Exam 1 Flashcards
Language
One of many cognitive abilities made possible by our minds
What does it mean when we say the mind is structured?
They mean each cognitive ability works in a very specific way
What is structure?
It is a constraint and limitation
What is the language faculty
Way of referring to all of the cognitive abilities abilities that give rise to language in humans. But more specifically it is a set of abilities that allow us to convert from physical signals like sound or visual signs to thoughts!
During comprehension…
The language faculty turns speech sounds (or signs in sign language) into complex meanings
During productions..
The language faculty turns complex meanings into motor commands for the vocal tract or hands in sign language
Phoneme
The smallest segment of speech that leads to a meaningful difference between words
Cognitive test for phonemes
If the changed sound leads to a different word, then the two sounds are both distinct phonemes in the language! (Rake lake, l and r are different phonemes )
What’s the problem with the alphabet?
There is no one to one relationship between symbols (letters) and phonemes
Sound
Is a wave that travels through the air. This means that a sound wave is a disturbance in air pressure
Sound waves
Are longitudinal waves meaning the oscillation moves in the same direction as the disturbance
Waves in the ocean
Are transverse waves, meaning the oscillation is perpendicular to the direction the disturbance is moving
Properties of waves
Amplitude and frequency
Amplitude
Measure of force applied to an area of air during compression. It’s effect is change in loudness
Frequency
Measure of number of compression cycles that a wave completed in a given unit of time. Effect is change in pitch
Do amplitude and frequency affect phonemes?
No
Two components to your voice
Vocal folds and vocal tract
Vocal tract
Acts as a filter to the sound created by your vocal folds. The shape of your oral cavity and pharynx directly affect the properties of the sound
Vocal folds
Are the source of your sound
The mind
A set of cognitive abilities, perception memory language emotions free will decision making etc
Fundamental frequency
The lowest frequency generated by a sound source. For your voice this is the basic pitch that you hear
Harmonics
The additional frequencies that are created by the source. There is one harmonic at each integer multiple of the F0.
Property of your voice: frequencies
Your vocal folds create a large set of frequencies simultaneously
Filtering by your vocal tract
The shape of your vocal tract changes the amplitude of the frequencies created by your vocal folds.
The difference between phonemes
Is the difference in the pattern of frequencies that are created by the filtering properties of the vocal tract
Formants
The highest amplitude peaks in the frequency spectrum created by the human vocal tract (after filtering)
Can you hear the different frequencies in speech? (Formats)
No
Formants are a great example of structure in the human mind
You can’t hear the distinct formants in speech.
The properties of the vocal cords (source)
Frequency and amplitude, are not critical to speech sounds
Properties of the vocal tract (the filter) are critical?
Yes
Sine wave speech
Isolating just the formants in speech. Somewhat unintelligible
Ipa
Set of symbols to represent each phoneme
Are formants different for different phonemes?
Yes
Representation
Object that stands in a symbolic relationship with another object
Mental representation
A representation made by your mind, how you interact with the world, created by your mind through your sensory systems
When you hear a sound…
You are perceiving the minds representation of the air vibrations based in the workings of the hearing system
The McGurk effect
Suggests we fuse audio and visual info during the perception of speech
Articulatory features
Property of a phoneme that is related to the way it is produced
Another way to think about phonemes is as
Gross motor commands, each phoneme may have several articulatory features, especially if it takes several different simultaneous motor commands to produce a given phoneme
Articulatory features are used to
Identify and describe a phoneme
Articulatory features of vowels
Height: is the tongue high or low
Backness: is the tongue forward or back
Monopthongs
Fancy word for single vowels
Diphthongs
Double vowel, a vowel that starts with the tongue in one location in the mouth and ends with it in a second location. Done quickly so it only takes up the place of a single vowel
Articulatory features of consonants
Place of articulation, manner of articulation, voicing
Place of articulation
Where in the vocal tract is the airflow being obstructed?
Manner of articulation
How is the airflow being obstructed?
Voicing
Are the vocal cords vibrating during this obstruction or not?
Manners of articulation
Stops, nasals, fricatives, affricates, laterals, approximants
Stops
The airflow is completely obstructed BPTDGK
Nasals
The airflow is diverted to the nasal cavity NM
Fricatives
The airflow is disturbed but not completely stopped FVThSh
Affricates
A stop plus a fricative Ch J
Laterals
The tongue blocks the air but air escapes around the sides L
Approximants
Not much obstruction, similar to vowels RY
Do the vocal cords have to vibrate to create necessary frequency for vowels?
