffix is also used in the word "naatoniqa" which means "that which will happen yet" in reference to the future. This word is formed from the adverb "naato" "yet", the "-ni" suffix and the clitic -qa that forms a relative clause with the meaning "that which...".


The -"ni" suffix is also obligatory on the main verb in conditional clauses:


The suffix is also used in conditional clauses referring to a past context then often combined with the particle "as" that carries past tense or counterfactual meaning, or describes unachieved intent:


The suffix "-ngwu" describes actions taking place habitually or as a general rule.


Whorf published several articles on Hopi grammar, focusing particularly on the ways in which the grammatical categories of Hopi encoded information about events and processes, and how this correlated with aspects of Hopi culture and behavior. After his death his full sketch of Hopi grammar was published by his friend the linguist Harry Hoijer, and some essays on Native American linguistics, many of which had been previously published in academic journals, were published in 1956 in the anthology "Language, Thought, and Reality" by his friend psychologist John Bissell Carroll.


Whorf's most frequently cited statement regarding Hopi time is the strongly worded introduction of his 1936 paper "An American Indian model of the Universe", which was first published posthumously in Carroll's edited volume. Here he writes that


Whorf argues that in Hopi units of time are not represented by nouns, but by adverbs or verbs. Whorf argues that all Hopi nouns include the notion of a boundary or outline, and that consequently the Hopi language does not refer to abstract concepts with nouns. This, Whorf argues, is encoded in Hopi grammar, which does not allow durations of time to be counted in the same way objects are. So instead of saying, for example, "three days", Hopi would say the equivalent of "on the third day", using ordinal numbers. Whorf argues that the Hopi do not consider the process of time passing to produce another new day, but merely as bringing back the daylight aspect of the world.


Whorf gives slightly different analyses of the grammatical encoding of time in Hopi in his different writings. His first published writing on Hopi grammar was the paper "The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi", published in 1936 in "Language", the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Here Whorf analyzed Hopi as having a tense system with a distinction between three tenses: one used for past or present events (which Whorf calls the "Factual" tense or "present-past"); one for future events; and one for events that are generally or universally true (here called "usitative"). This analysis was repeated in a 1937 letter to J. B. Carroll, who later published it as part of his selected writings under the title "Discussion of Hopi Linguistics".


In the 1940 article "Science and Linguistics", Whorf gave the same three-way classification based on the speaker's assertion of the validity of his statement: "The timeless Hopi verb does not distinguish between the present, past and future of the event itself but must always indicate what type of validity the intends the statement to have: a. report of an event .. b. expectation of an event ..; generalization or law about events."


In his interpretation of Hopi time Whorf was influenced by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which was developed in the first decades of the century and impacted the general Zeitgeist. Whorf, an engineer by profession, in fact made occasional reference to physical relativity, and he adopted the term "linguistic relativity," reflecting the general concept of the different but equally valid interpretations of some aspects of physical reality by different observers due to differences in their (for Einstein) physical circumstances or (for Whorf) their psychological-linguistic circumstances.


The most salient points involve the concepts of "simultaneity" and "spacetime". In his 1905 Special Relativity paper, Einstein maintained that two given events can legitimately be called simultaneous if and only if they take place at the same point in time and in the same point in space. No two events which take place at a spatial distance from one another can legitimately be declared to be simultaneous in any absolute sense, for the judgement of simultaneity or non-simultaneity will depend on the physical circumstances (to be exact: the relative motion) of the observers. This difference is no artifact; each of the observers is correct (and is wrong only to the extent he or she insists that another observer is incorrect).


Hermann Minkowski, in his seminal 1908 address to the Congress of German Physicists, translated Einstein's 1905 mathematical equations into geometric terms. Minkowski famously declared:


"Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."


Spatial distance and temporal distance between any two events was now replaced by a single absolute distance in spacetime.


Heynick points to several passages in Whorf's writings on the Hopis which parallel Einsteinian concepts such as:


"time varies with each observer and does not permit of simultaneity" (1940)


"The Hopi metaphysics does not raise the question whether the things at a distant village exist at the same moment as those in one's own village, for it ... says that any 'events' in the distant village can be compared to any events in one's own village only by an interval of magnitude that has both time and space forms in it." (c.1936)


The concept of a "simultaneous now" throughout the cosmos was formulated by Aristotle, Newton, and most succinctly in John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690):


"For this moment is common to all things that are now in being ... they all exist in the same moment of time."


