Language

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Language

• Psychological Aspects of Human Language

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Language A Big Picture
Conceptual Intentional Systems
The World
Sensory Motor Systems
Language
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Outline

• Language Systems
• Phonology (sounds of language)
• Morphology
• Syntax (grammatical rules)
• Semantics (meaning)
• Pragmatics (social rules)
• Themes in Psycholinguistics
• Ambiguity

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Language Structure Phonology
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Phonology

• Phonemes set of distinct sounds that compose a
  language.
• Primitives
• Minimal pairs bat/pat
• are extracted from a continuous input (sound)

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Phonology

• Categorical Perception Continuous dimension
  perceived as discrete.
• Sudden break between categories (between
  phonemes)
• No discrimination within categories (within
  phonemes)

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The basic perceptual elements of speech Sound
Pressure waves
Pressure Wave
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Linguistic Description
S P EECH L A B
Pressure Wave
Amplitud
Spectrogram
Frequency
Time
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Spectrogram
formants
f3
Frequency
f2
f1
Time
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Formant

• A formant is a stream of sound within a specific
  frequency range
• Each phoneme has a unique combination of multiple
  formants
• Vowels are defined based on the relation among
  multiple formants
• Consonants are defined based on the formant
  transition (i.e., the rapid change of frequency
  in the initial segment of a formant)

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Da
Ga
a
G
D
a
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Ambiguity of Speech Signal
1. Coarticulation (Parallel Transmission)
OO
TOOL
T
L
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2. Context Dependence
di
du
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3. Segmentation of continuous speech
pauses in the middle of words
no pauses between words
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Phoneme production

• Three dimensions
• Do the vocal cords vibrate? (voicing)
• Voiced (/z/) vs. not voiced (/p/)
• Where is airflow restricted? (Place of
  articulation)
• Bilabial (/p/), labio-dental (/t/), alveolar
  (/t/)
• How is airflow restricted? (Manner of
  production)
• Fully stopped (/p/) or not (/b/), air through
  nose or mouth
• quantified by voice-onset time

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Language Structure Morphology
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Morphology

• Morpheme
• Smallest unit in a language that conveys meaning.
• Can be combined to form words.
• Content Morphemes
• Dog
• Mississippi
• Function Morphemes
• Play-ed
• Dog-s

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Morphology

• Different phonemes can represent the same
  morpheme (e.g, English plural).
• Dog
• Dog /s/ dogs z
• Cat
• Cat /s/ cats s
• Dish
• Dish /s/ dishes iz

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Morphology

• Knowledge of morphemic variation is rule-based.
• Whats the plural of
• Toma?
• Blorch?

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Language Structure Syntax
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Syntax

• Tacit rules which govern the mappings between
  ideas and spoken sentences.
• Production
• Comprehension
• These aint the rules your middle school teacher
  taught you. You already knew them by the time you
  got to middle school
• Syntax does not depend on semantics

Noam Chomsky (1928-)
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Phrase Structure Rules

• Syntactic rules that specify allowable sequences
  of elements
• For example
• Sentence gt Noun Phrase Verbal Phrase
• S -gt NP VP
• John walks
• The cat walks
• The young man walks the dog
• NP gt determiner adjective Noun
• VP gt aux V NP
• Sentences have internal structure.
• Grammatical rules have psychological reality.
• Ask your friend to parse the above sentences

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Sentences Have Structure
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Syntactic Structure

• Surface structure natural grouping of words in
  order, as spoken.
• Deep structure underlying linguistic
  representation of sentence structure and meaning.
  
• Transformational rules move from deep to surface

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Standard Theory of Generative Grammar
Meaning
Phrase-Structure Semantic Rules Rules T
ransformations (rewrite rules)
Deep Structure
(preserves meaning)
Surface Structure
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Multiple surface structures can correspond to a
single deep structure...
Example 1
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Example 2
Same deep structure, different surface structure.
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The boy hit the ball
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The ball was hit by the boy
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The boy did not hit the ball
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Syntactic Structure

• Meaning and form are distinct
• One sentence can have multiple meanings.
• They are cooking apples.
• Different sentences can have same meaning.
• John graded the exams.
• The exams were graded by John.

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Different Meanings
They were cooking apples.
There were things on the table. Those things
were apples for cooking.
There were people cooking something. What they
were cooking were apples.
Smashing Pumpkins
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Processing Syntax

• Parsing figuring out how sentence elements fit
  together as we hear them.
• Assign elements of surface structure to
  linguistic categories.
• Parsing Strategies
• Late Closure

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Late Closure

• Late Closure wherever possible we prefer to
  attach new items to the current constituent.
• Since Jay always jogs a mile seems like a very
  short distance to him.
• They were cooking apples.

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Late Closure
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Language Structure Semantics
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Semantics

• Meanings of words and sentences.
• Swinney (1979) When is semantic ambiguity
  resolved?
• Ps listened to sentences while performing a
  lexical decision task.
• The waiter poured the port into the glass.
• Measured priming for relevant meanings.
• wine, ship
• Found priming effects for both meanings.
• Suggests that

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Language Structure Pragmatics
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Language Pragmatics
Conceptual Intentional Systems
The World
Sensory Motor Systems
Language
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Pragmatics

• Social rules for using language as a means of
  communication.
• Conversational Maxims (Grice)
• Be appropriately informative
• Be truthful
• Be relevant
• Be clear
• Sorry I am late, I had a flat tire (yesterday)

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Pragmatics

• Speech Acts What we are trying to accomplish
  with a given utterance.
• Underlying communicative goal.
• Words dont mean, people mean
• Should the first amendment be always protected?
• Direct v Indirect Speech Acts
• Can you pass the salt?
• Irony, sarcasm

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Ambiguity

• Human language is often ambiguous.
• Context, background knowledge, assumptions allow
  us to process language.

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Lexical Ambiguity

• Words with two different meanings.
• He was bothered by the cold.
• Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a
  banana.

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Syntactic Ambiguity

• Words can be grouped together into more than one
  phrase structure -- leading to different
  meanings.
• Ambiguity results when the surface structure
  corresponds to more than one deep structure.
• They are cooking apples.
• I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How it got in
  my pajamas, Ill never know.

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Minimal Attachment

• Minimal Attachment build structure using the
  fewest syntactic nodes possible.
• Marcie kissed Ernie and his brother