Yes
Consonants
Obstructions to airflow. Can be voiced or voiceless
Voiced
Let the vocal cords vibrate during the obstruction
Voiceless
Stop the vocal cords from vibration during the obstruction
Language is actually
A sequence of phonemes
Not every sound can appear next to any other sound…
There are patterns in the sequences that we use
Gap in the paradigm
Tr cannot be put at the beginning of a syllable
Another gap in the paradigm
You will never find a plural s after a voiced consonant. And you will never find a plural z after a voiceless consonant
Phonological theory
Study of the patterns of sequences of sounds in language in phonology
Three components that build the theory of phonology
An underlying representation
A surface representation
A rule that maps from underlying representation to the surface representation
Give surface, rule and underlying for tree
Surface: chree
Rule: if an “r” follows a “t” change the “t” into a “ch”
Underlying: tree
Ipa symbols represents
A cluster of articulatory features
T articulatory features
Voiceless, alveolar, stop
B articulatory features
Voiced, bilabial, stop
Theta articulatory features
Voiceless, interdental, fricative
I articulatory features
High, front
U articulatory features
High, back
First step in converting rules to articulatory features
Convert our rules from English orthography to IPA symbols. Then we can look up the symbols in our charts
Flap (D)
This consonant that appears in writer and rider
Rule for flap D?
Surface: wriDer riDer
Rule: if an er follows a t or d, they change into a D
Intermediate: writer ri:der
Rule: if a vowel is before d make it longer
Underlying: writer rider
What’s the surface difference between writer and rider that makes us hear the t/d instead of D?
Difference in the length of time that the vowel is pronounced. Writer is shorter. Ri:der is longer
Morphology
The relationship between the meaning and shape of words. By shape we mean the sequence of phonemes that make up the word. This is the study of the shape of words
How many meanings does unlock able have?
2, can’t be locked or can be unlocked
Words that that have the form un-x- able, where x is reversible
Seems to have two meanings
Compositional
The meaning of a string is compositional if the meaning can be derived from the independent meanings of the parts ( if the meanings are composed of the meanings of the smaller parts) ex undoable
Morpheme
The smallest unit of language that carries a distinct meaning
Plural
The s in these words seem to mean something like multiple (desks pencils boots)
Past tense
The ed in these words seems to mean something like in the past
Pre (preset prepay prequalified)
Seem to mean something like before
Word with single morpheme
One unit that carries meaning: the entire word itself
Some words that contain two morphemes
Desks- s is a morpheme, desk is a morpheme
Preset- pre is a morpheme, set is a morpheme
Free morphemes
Morphemes that can be a stand alone word
Bound morphemes
Can only occur attached to a free morpheme
Theory of morphology
Theory of the types of morphemes
Affixes
A word used to refer to bound morphemes
Prefix
A bound morpheme that appears before the free morpheme
Suffix
A bound morpheme that appears after the free morpheme
Infix
A bound morpheme that appears inside of a free morpheme
Word stress
Extra acoustic prominence that we give certain syllables inside of words
The fucking insertion rule
The word fucking can only be inserted in the position immediately before the primary stressed syllable
Compound words
Words composed of two or more free morphemes
Nobel compounds that I
Compounds made up on the fly
They tend to stress on the second word and have a fully compositional meaning. Also tend to have two means. Example cookie chair
Lexicalized compounds
Compounds stored as complete units. Tend to stress first word and be written as single unit and have single meaning. Example teacup
Ambiguity
A word is ambiguous if there is more than one possible meaning
Hierarchical structure example
Complex words are compositional and the difference in structure leads to a difference in meaning
Ex un lockable
Unlock + able
Hierarchical structure
Smaller units are combined to form larger units
Trees
Used to demonstrate hierarchical structure. Two lines converge into a node that is labeled to show that they formed a new unit with certain properties
Presence of morpheme in a multi morpheme word will..
Have systematic effects due to compositionality
Semantics
Meaning
Lexical semantics
Meaning of words
Where is the meaning in speech signal?
