Here is a ppt on language acquisition:
Here is a ppt on poverty of stimulus:
http://www.cogsci.bme.hu/~zjakab/BSCS_Topics_in_Cognitive_Development/Lang_acq08.ppt
And one more on language acquisition:
plaza.ufl.edu/lcsonka/notes/Presentation17a.ppt
And another on language acquisition:
I’m just going to drift through the net here and pull some stuff up. It is very interesting to me that there are so many powerpoint presentations out there. We will have an assignment where I will ask you to find and present a powerpoint.
Auditory Cortex: The auditory cortex is ”The major cortical target of the neurons in the medial geniculate nucleus” (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=.0POPlIEWmNCeTzBzCh5qiMtsI2nqLUmGxcvrfaQ7QG#2782). This image Dr. Ugurbil’s image of the auditory cortex shows the auditory cortex ‘light up’ when a word is heard. Compare the same brain area during reading.
Angular Gyrus: The angular gyrus ”plays a special role in inter-analyzer synthesis.” This UCSD news release Grasping Metaphor shows a nice picture of the angular gyrus ‘lighting up.’ A team led by V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, has found brain damage evidence for the role of the angular gyrus in interpreting metaphor. One subject, “prodded on “all that glitters is not gold,” … finally said that it meant you had to be very careful when buying jewelry because you might get robbed.”
The USCD team used the booba/kiki test.
Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area: A two-fer from Neuroscience for Kids. Scroll down to Broca’s Area and Wernicke’s Area and read that Broca’s area is for speech production and articulation and the Wernicke’s area is for (rather broadly) language comprehension. Broca’s area is associated with motor control of speech. Here’s Broca and a brain he studied, courtesy of Medical Science 532 of the U of Idaho. The site notes that Broca’s aphasia is also called expressive aphasia because people with damage to Broca’s area have difficulty producing spoken language. The National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders provides information about the types of aphasia. If Wernicke’s area is damaged, people “may speak in long sentences that have no meaning, add unnecessary words, and even create made-up words. For example, someone with Wernicke’s aphasia may say, ‘You know that smoodle pinkered and that I want to get him round and take care of him like you want before’” (quoted from the NIDCD site).
And then I ended up looking at homunculi:
motor homunculus From McGill’s The Brain.
Here is a sound file for our brief introduction to the Cherokee language. Here is a rough gloss in English. Listen to the sound file and write out the Cherokee words. What are the sounds of Cherokee?
apple, deer, pig, chicken, egg, eggs, someone’s mother, my mother, your mother, water, meat, fruit, something to eat, you are eating, you eat, something to drink, someone is drinking, dirt, soil
China’s many different ethnic groups speak many different languages, collectively called Zhōngguó Yǔwén (中国语文), literally “speech and writing of China” which mainly span six linguistic families.
Includes the many different Han Chinese language variants (commonly simply called Chinese) as well as non-Han minority languages such as Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.
Chinese is written with characters which are known as 漢字 [汉字] (hànzi).
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/language.htm
Has links to lessons as well as showing the writing systems.
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/burmese.htm
Gives the origin of the writing system.
Mocking Artificial International Languages
Europanto
http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-eur2.htm
How English becomes German
http://luminusdadon.wordpress.com/2006/05/04/how-english-becomes-german/
Ann Arbor “Black English trial” (1979)
(And Oakland School Board 1996)
Teachers use African American Language to teach standard English:
http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/standardamerican/
http://www.cal.org/topics/dialects/aae.html
http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/christ01.html
http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/LingAnthro1.html
and KRS-1 Boogie Down Productions Why is that?
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Is-That-Explicit/dp/B002JLW0D8/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1251911946&sr=1-13
“how things are said … may carry more weight than what is actually being said”
Salzmann p.313
George Orwell. 1946. Politics and the English language. Quoted from http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm accessed on 9/1/09.
“Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. “