Whorf saw this notion as derived from the Standard Average European languages in which these thinkers thought: "Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are recepts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them."


Heynick, who claimed no personal knowledge of the Hopi language, posits alternative weaker and stronger interpretations of the influence of Einsteinian relativity on Whorf's analysis of the Hopi language and the Hopi concept of time. In the weaker version, the (then) new questioning of the nature of time and space brought about by the Einsteinian revolution in physics enabled Whorf to approach the Hopis and their language unburdened by traditional Western concepts and presumptions. The stronger version is that Whorf under the influence of Einstein tended inadvertently to "read into" his linguistic and cultural data relativistic concepts where they perhaps were not.


In 1964 John Greenway published a humorous portrait of American culture, "The Inevitable Americans", in which he wrote: "You have a watch, because Americans are obsessed with time. If you were a Hopi Indian, you would have none, the Hopi have no concept of time". And even the 1971 ethnography of the Hopi by Euler and Dobyns claimed that "The English concept of time is nearly incomprehensible to the Hopi". The myth quickly became a staple element of New Age conceptualizations of the Hopi.


In 1959 philosopher Max Black published a critique of Whorf's arguments in which he argued that the principle of linguistic relativity was obviously wrong because translation between languages is always possible, even when there are no exact correspondences between the single words or concepts in the two languages.


Most of "Hopi Time" is dedicated to the detailed description of the Hopi usage of words and constructions related to time. Malotki describes in detail the usage of a large amount of linguistic material: temporal adverbs, time units, time counting practices such as the Hopi calendar, the way that days are counted and time is measured.


Linguists and psychologists who work in the universalist tradition such as Steven Pinker and John McWhorter, have seen Malotki's study as being the final proof that Whorf was an inept linguist and had no significant knowledge or understanding of the Hopi language. This interpretation has been criticized by relativist scholars as unfounded and based on a lack of knowledge of Whorf's work.


In spite of Malotki's refutation, the myth that "the Hopi have no concept of time" lived on in the popular literature. For example, in her 1989 novel "Sexing the Cherry", Jeanette Winterson wrote of the Hopi: "...their language has no grammar in the way we recognize it. And most bizarre of all, they have no tenses for past, present and future. They do not sense time in that way. For them time is one." And the myth continues to be an integral part of New Age thinking that draws on stereotypical depictions of "timeless Hopi culture".


Some linguists working on Universals of semantics, such as Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard, argue that there is a Natural Semantic Metalanguage that has a basic vocabulary of semantic "primes" including concepts such as . They have argued that Malotki's data show that the Hopi share these primes with English and all other languages, even though it is also clear that the precise way in which these concepts fit into the larger pattern of culture and language practices is different in each language, as illustrated by the differences between Hopi and English.


Historian of science, G E R Lloyd held that Malotki's investigation "made it abundantly clear that the Hopi had, and have, no difficulty whatsoever in drawing distinctions between past, present, and future. Some investigators of Puebloan astronomical knowledge have taken a compromise position, noting that while Malotki's study of Hopi temporal concepts and timekeeping practices "has clearly refuted Whorf's assertion that Hopi is a 'timeless' language, and in doing so has destroyed Whorf's strongest example for linguistic relativity, he presents no naively positivist assertion of the total independence of language and thought."


In a book review of Hopi Time, Leanne Hinton echoes Lucy's observation that Malotki wrongly characterizes Whorf's claim that Hopi have no concept of time or cannot express time. She further claims that Malotki's glosses of Hopi often use English terms for time that do not exactly translate time terms (e.g., translating "three-repetitions" in Hopi as "three times"), thereby "mak[ing] the error of attributing temporality to any Hopi sentence that translates into English with a temporal term". Further, without delineating "Hopi views of time from the views expressed by English translations" "What is meant by the word 'time', and what are the criteria for determining whether or not a concept is "temporal" is never answered by Malotki, thus begging the question.


In 1991 Penny Lee published a comparison of Malotki and Whorf's analyses of the adverbial word class that Whorf had called "tensors". She argues that Whorf's analysis captured aspects of Hopi grammar that were not captured by simply describing tensors as falling within the class of temporal adverbs.


In 2006 anthropologist David Dinwoodie published a severe critique of Malotki's work, questioning his methods and his presentation of data as well as his analysis. Dinwoodie argues that Malotki fails to adequately support his claim of having demonstrated that the Hopi have a concept of time "as we know it". He provides ethnographic examples of how some Hopi speakers explain the way they experience the difference between a traditional Hopi way of experiencing time as tied closely to cycles of ritual and natural events, and the Anglo-American concept of clock-time or school-time.


