language Flashcards
• Panbanisha (1985-2012) the bonobo great ape
- A lifetime in captivity receiving language training
- Taught to use a keypad of approx. 400 geometric pattern in order to communicate
- Keypresses prompted a synthetic voice
- 3,000 word vocabulary (when 14 years old)
- Understood English at the level of 2.5 year old human child (Lyn, 2007)
bonobos aren’t as good at language than humans
- Produce simple sentences
- Lacking in correct grammar
- Only sometimes able to refer to things outside of the present tense
skinner on language
language is learnt
chomsky on language
language is innate
universal grammar (chomsky)
- Multiple linguistic universals that form a universal grammar:
- Lexical categories (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.)
- Word order (i.e., SOV: Subject Object Verb; or SVO: Subject Verb Object)
- Recursion (embedding clauses within sentences)
- i.e. “Phillip bought some bread from the shop” can be expanded….
- “Phillip, who had just been paid, bought some bread from the shop, the building next to his place of work”
justification for the concept of innate universal grammar
- It offers an explanation as to why only humans develop language fully
- It offers an explanation for the broad similarities across the various human languages
- It offers an explanation for the rapid speed in which children learn to speak
criticisms of chomskys approach
- There are not linguistic universals – languages across the world differ enormously
- “Language has been shaped by the brain: language reflects pre-existing, and hence non-language-specific, human learning and processing mechanisms” (Christiansen & Chater, 2008, p. 491).
- Children learn language quickly because language is invented by humans with the limitations of human performance in mind
Innate universal grammar - Findings and considerations
• Languages do not appear to share the same universals
- Recursion may be lacking in some languages
- Amazonian language Pirahã
- Some lexical categories are missing in some languages
- Word order appears to be (almost) universal
natural language
any language that has developed naturally through human interaction and use.
• Any human language
• Can take different forms (i.e., speech, signing, writing, etc.)
It is fundamental to human cognition and social integration.
characteristics of natural language
flexible, generative symbolic representation system for communicating meaning.
• Grammar and syntax are the key mechanisms
• but meaning is subject to inference and pragmatics.
• NL is complex and resource intensive.
• It’s also subject to interference and error.
• But we have a range of short cuts and context is very important.
appears to be unique to humans
natural language follows a developmental sequence
Simple -> complex
Babbling -> words -> sentences
why is natural language important?
- As a social animal, language is necessary to convey simple and complex meaning and ideas
- May have been a key factor human brain development (encephalization)
- Human brain = 3 times bigger than it should be given body size
- Increased brain size relative to body correlates with sociality
- Only humans have the vocal equipment for spoken language and possibly unique brain areas
- Non-humans able to convey complex messages BUT this is not the same as natural language
language skills
- We possess four main language skills:
- Speaking
- Listening (to speech)
- Writing (including typewriting and texting etc.)
- Reading
processes involved in language production
- conceptualisation
- formulation
- articulation
conceptualisation
Planning the message
• Desired concept to be communicated
formulation
Transforming the intended message into speech sounds and sentences
• Including grammatical encoding, morpho-phonological encoding, & phonetic encoding.
articulation
Words are turned into speech
• Movements from the tongue, lips, jaw, lungs, larynx, glottis, etc.
tip of the tongue phenomenon
a failure in retrieval
• Cannot recall the word, but can recall words of a similar form or meaning
• Brown & McNeil (1966) study
• Subjects given definitions to low-frequency words
• Attempt to recall word associated with definition
• Recall can be guided by partial word information
semantics
meaning of encoded language
grammar
rules of language
pragmatics and inference
knowledge about how to use language appropriates
phonology
- Organised into phonemes
- Constitute the spoken sounds of a sentence
- Phonological structure also includes:
• Morphophonological structure
(How the phonemes are arranged/grouped to form words & morphemes)
• Syllabic structure
(How spoken words can be deconstructed into syllables)
• Prosodic structure
(Assigning stress & intonation within a sentence)
phonemes
- What you hear, not what you see
* Smallest unit of sound in a word
graphemes
- Written alternative to the phoneme
- What you see, not what you hear
- A phoneme can form graphemes in multiple ways (multiple spellings)
- i.e. shun can also be spelt as tion in words such as ration
sublexical route`
- Also known as:
- Sound-to-spelling conversion
- Phoneme-to-grapheme conversion
- The word is prepared as in speech until the point where phonemes can be converted to graphemes
lexical route
- Direct retrieval of the orthographic word
- Stored knowledge about how the word is written
- Very important for languages (i.e. English) with deep orthographies
- Allows us to spell words with poor sound-to-spelling consistency, or words with same spelling (i.e. there/their)
semantics
- Meaning conveyed by words, phrases or sentences
* Not to be confused with syntax/syntactic structure
whorfian hypothesis
• Language determines or influences thinking
- Strong version:- Language determines thinking
- Weak version:- Language imposes constraints on thinking
- Weakest version:- Language influences memory
- Alternative account:
- Roschian hypothesis - Language does not determine our thinking.
- Language is only used to describe our perceptions of the world.
intertranslatability
(contradiction of the strongest version of the Whorfian hypothesis)
• We can translate a statement in one language to a statement in the other
• It just may not be the same number of words
• Contradicts the argument that a thought expressible in one language is not expressible in another
winawer (20070
- Studied categorical perception in English and Russian subjects
- Russian has distinctive words for dark blue (siniy) and light blue (goluboy)
- Examined performance in a speeded colour discrimination task
- Which of the bottom two square matches the top square?
- Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colours if they can be categorised separately (i.e., one siniy & one goluboy)
- Categories in language can affect performance of basic perceptual colour discrimination tasks
pragmatics
literal vs intended meaning
traditional approach
- Three stage approach (e.g., Grice, 1975; Searl, 1979)
- Stage 1. Literal meaning is accessed
- Stage 2. Listener/reader decided if this meaning makes sense in context.
- If it does it is accepted
- If it doesn’t…
- Stage 3. Alternative context appropriate meaning is searched for
- Predictions:
- Literal meaning should be accessed faster than metaphorical meaning
- Literal meanings should be accessed automatically
graded salience model
- Graded salience model: initial processing of message is determined by salience or prominence of the meaning rather the type (literal vs. non-literal)
- Meaning is really a matter of degree
- Frequency of exposure to and familiarity with meaning in question
- A lot of our language use is metaphorical and hence common (Cacciari & Glucksberg, 1994) thus extraction of the actual meaning is often fast and effortless (Gibbs et al., 1989)
inference making
• Integrating sentence information in to a discourse would be impossible with out drawing inferences
shared meaning
• The presence/absence of shared meaning, knowledge etc = very important in understanding the intended meaning
• How?
• Two heuristics (‘rule of thumb’) are used early on in sentence processing:
- common ground
-egocentric heuristic
