Introduction to Sentence Production Flashcards
Role of Chomsky (1968)
Chomsky argued that language is a special feature which is innate, species-specific and biologically pre-programmed, and which is a faculty “special” and independent of other cognitive structures
Goal of study of syntax is to describe the set of rules, or grammar, that enables us to produce and understand language
Definitions of language competence and language performance, with examples to illustrate them
You could consider how this relates to psycholinguistics as a discipline- are psychologists more interested in one aspect than another?
Distinction between:
Language competence: what is tapped by our intuitions about which are acceptable sentences of our language and which are ungrammatical strings of word. Competence concerns our abstract knowledge of our language. It is about the judgements we would make if we had sufficient time and memory capacity.
Our actual linguistic performance: sentences we actually produce, limited by factors such as time and memory capacity, so sentences we produce often use more simple grammatical constructions
Chomsky’s big ideas
Poverty of the stimulus argument
Generative grammar; universal grammar
Universal grammar
“Language is special”- language is a special faculty that cannot be reduced to cognitive processes
Chomsky’s arguments about language production
Degenerate input
Poverty of stimulus
The review of Skinner’s book Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour: why did Chomsky think behaviourism couldn’t explain language acquisition?
Chomsky showed that behaviourism was incapable of dealing with natural language and argued that a new type of linguistic theory called transformational grammar provided an account of the underlying structure of language and also people’s knowledge of language
Influences of other disciplines
Linguistics - Chomsky
Behaviourism - Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour
Information processing approach (“computational metaphor”)
Cognitive Science - Artificial Intelligence / Connectionism
Psycholinguistics
The psychology of language
Study understanding, producing and remembering language
Concerned with listening, reading, speaking, writing and memory for language
Cognitive science approach
Multi-disciplinary approach to the study of the mind - particularly focusing on artificial intelligence
AI has involved getting computers to do things that appear to need intelligence - there has been hope that it will increase our understanding of how humans do such tasks
What are psycholinguists more interested in?
Linguistic PERFORMANCE (shouldn’t be focus on act of speaking)
How should we describe the rules of grammar?
Chomsky proposed that phase-structure rules are an essential component of our grammar
An important aspect of language is that we can construct sentences by combining words according to rules
Central idea of Chomsky
the goal of linguistics is to specify the rules of a grammar that captures our linguistic competence - PROVIDE A THEORY OF COMPETENCE
According to Chomsky
A complete linguistic theory will be able to generate all of the sentences of a language and none of the non-sentences, will provide an account of people’s intuitions about the knowledge of their language and will explain how children can acquire language
In Chomsky’s early work
Chomsky argued that sentences are generated by the operation of transformational rules on a deep-structure representation generated by phrase-structure rules, resulting in a surface-structure representation
Chomsky’s later work
Important generalisation about language are best explained by a set of principles and parameters; language acquisition involves setting these parameters to the appropriate value given exposure to particular languages
Chomsky in recent minimalist work
Attempted to simplify the grammar by incorporating many of its aspects into the lexicon
