Language

1
Chapter 9

• Language

2
Introductory Definitions

• Linguistics The academic discipline that studies
  language.
• Psycholinguistics The study of language as it is
  used and learned by people.
• Language A shared, symbolic system for
  communication.

3
Linguistic Universals

• Hockett (1960)
• Features or characteristics common to all known
  languages.

4
Semanticity, Arbitrariness and Flexibility

• Semanticity Language conveys meaning.
• Arbitrariness No inherent connection between the
  units in a language and the meanings referred to
  by those units.
• Flexibility of Symbols The connection between
  symbols and meaning in language is arbitrary (see
  also Naming we assign names to everything in our
  environment).

5
Displacement and Productivity

• Displacement
• The ability to talk about something other than
  the present moment.
• Productivity
• Language is a productive and inherently novel
  activity we generate sentences rather than
  repeat them.

6
Five Levels of Language Analysis
7
Competence Versus Performance

• Competence The internalized knowledge of
  language and its rules that fully fluent speakers
  of a language have.
• Performance The actual language behavior a
  speaker generates.
• Chomsky (1957) argues that competence is a purer
  basis for understanding linguistic knowledge than
  is performance.

8
Dysfluencies and Linguistic Intuitions

• Dysfluencies Irregularities or errors in
  otherwise fluent speech.
• Linguistic Intuitions Chomskys approach to
  studying language involves asking people to
  judge whether a sentence is acceptable.

9
Whorfs Hypothesis

• The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
• The language you know shapes the way you think
  about events in the world around you.
• Does language constrain thought?
• Can we think about ideas that our language
  doesnt name?

10
Phonology

• The sounds of language and the rule system for
  combining them.
• Phoneme A category of language sounds that are
  treated as the same sound, despite any physical
  difference among the category members.
• English has about 46 phonemes.

11
Categorical Perception

• All the sounds within a set of boundaries are
  perceived as the same, despite physical
  differences among them.
• Example
• The hard /k/ sounds in cool and keep we perceive
  these as belonging to the same category, the /k/
  phoneme.

12
Productivity and Phonology

• A small number of units (phonemes) can be used to
  generate an essentially infinite number of words.
• Phonemes are combined into words by using rules.
• Phonemic Competence Extensive knowledge of the
  rules of permissible English sound combinations.

13
Speech Perception

• Is not just stringing phonemes together.
• The same sounds change from speaker to speaker,
  and from word to word, depending on what sounds
  precede and follow (see, e.g., co-articulation
  where more than one sound is articulated at the
  same time).
• This variability in sounds is called the Problem
  of Invariance (The problem is that sounds are not
  invariant).

14
Are there pauses at the End of Spoken Words?
15
Syntax

• A tax levied on alcohol and tobacco?
• The arrangements of words as elements in a
  sentence to show their relationship to one
  another or sentence structure.
• Here, were interested in how words are sequenced
  to form meaningful utterances.

16
Syntactic Grammar

• The set of rules for ordering words into
  acceptable, well-formed sentences.
• Is descriptive (versus proscriptive).
• Examples
• Word order
• Phrase order.

17
Chomskys Transformational Grammar

• Goal Describe the universal aspects of syntactic
  knowledge.
• Words come in groupings.
• Groupings can be altered to express different
  meanings.

18
Chomskys Transformational Grammar, Illustrated
19
Phrase Structure Grammar

• The constituents of the sentence, the word
  groupings and phrases that make up the whole
  utterance, and the relationships among these
  constituents.

20
Deep Structure

• An abstract, syntactic representation of the
  sentence being constructed.
• Is passed along to the transformational rules to
  yield the surface structure (the actual form of
  the sentence).
• Is also submitted to a semantic component that
  computes sentence meaning.

21
Ambiguous Sentences and Parsing

• Visiting relatives can be a nuisance.
• This sentences surface structure is ambiguous--
  has more than one meaning.
• Alternative meanings can be revealed by PARSING
  the sentence-- dividing the sentence into
  phrasings and groupings.
• Reveals two deep structures.

22
Transformational Rules

• Convert the deep structure into a surface
  structure, a sentence ready to be spoken.
• Different transformations lead to different types
  of sentences (e.g., future or past tense).

23
Limitations of Transformational Grammar

• Makes meaning a secondary factor to the syntactic
  component?
• Decide on syntax first, and then figure out what
  were going to talk about???
• Chomsky, however, did emphasize the joint
  importance of syntax and semantics.

24
The Cognitive Role of Syntax

• To help the listener determine meaning.
• To minimize comprehensions processing demands.
• Bock (1982) the cognitive psychology of syntax.
• Automatic Processing
• Planning

25
Lexical and Semantic Language Factors

• Retrieving word meaning from memory.
• The Mental Lexicon The mental dictionary of
  words and their meanings.
• Also involves relating words to other words.

26
Morphemes

• Morphemes The smallest meaningful unit of
  language.
• Can be free (car, dog) or bound (un-,
  -ness).unhappiness un- not happy
  happy -ness state or quality of being
• Morphemes and lexical representation.

27
Case Grammar

• Fillmore (1968)
• The semantic analysis of sentences involves
  figuring out what semantic role is being played
  by each word or concept in the sentence and
  computing meaning based on those semantic roles.

28
Case Grammar, Continued

• A sentence is made up of a verb and a collection
  of nouns in various cases in the deep structure
  sense.
• Sentence processing involves semantic parsing, in
  which we focus on the semantic roles played by
  the content words in the sentences.

29
Interaction of Syntax and Semantics

• Syntax is a clue to understanding sentences.
• But, semantic knowledge can overpower syntax.
• Fillenbaum (1974)
• Subjects normalized perverse and disordered
  sentences.
• Dont print that or I wont sue youJohn went
  into the store and got off the bus

30
Evidence for Semantic Grammar Approaches.

• Predicts Listeners begin to analyze sentences
  immediately, by assigning each word to a
  particular semantic case role.
• Garden Path Sentences
• The old train the young.
• After the musician played the piano was rolled
  off the stage.

31
Brain and Language

• Aphasia
• A general class of brain disorder where language
  is disrupted.
• Three basic forms
• Brocas (speech production)
• Wernickes (speech comprehension)
• Conduction aphasia (word repetition).

32
Brain-Related Disruptions of Language
33
Brocas and Wernickes Aphasia
34
Other Aphasias

• Anomia Impairment in the normal ability to
  retrieve a concept and say its name. Involves
  damage to the left temporal lobe.
• Agraphia Disruption in writing.
• Alexia Disruption in reading.
• Pure Word Deafness Person cannot understand
  spoken language.

35
Language and the Intact Brain

• Osterhout and Holcombs (1992) ERP study.
• Sentences that violated syntax produced a strong
  P600 ERP pattern.
• Sentences that violated semantics produced a
  strong N400 ERP pattern.

36
Summary of Major Topics Covered in Chapter 9

• Linguistic Universals and Functions.
• Phonology The Sounds of Language.
• Syntax The Ordering of Words and Phrases.
• Lexical and Semantic Factors The meaning in
  Language.
• Brain and Language.