Looked at from the perspective of the History of Science, Hopi conceptions of time and space, which underlie their well-developed observational solar calendar, raise the question of how to translate Hopi conceptions into terms intelligible to Western ears.


A reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is "not" marked by an explicit relative pronoun or complementizer such as "who", "which" or "that". An example is the clause "I saw" in the English sentence "This is the man "I saw"." Unreduced forms of this relative clause would be "This is the man "that I saw"." or "..."whom I saw"."


Another form of reduced relative clause is the "reduced object passive relative clause", a type of nonfinite clause headed by a past participle, such as the clause "found here" in: "The animals "found here" can be dangerous."


Reduced relative clauses are given to ambiguity or garden path effects, and have been a common topic of psycholinguistic study, especially in the field of sentence processing.


Regular relative clauses are a class of dependent clause (or "subordinate clause") that usually modifies a noun. They are typically introduced by one of the relative pronouns "who", "whom", "whose", "what", or "which"and, in English, by the word "that", which may be analyzed either as a relative pronoun or as a relativizer (complementizer); see That a relativizer.


Reduced relative clauses have no such relative pronoun or complementizer introducing them. The example below contrasts an English non-reduced relative clause and reduced relative clause.


Because of the omission of function words, the use of reduced relative clauses, particularly when nested, can give rise to sentences which, while theoretically correct grammatically, are not readily parsed by listeners. A well-known example put forward by linguists is "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo", which contains the reduced relative clause "Buffalo buffalo buffalo" (meaning "which buffalo from Buffalo (do) buffalo").


While reduced relative clauses are not the only structures that create garden path sentences in English (other forms of garden path sentences include those caused by lexical ambiguity, or words that can have more than one meaning), they are the "classic" example of garden path sentences, and have been the subject of the most research.


Not all grammatical frameworks include reduced relative clauses. The term reduced relative clause comes from transformational generative grammar, which assumes deep structures and surface structures in language. Frameworks that assume no underlying form label non-finite reduced relative clauses as participial phrases.


In languages with head-final relative clauses, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish, non-reduced relative clauses may also cause temporary ambiguity because the complementizer does not precede the relative clause (and thus a person reading or hearing the relative clause has no "warning" that they are in a relative clause).


In psycholinguistics, a lemma (plural "lemmas" or "lemmata") is an abstract conceptual form of a word that has been mentally selected for utterance in the early stages of speech production. A lemma represents a specific meaning but does not have any specific sounds that are attached to it.


This two-staged model is the most widely supported theory of speech production in psycholinguistics, although it has been challenged. For example, there is some evidence to indicate that the grammatical gender of a noun is retrieved from the word's phonological form (the lexeme) rather than from the lemma. This can be explained by models that do not assume a distinct level between the semantic and the phonological stages (and so lack a lemma representation).


During the process of language activation, lemma retrieval is the first step in lexical access. In this step, meaning and the syntactic elements of a lexical item are realized as the lemma. Lemma retrieval, as explained through a spreading-activation theory, is part of a network of separate elements consisting of the abstract concept, the lemma and the lexeme. Lemma retrieval is aided by the activation level of the concept that has yet to be verbalized. When activation takes place on the lemma level, the highest activated lemma element is selected.


Lexical selection experiments have provided evidence that lemma retrieval is affected by the frequency of the word. This indicates that word frequency not only has an effect on the phonological elements of a word but also the semantic and syntactic elements that make of the lemma.


Experiments that have studied the Tip-of-the tongue (TOT) phenomenon have provided evidence that less strong connections of phonological elements (lexemes) and lexical and syntactic representation (lemmas) lead to inability to retrieve a lexical item. TOT utterances provide evidence that the lemmas and lexemes are separate processes in language activation.


The concept of lemma is similar to the Sanskrit "sphoṭa" (6th century), an invariant mental word, to which the sound is intimately – but not indivisibly – connected.


Maledictology (from Latin "maledicere", "to say [something] ("dicere") bad ("male")" and Greek "logia", "study of") is a branch of psychology that does research into cursing and swearing. It is influenced by American psychologist Timothy Jay (Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts) and the philologist and researcher in swearwords Reinhold Aman (California). They assume that swearing is part of human life and can even act as a passive self-defense, since it prevents palpable argument.


