Language Flashcards
Language
Set of rules used to communicate
Can be spoken or written/signed
Hockett’s universal characteristics of language
(6)
Semanticity: Language conveys meaning
Arbitrariness: Signal doesn’t resemble what is represents (is an arbitrary symbol system)
Flexibility and naming: Referents have labels that can be changed
Duality if patterning: Signal can be broken down into smaller units
Productivity: We can create infinite number of new meaningful utterances from a finite number of meaningful signals
Displacement: We can communicate about things that aren’t present
Behaviourist theory of language acquisition
Language is acquired the same way as any other learned behav (reinforcement and gradual shaping of babbling)
Problems:
- Children say things they’ve never heard
- Children don’t say things they hear a lot
Innatist theory
Poverty of stimulus (Chomsky)
Principles of language are inborn, not learned (A bioprogram that develops once child is exposed to language)
Poverty of stimulus: There is insufficient data for children to learn rules of grammar based on exp alone
1) Not all language heard by children are complete well-formed utterances
2) Children come to understand and use sentences that are never heard in their learning enviro
3) Children learn grammar despite receiving little negative evidence
Universal Grammar (UG)
Parameter setting
(innatist theory)
UG: Considers the principles, elements, and rules that underlie all possible human languages to be innate
- Task of acquiring language is a task of parameter setting: identifying which setting of each parameter applied to their language
Language bioprogram hypothesis (Bickerton)
(Innatist theory)
Children have an innate grammar that is available biologically if the language input is insufficient
Deaf children not exposed to sign language will develop their own system that incorporates many of the formal features of the language
Pidgin
Creole
(Innatist theory)
Pidgin: Quasi-language that doesn’t contain full grammar
- Adults will use if there’s no common language
Creole: Combo of 2 preexisting languages
- Children of adults who use pidgin will typically generate this
Phoneme
Smallest unit of sound that makes a diff to meaning
- Can be consonants or vowels
Distinctive features in phonemes:
Voicing
Place of articulation
Manner of articulation
Voicing:
- Voiced: When vocal cords vibrate (/b/)
- Unvoived: When vocal cords don’t vibrate (/p/)
- Voice Onset Time: When vocal cords start to vibrate
Place of articulation: Where air flow is altered to make speech sound
Manner of articulation: How air flow is altered
- Stops: Blocking then releasing air (/p/)
- Fricative: Air is forced thru narrow passage (/f/)
- Nasals: Air is passed thru nasal cavity (/m/)
Lack of invariance problem
(Phonemes)
Phonemes are different depending on the context they’re in
- Phonemes always coarticulated
- Accent, speed, etc all affect speech stimulus
Segmentation problem
(Phonemes)
We clearly hear separated words but there aren’t any clear breaks between words in acoustic signal
The McGurk effect
(Phonemes)
We use vision to help us hear
- Understanding language creates an avg between visual and audio inputs
Categorical perception
(Phonemes)
Phonemic boundary: Where one phoneme becomes another phoneme
- We use categorical perception for phonemes
- Categorize base on VOT (vocal onset time)
- Ex: /ba/ and /pa/ only differ in VOT intervals
Morpheme
Smallest unit of meaningful unit in language
- Ex: Snowman has 2 morphemes
Free morphemes
Bound morphemes
Free: Have meaning on their own
Bound: Contribute to word meaning but aren’t words themselves
- Ex: “s” to add plurality
Mental lexicon
Mental lexicon: Mental dictionary in LTM that stores words, meanings, relations to other words
Top-down processing of lexical access
(Semantics)
1) Ppl respond more frequently to high freq words
2) Ppl notice errors better when they’re in a predictable context
3) Ppl recognize letters better in context than in isolation
4) Phonemic restoration effect: Sound that is missing/obscured is still perceived if highly predictable
5) Context allows disambiguation of ambiguous words (words that can have more than one meaning)
Bottom-up processing of lexical access
Swinney
(Semantics)
Demonstrated that effect of context isn’t immediate
- Lexical access is context-independent but role of context comes in quickly to determine appropriate word
Used lexical decision task
- After and during passage about bugs in government building, flashed ANT, SPY, SEW, or ANK
- During - ANT and SPY were fast
- After - Only ANT was fast
Homophones
Homographs
(Lexical ambiguity)
Homophones: Words that are pronounced the same but have diff meanings
(Ate and Eight)
Homographs: Words that are spelled the same but have different meanings
(Fine: Tax or good quality)
Syntax
Structure of language
- Encompasses tacit rules of grammar
- Grammar: Set of implicit syntactic rules that make a language system regular and productive
Prescriptive grammar
Descriptive grammar
(Syntax)
Prescriptive grammar: Describes what you must do to use language correctly
Descriptive grammar: Description of language users’ tacit knowledge of the rules of language
- Competence: Refers to knowledge of these rules
- Performance: Refers to behaviour
Phrases (Chomsky)
Phrase structure rules / Rewrite rules
Chomsky realized that sentences are composed of phrases rather than isolated words
Phrase structure rules: Formal rules for describing tacit knowledge people have for creating sentences out groups of words (Think of sentence structure before words)
- Cannot account for:
1) Sentences that have diff structures but same underlying meaning
2) Ambiguous sentences
Transformational grammar (Chomsky)
Passive transformation
(Syntax)
We need to distinguish between:
- Surface structure (SS): Actual phrases in the sentence
- Deep structure (DS): Hypothetical word string that reflects relationship between sentence elements (Underlying structure of sentence)
Passive transformation: Transforms SS to another SS while keeping same DS
NP1 + V + NP2 -> NP2 + was + V + by + NP1
Parsing
Immediacy principle
Syntax-first approach
Parsing: Breaking up a language into its constituent parts (clause)
- Clause: Group of words that express a full idea of something/someone/the subject
Immediacy principle: We parse info as it’s coming in
Syntax-first approach: We parse based only on syntax
Temporary ambiguities
Syntax-first view
Observing ambiguities supports syntax-first view
Ambiguities:
- Garden-path sentence: A sentence that tends to induce wrong parsing
- Early closure: Parsing is actually earlier in sentence than intended
- Ppl take longer to parse this
Late closure: Tendency to attach incoming words to the current phrase when parsing
