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The Physical Foundation Of Language: Exploration of a hypothesis

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology.

The Physical Foundation of Language: Exploration of a Hypothesis - Robin Allott - Google Книги

A Student's Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. Resistance of the Sensible World. Demonstratives in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. The Work of Psychic Figurability. Reference and Structure in the Philosophy of Language. Philosophical and Linguistic Analyses of Reference. Thinking between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty.

An overview paper about: The Natural Origin of Language. The Motor Theory of Language Origin. The Child and the World. The Great Mosaic Eye. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long. At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. You submitted the following rating and review. We'll publish them on our site once we've reviewed them.

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Critical period

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Would you like us to take another look at this review? No, cancel Yes, report it Thanks! You've successfully reported this review. One prediction of this hypothesis is that second language acquisition is relatively fast, successful, and qualitatively similar to first language only if it occurs before the age of puberty. In , Jacqueline S. Johnson and Elissa L.

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Johnson and Newport attributed this claim to a decline in language learning ability with age. Opponents of the critical period argue that the difference in language ability found by Johnson and Newport could be due to the different types of input that children and adults receive; children received reduced input while adults receive more complicated structures. There is also some debate as to how one can judge the native-like quality of the speech participants produce and what exactly it means to be a near-native speaker of a second language.

Recently, a connectionist model has been developed to explain the changes that take place in second language learning assuming that sensitive period affects lexical learning and syntactic learning parts of the system differently, which sheds further light on how first and second language acquisition changes over the course of learners development. In mammals , neurons in the brain that process vision actually develop after birth based on signals from the eyes.

A landmark experiment by David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel showed that cats that had one eye sewn shut from birth to three months of age monocular deprivation only fully developed vision in the open eye. They showed that columns in the primary visual cortex receiving inputs from the other eye took over the areas that would normally receive input from the deprived eye. In general electrophysiological analyses of axons and neurons in the lateral geniculate nucleus showed that the visual receptive field properties was comparable to adult cats.

However, the layers of cortex that were deprived had less activity and fewer responses were isolated.

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The kittens had abnormally small ocular dominance columns part of the brain that processes sight connected to the closed eye, and abnormally large, wide columns connected to the open eye. Because the critical period time had elapsed, it would be impossible for the kittens to alter and develop vision in the closed eye. This did not happen to adult cats even when one eye was sewn shut for a year because they had fully developed their vision during their critical period.

Later experiments in monkeys found similar results. In a follow-up experiment, Hubel and Wiesel explored the cortical responses present in kittens after binocular deprivation; they found it difficult to find any active cells in the cortex, and the responses they did get were either slow-moving or fast-fatiguing.

Furthermore, the cells that did respond selected for edges and bars with distinct orientation preferences.

Language and the Mind Revisited - The Biolinguistic Turn with Noam Chomsky

Nevertheless, these kittens developed normal binocularity. Hubel and Wiesel first explained the mechanism, known as orientation selectivity, in the mammalian visual cortex. Orientation tuning, a model that originated with their model, is a concept in which receptive fields of neurons in the LGN excite a cortical simple cell and are arranged in rows.

This model was important because it was able to describe a critical period for the proper development of normal ocular dominance columns in the lateral geniculate nucleus , and thus able to explain the effects of monocular deprivation during this critical period. The critical period for cats is about three months and for monkeys, about six months. In a similar experiment, Antonini and Stryker examined the anatomical changes that can be observed after monocular deprivation. They compared geniculocortical axonal arbors in monocularly deprived animals in the long term 4- weeks to short term 6—7 days during the critical period established by Hubel and Wiesel They found that in the long term, monocular deprivation causes reduced branching at the end of neurons, while the amount of afferents allocated to the nondeprived eye increased.

Even in the short term, Antonini and Stryker found that geniculocortical neurons were similarly affected. This supports the aforementioned concept of a critical period for proper neural development for vision in the cortex. In humans, some babies are born blind in one or both eyes, for example, due to cataracts. Even when their vision is restored later by treatment, their sight would not function in the normal way as for someone who had binocular vision from birth or had surgery to restore vision shortly after birth.

Therefore, it is important to treat babies born blind soon if their condition is treatable. Expression of the protein Lynx1 has been associated with the normal end of the critical period for synaptic plasticity in the visual system. In psychology, imprinting is any type of rapid learning that occurs in a particular life stage. While this rapid learning is independent of the behavioral outcome, it also establishes it and can effect behavioral responses to different stimuli.