Dieter Gilberto Hillert () is a German-American biolinguist and cognitive scientist. His research focuses on the human language faculty as a cognitive and neurological system. He is known for work on the neurobiology of language, real-time sentence processing, and language evolution. He advocates comparative evolutionary studies of cognition, argues against tablua rasa models, and favors computational theories of mind.


He received several awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.


The early left anterior negativity (commonly referred to as ELAN) is an event-related potential in electroencephalography (EEG), or component of brain activity that occurs in response to a certain kind of stimulus. It is characterized by a negative-going wave that peaks around 200 milliseconds or less after the onset of a stimulus, and most often occurs in response to linguistic stimuli that violate word-category or phrase structure rules (as in *"the in room" instead of "in the room"). As such, it is frequently a topic of study in neurolinguistics experiments, specifically in areas such as sentence processing. While it is frequently used in language research, there is no evidence yet that it is necessarily a language-specific phenomenon.


More recent work has criticized the design of many of the foundational studies that characterized the ELAN, such that apparent ELAN effects might be the result of spillover from words prior to the onset of the critical word. This raises important questions about whether the ELAN is a true ERP component or an artifact of certain experimental designs.


The ELAN was first reported by Angela D. Friederici as a response to German sentences with phrase structure violations, such as *"the pizza was in the eaten" (as opposed to "the pizza was eaten"); it can be elicited by English phrase structure violations such as *"Max's of proof" (as opposed to "Max's proof") or *"your write" (as opposed to "you write"). The ELAN is not elicited by sentences with other kinds of grammatical errors, such as subject-verb disagreement (*""he go to the store" rather than "he goes to the store"") or grammatically dispreferred and "awkward" sentences (such as ""the doctor charged the patient was lying" rather than "the doctor charged that the patient was lying""); it only appears when it is impossible to build local phrase structure.


It appears rapidly, peaking between 100 and 300 milliseconds after the onset of the grammatically incorrect stimulus (other reports have placed its time course, or "latency", between 100 and 200ms, "under 200ms", "around 125 ms", or "about 160ms"). The speed of the ELAN may also be affected by characteristic of the violating stimuli; the ELAN appears later to visual stimuli that are fuzzy or difficult to see, and may occur earlier in morphologically complex spoken words where much information about the meaning of the word precedes the word's recognition point.


Its name derives from the fact that it is picked up most robustly by EEG sensors on the left front regions of the scalp; it may sometimes, however, have a bilateral (both sides of the scalp) distribution.


Some authors consider the ELAN to be a separate response from the left anterior negativity (LAN), while others label it as just an early version of the LAN.


The ELAN has been reported in languages such as English, German, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese. It is possible, though, that it is not a response specific to language (in other words, that the ELAN might also occur in response to non-linguistic stimuli).


Bilingual interactive activation plus (BIA+) is a model for understanding the process of bilingual language comprehension and consists of two interactive subsystems: the word identification subsystem and task/decision subsystem. It is the successor of the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model which was updated in 2002 to include phonologic and semantic lexical representations, revise the role of language nodes, and specify the purely bottom-up nature of bilingual language processing.


The BIA+ is one of many models that was defined based on data from psycholinguistic or behavioral studies which investigate how the languages of bilinguals are manipulated during listening, reading and speaking each of them; however, BIA+ is now being supported by neuroimaging data linking this model to more neurally inspired ones which have a greater focus on the brain areas and mechanisms involved in these tasks.


The two basic tools in these studies are the event-related potential (ERP) which has high temporal resolution but low spatial resolution and the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which typically has high spatial resolution and low temporal resolution. When used together, however, these two methods can generate a more complete picture of the time course and interactivity of bilingual language processing according to the BIA+ model. These methods, however, do need to be considered carefully as overlapping activation areas in the brain do not imply that there is no functional separation between the two languages at the neuronal or higher-order level.


Distinction of 2 subsystems: word identification vs. task/decision.


According to the BIA+ model shown in the figure, during word identification, the visual input activates the sublexical orthographic representations which simultaneously activate both the orthographic whole-word lexical and the sublexical phonological representations. Both whole-word orthographic and phonological representations then activate the semantic representations and language nodes which indicate membership to a particular language. All of this information is then used in the task/decision subsystem to carry out the remainder of the task at hand. The two subsystems are further described by the assumptions associated with them below.


This assumption states that language nodes/tags exist to provide a representation for the language of membership based on the information from upstream orthographic and phonological word ID processes. According to the BIA+ model, these tags have no effect on the activation level representation of words. The focus of activation of these nodes is postlexical: the existence of these nodes enables bilingual individuals not to get too much interference from the nontarget language while they process one of their language.


