The crew enters Kat's realm of speech and language science. Language is broken down to the point where the hosts all end up just making noises and trying to figure out what the hell is actually going on. The discussion of speech and language is embedded in developmental psychology. From fetuses to adults, the crew discusses how we develop and perceive speech and language. It is difficult to talk about these topics without also discussing how speech and language critically determine our identity as a species.

Topics Discussed:

The sounds of language

The five components of language

Phonology – sounds and sound systems – how can we combine certain sounds?

It's okay for "ks" to be at the end of a word “breaks”, not at the beginning

Morphology – how to we combine units of meaning – conjugation

Semantics – meaning, lexicon

Syntax – how we combine words

You can put the same words in a different order to create different meanings

Pragmatics – rules for the social use of language, communication

Politeness, indirect requests, facial expressions, etc

The intersection of the study of language and developmental psychology

The difference between speech and language

How speech develops in infants

Speech perception in fetuses

How speech and language studies are performed with infants and fetuses

Brain Imaging (EEG, MEG – Magnetoencephalography, etc.)

Infant perception studies

Habituation studies – If an infant hears the same thing over and over, they get bored and stop

responding as much. If we introduce a new stimulus and the response level goes back up, we

know they perceived the difference. Usually they are sucking on a pacifier with a sensor in it.

Behavioral Response Audiometry (BOA)

Conditioned head turning / Visual Reinforcement – we condition them (think Skinner’s Behavioral studies) to turn their heads to a certain spot when they hear a difference (or whatever we are testing for) by rewarding them with an interesting visual stimulus like a dancing teddy bear, or a light up spinning thing

In audiology – Visual Reinforcement Audiometry (VRA)

Preferential looking - Similar to conditioned head turning – children will look longer at something that matches what they are hearing

e.g. we can tell if they understand the word dog if they look longer at the picture of the

dog than the ball

Technology can track eye gaze very precisely

Innate speech abilities of infants

Infants are born with the ability to hear speech sounds (even before they are born!) and they can tell the difference between their mother’s voice and a stranger’s voice

Kisilevsky et al. (2003) – 38 week old fetuses’ heart-rates went up when they heard their mother’s voices

Infants can remember what they hear in utero and show preference for familiar patterns of sounds

DeCasper & Spence (1986) – moms read passage out loud every day for a few weeks prior to birth and after they were born, the infants showed preference for that passage over an unfamiliar one. Control group showed no preference between the two.

Infants can selectively attend to speech over environmental noises

Vouloumanos & Werker (2007) – 1-4 day old infants try harder to attend to/hear speech

sounds than non-speech sounds

Shultz & Vouloumanos (2010) - This fact holds true for speech vs. other human vegetative sounds (coughing, sneezing, etc.) as well as human speech vs. animal (monkey) “speech”/calls