Konrad Lorenz is well known for his classic studies of filial imprinting in graylag geese. From to , he presented himself to a group of newly hatched gosling and took note of how he was instantly accepted, followed, and called to as if he were the one who laid them himself. As the first moving object they encountered, Lorenz studied the phenomenon in how quickly the geese were able to form such an irreversible bond.

For certain species, when raised by a second one, they develop and retain imprinted preferences and approach the second species they were raised by rather than choose their own, if given a choice. Imprinting serves as the distinguishing factor between one's own mother and other mother figures.


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The mother and the infant both identify with each other, this is a strong bonding moment for humans. It provides a sort of model or guide to adult behaviors in addition to other factors such as nurture, protection in infancy, guidance, and nourishment. The imprinting process, Lorenz also found, brought about a sense of familiarity for the young animals.

When such a strong bond is formed at such an early stage, it creates a sense of security and comfort for the subject and actually encourages the imprinting behavior. Pheromones play a key role in the imprinting process, they trigger a biochemical response in the recipient, leading to a confirmed identification in the other individual. If direct contact between mother and infant is not maintained during the critical imprinting period, then the mother goose may reject the infant because she is unfamiliar with her newborn's scent. If that does happen, then the infant's life would be in jeopardy unless it were claimed by a substitute mother and if it failed to imprint would, that trigger psychological trauma, possibly leading to awkward social behavior in later life.

The newborn uses this pheromone identification to seek the people it identifies with, when in times of distress, hunger, and discomfort as a survival skill. When imprinting on their mothers, newborns look to them for nourishment, a sense of security, and comfort. Human newborns are among the most helpless known with orangutang newborns ranking second.

Newborns of these species have a very limited array of innate survival abilities. Their most important and functional ability is to form bonds with close individuals who are able to keep them alive. Imprinting is a crucial factor of the critical period because it facilitates the newborn's abilities to form bonds with other individuals, from infancy to adulthood. Many studies have supported a correlation between the type of auditory stimuli present in the early postnatal environment and the development on the topographical and structural development of the auditory system.

First reports on critical periods came from deaf children and animals that received a cochlear implant to restore hearing. Approximately at the same time, both an electroencephalographic study by Sharma, Dorman and Spahr [27] and an in-vivo investigation of the cortical plasticity in deaf cats by Kral and colleagues [28] demonstrated that the adaptation to the cochlear implant is subject to an early, developmental sensitive period.

The closure of sensitive periods likely involves a multitude of processes that in their combination make it difficult to reopen these behaviorally. Merzenich and colleagues showed that during an early critical period, noise exposure can affect the frequency organization of the auditory cortex. Recent studies have examined the possibility of a critical period for thalamocortical connectivity in the auditory system. For example, Zhou and Merzenich studied the effects of noise on development in the primary auditory cortex in rats.

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In their study, rats were exposed to pulsed noise during the critical period and the effect on cortical processing was measured. Rats that were exposed to pulsed noise during the critical period had cortical neurons that were less able to respond to repeated stimuli; the early auditory environment interrupted normal structural organization during development.

In a related study, Barkat, Polley and Hensch looked at how exposure to different sound frequencies influences the development of the tonotopic map in the primary auditory cortex and the ventral medical geniculate body. They found that mice that were exposed to an abnormal auditory environment during a critical period P P15 had an atypical tonotopic map in the primary auditory cortex. Critical periods are important for the development of the brain for the function from a pattern of connectivity.


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In general, the early auditory environment influences the structural development and response specificity of the primary auditory cortex. Absolute pitch manifests itself almost always before adolescence and rarely if ever among individuals who are first exposed to music after mid-childhood, suggesting that exposure to music or similar phenomena e. Studies that ask musicians and non-musicians to sing or hum well-known popular songs that have definitive recordings and hence are sung in standardized keys show that—on average—participants sing within a semitone of the standardized key but that outside the small subset of participants with absolute pitch there is broad variation the "bell curve" that reflects the degree of approximation to the standard key is broad and flat.

Also, the results' conjunction with the aforementioned chronological observations suggests that early to mid-childhood exposure to environments whose interpretation depends on pitch is a developmental "trigger" for whatever aptitude an individual possesses. In our vestibular system , neurons are undeveloped at neuronal birth and mature during the critical period of the first postnatal weeks.