Lecture 17- Language And Language Processing

Question 1

What are some arrangements of language

Answer 1

• Patterns of sound (spoken language)
• Patterns of visual marks (written language)
• Patterns of hand positions (sign language)
• Patterns of meaning

Question 2

Connection between signifier and signified is fundamentally

Answer 2

Arbitrary and different in different languages

Question 3

What’s an example of non-arbitrariness in language

Answer 3

Sound symbolism (slither)

Question 4

What are phones (to do with speech)

Answer 4

The Sounds of speech

Question 5

What are phonemes

Answer 5

A phoneme is a group of phones that are essentially equivalent in a given language, even though they are not exactly the same sound

Question 6

Letters in alphabetical languages correspond to

Answer 6

Phonemes (not always one to one)

Question 7

What are some types of written languages

Answer 7

• Alphabet
• Syllabaries
• Logographs

Question 8

Are sign languages the same as spoken languages

Answer 8

No, they are fully fledged languages

Question 9

What does ‘one sign’ mean

Answer 9

Something with a fixed meaning

Question 10

Do phonemes have meaning

Answer 10

No

Question 11

Words can have

Answer 11

Internal structure

Question 12

What is morphology

Answer 12

The study of the internal structure of words, with reference to meaning

Question 13

What are two types of morphemes

Answer 13

• Free morphemes

- Bound morphemes

Question 14

What types of bound morphemes are there

Answer 14

• Inflectional, add grammatical information (plurals)

- Derivational, change the meaning and or the word category (un, ness, ly)

Question 15

What is the principle of compositionality

Answer 15

The meaning of a phrase depends upon the structure and meaning of words present

Question 16

There have to be rules for saying what combination of meanings goes with

Answer 16

Each type of structural combination of parts

Question 17

A definite determiner can be added to a singular noun to make

Answer 17

A noun phrase

Question 18

In complex sentences there may be more than one

Answer 18

Eventuality

Question 19

Clauses may be related structurally via

Answer 19

Co-ordination or subordination

Question 20

What is pragmatic meaning

Answer 20

Indirect meaning (e.g. I’ve stopped eating fast food, suggests I used to eat it)

Question 21

What are the three stages of processing

Answer 21

• Words
• Structure
• Meaning

Question 22

What is more heavily researched, production or comprehension of language

Answer 22

Comprehension, easier to measure

Question 23

What has been studied more spoken or written language

Answer 23

Written, for pragmatic reasons

Question 24

What’s the segmentation problem

Answer 24

To understand spoken language we have to break the sound stream into words according to what makes sense

Question 25

The process of identifying words relies on

Answer 25

A set of interconnected detectors, one for each word you know

Question 26

What is syntactic processing/ parsing

Answer 26

The process of working out structure in comprehension using stored rules

Question 27

What are the two main ideas about how we process structure

Answer 27

• Garden path theory, At each point we make a choice and if we’re wrong we have to revise it later
• Constraint-based theory, We develop all possibilities in parallel and discard them at later points

Question 28

How did Broca’s aphasics seem to process sentences

Answer 28

Putting the main content words together so the sentence is ‘good enough’ to produce a meaning

Question 29

In dialogue comprehension and production are

Answer 29

Intertwined

Question 30

What is alignment is dialogue

Answer 30

Adjusting the way you speak to sound similar to the person you speak to

Question 31

How is audience design useful for dialogue

Answer 31

Makes it more likely someone will understand you