Parallel access assumes that language is nonselective and that both potential word choices are activated in the bilingual brain when exposed to the same stimulus. For example, test subjects reading in their second language have been found to unconsciously translate to their primary language. N400 stimulus response activation measurements show that semantic priming effects were seen in both languages and an individual cannot consciously focus their attention to only one language, even when told to ignore the second.


This language nonselective lexical access has been shown during semantic activation across languages, but also at the orthographic and phonological levels.


The temporal delay assumption is based on the principle of resting potential activation which reflects the frequency of word use by the bilingual such that high frequency words correlate to high resting level activation potentials, and words used with little frequency correlate to low resting level activation potentials. A high resting potential is one that is less negative or closer to zero, the point of activation, and therefore needs less stimuli in order to become activated. Because the less commonly used words of L2 have a lower resting level activation, L1 is likely to be activated before L2 as seen by N400 ERP patterns.


This resting level activation of words also reflects the proficiency level of bilinguals and their frequency of usage of the two languages. When a bilingual’s language proficiency is lower in L2 than L1, the activation of L2 lexical representations will be further delayed as more extensive or higher-level brain activation is necessary for language control. Both low and high proficiency bilinguals have parallel activation of the word representations, however the less proficient language, L2, becomes active more slowly contributing to the temporal delay assumption.


The locations of many of the word identification processing tasks have been determined with fMRI studies. Word retrieval is localized in Broca's area of the prefrontal cortex, whereas storage of information is localized in the inferior temporal lobes.


Globally, the same brain areas have been shown to be activated across the L1 and L2 in highly proficient bilinguals. Some subtle differences between L1 and L2 activations emerge though when testing lower proficient bilinguals.


The task/decision subsystem of the BIA+ model determines which actions must be executed for the task at hand based on the relevant information that becomes available after word identification processing. This subsystem involves many of the executive processes including monitoring and control associated with the prefrontal cortex.


"Bottom-up control of task/decision from word identification".


Action plans that meet the task at hand are executed by the task/decision system on the basis of activation information from the word identification subsystem. Studies that tested bilinguals with homographs showed that conflicts between target and non-target language readings of the homographs still led to a difference in activation between it and a control, implying that bilinguals are not able to regulate activation in the word identification system. Therefore, the action plans of the task/decision system have no direct influence on activations of word identification language subsystem.


The neural correlates of the task/ decision subsystem consist of multiple components that map onto different areas of prefrontal cortex responsible for executing control functions. For example, the general executive functions of language switching have been found to activate the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex areas.,


Translation, on the other hand, requires controlled actions in language representations and has been associated with the left basal ganglia, The left caudate nucleus has been associated with control of in-use language, and the left mid-prefrontal cortex is responsible for monitoring interference and suppressing competing responses between languages.,


According to the BIA+ model, when a bilingual with English as their primary language and Spanish as their secondary language translates the word "advertencia" from Spanish to English, several steps occur. The bilingual would use the orthographic and phonological cues to differentiate this word from the similar English word "advertisement". At this point, however, the bilingual automatically derives the semantic meaning of the word, not only for the correct Spanish meaning of advertencia which is "warning" but also for the Spanish meaning of advertisement which is "publicidad".


This information would then be stored in the bilingual’s working memory and used in the task/decision system to determine which of the two translations best fits the task at hand. Since the original instructions were to translate from Spanish to English, the bilingual would choose the correct translation of "advertencia" to be "warning" and not "advertisement".


While the BIA+ models shares several similarities with its predecessor, the BIA model, there are a few distinct differences that exist between the two. First and most notable is the purely bottom-up nature of the BIA+ model which assumes that information from the task/decision subsystem cannot influence the word identification subsystem, while the BIA model assumes that the two systems can fully interact.


Second is that the language membership nodes of the BIA+ model do not affect the activation levels of the word identification system, whereas they play an inhibitory role in the BIA model.


Finally participant expectations could potentially affect the task/decision system in the BIA+ model; however the BIA model assumes there is no strong effect on the activation state of words based on expectations.


The BIA+ model has been supported by many of the quantitative neuroimaging studies but more research needs to be completed in order to strengthen the model as a frontrunner in the accepted models for bilingual language processing. In the task/decision system, the task components are well-defined (e.g. translation, language switching) but the decision components involved in the execution of these tasks in the subsystem are underspecified. The relationship of the components in this subsystem need further exploration in order to be fully understood.