COMMON FEATURES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGES

1
COMMON FEATURES OF SPOKEN LANGUAGES

• Arbitrary link of sound and meaning
• occurs in absence of referent (displacement)
• small set of phonemes (/e/, /sh/, ..) that carry
  meaning (duality)
• large set of morphemes
• small set of function words affixes
• large set of content words
• syntactic rules that specify sequence and
  constituent structure (regularity)
• unlimited number of potential sentences
  (productivity)
• iteration and recursion

2
DIFFERENCES AMONG SPOKEN LANGUAGES

• identity and number of phonemes
• English has 45 phonemes
• Russian has 70 phonemes
• specific syntactic rules
• e.g., for basic declarative sentence,
• SVO 35 SOV 44
• VSO 19 OVS 0
• number of inflections (walk, walking..)
• Chinese has none
• Serbo-Croatian has lots
• total number of morphemes
• varies with cultural complexity
• use of intontation (prosody) phonemically
• Cantonese ma, ma ma ma, ma ma.

3
ANATOMICAL ADAPTATIONSFOR SPOKEN LANGUAGE
Lower larynx lets air through mouth vs. nose
larger nerve for controlling tongue movements
Hypoglossal canal
4
BROCAS APHASIA

• damage to inferior left frontal lobe
• speech is halting and agrammatic
• ah. Monday .. ah..Dad and Paul . .and Dad . .
  hospital. Two . . ah. .doctors. .and. .ah.
  .thirty minutes . . and . . yes . . hospital . .
  and . . Thursday . . . teeth.
• comprehension impaired for more complex sentences
• They gave her dog / the biscuits
• John was hit by Mary
• speech articulation errors
• chrysanthemum chyrsa. . mum . . mum

5
WERNICKES APHASIA

• damage to left posterior temporal lobe
• speech may be fluent but meaningless
• I called my mother on the television and didnt
  understand the door. It wasnt too breakfast, but
  they came from far to near.
• and contain neologisms
• I was just wondering what kind of a hote mone
  murchin it is.
• comprehension often abysmal
• may be unaware of deficit (anasagnosic)

6
TYPES OF APHASIA
Brocas Left nonfluent speech Frontal comprehe
nsion OK poor naming
repetition Wernickes Left fluent, bizarre
speech Temporal poor comprehension poor
naming good repetition Conduction arcuate
fluent speech fasciculus good
comprehension good naming poor
repetition Trans- angular nonfluent
speech Cortical gyrus? Poor comprehension goo
d naming repetition