There is no way to transmit meaning in an acoustic signal. We must have the meaning stored in our memory paired with sound
3 human memory components
Sensory
Long term components
Procedural (skills)
Declarative
Declaritive memory components
Episodic (events)
Semantic (concepts)
Lexicon
Lexicon
The section of long term memory dedicated to storing words
The lexical decision task
Timing the retrieval of words
Timing of word retrieval
How long it takes a person to decide whether the letters form a word or not
The idea behind the lexical decision task
In order to say yes or no you need to access the stored word. This means that the task will engage in the processes necessary for lexical access
Reaction time
Amount of time it takes to respond to a word
Logic of reaction times
If two conditions in an experiment differ in reaction time, then the processes deployed during those conditions differ
Frequency of occurrence
Of a word is the number of times that a word occurs
Corpus
A collection of text that was written or spoken by people
The frequency effect
High frequency words have faster lexical decision times and vice versa
The advantage of frequency as an organising principle
Maximises efficiency. The most used are the easiest to retrieve
Semantic network
The idea that words or concepts are connected based on their semantic relatedness
Word association task
Say a word and say the first word in your head
Spreading activation
Process by which nodes in the network activate nodes that they are connected to, at eac step activation decreases because the concept isn’t as strongly associated
Semantic priming
Words that are semantically related to each other make each other faster during lexical decision
2 organising principles of the lexicon
Frequency effect and semantic priming
Prescriptive rules
These are rules that are prescribed by people who care about style. They are not rules for constructing sentences in your mind
Syntactic rules
Rules for building sentences
They are in your mind, you use them every time you speak/hear a sentence
They are complex, they tell you where to put every single word in a sentence
These were never taught to you explicitly. You learned as a small child
Syntax
The field that studies the structure of sentences
Grammar/grammatical rules
A set of syntactical rules
Prescriptive grammar
They are about style.
Descriptive grammar
The rules that are actually in your mind. They are subconscious
Three pieces of evidence that suggest that sentences are governed by syntactic rules
Word order matters
You understand novel sentences
Infinite number of sentences
Word order matters
You know words in sentences need to go in a certain order. There are times that dictate exactly where each word must go in the sentence. If broken the sentence becomes ungrammatical
You understand novel sentences
You can understand sentences you’ve never heard before which means sentences are not memorised
Are morphemes memorised?
No because you can’t understand words you’ve never heard before
Categories
Human mind takes advantage of the idea of categories to reduce the number of rules
Two words that share the same syntactic category…
Can appear in the same position in a sentence
Words in the same syntactic category
Words that can fit the same position. Example: nouns
Syntactic categories
Bound, prepositions, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, determiners, complementizers, they reduce rules needed
Items stored in the lexicon consist of…
A sound(phonetic representation)
Semantic( meaning) representation
Syntactic category
Do sentences have hierarchical structure?
Yes. They can have the same set of words leading to two distinct meanings
Structure building rules for syntax
Label the syntactic categories of words
Figure out which words combine together
Phrase
When two or more words are combined together
Head of phrase
Syntactic category that lends it’s name to the phrase. Ever my phrase has a head
Head of the phrase is important because..
It determines the properties of the phrase
Phrase structure rules
Structure building rules in syntax used to construct phrases from two or more words or phrases
Components to theory of syntax
Syntactic category and phrase structure rules
Principles and parameters theory
Theory used to solve paradoxes of linguistic variation
Principles
General principles that govern the way languages work. These properties are shared by all human languages
Parameters
A finite set of options or settings that determine how languages can vary
Example of syntactic principle
Phrase structure. Phrases in all languages appear to have heads. All languages appear to combine words into phrases
A phonetic principle. Articulatory features
All languages studied so far use Sen set of articulatory features to create phonemes
Null subject parameter
In Spanish and Italian, if subject has already been discussed you can omit subject completely. In English and French you need the pronoun.
English/French always have a subject
Spanish/Italian omit known/weather subjects and subjects when subject is after verb
Head parameter
Another important syntactic parameter. Determines whether heads come first in their phrases. (Head initial) or at the end (head final)
English v Japanese
English has head parameter as head initial and Japanese has head parameter as head final
English and Japanese: mirror images
Subjects are strange. They are always to the left in IPs
Ignoring subjects they are mirror images of each other
First power of p and p
Ability to capture abstract universal properties of languages as principles
Second power of p and p
Ability to capture large amounts of variation with very few parameters
Do parameters capture all of the variation?
They are only intended to capture systematic variation
Unsystematic variation
Like choice of phonemes and morphemes, require other mechanisms like memory to predict
