Lecture 17- Language And Language Processing Flashcards
What are some arrangements of language
- Patterns of sound (spoken language)
- Patterns of visual marks (written language)
- Patterns of hand positions (sign language)
- Patterns of meaning
Connection between signifier and signified is fundamentally
Arbitrary and different in different languages
What’s an example of non-arbitrariness in language
Sound symbolism (slither)
What are phones (to do with speech)
The Sounds of speech
What are phonemes
A phoneme is a group of phones that are essentially equivalent in a given language, even though they are not exactly the same sound
Letters in alphabetical languages correspond to
Phonemes (not always one to one)
What are some types of written languages
- Alphabet
- Syllabaries
- Logographs
Are sign languages the same as spoken languages
No, they are fully fledged languages
What does ‘one sign’ mean
Something with a fixed meaning
Do phonemes have meaning
No
Words can have
Internal structure
What is morphology
The study of the internal structure of words, with reference to meaning
What are two types of morphemes
- Free morphemes
- Bound morphemes
What types of bound morphemes are there
- Inflectional, add grammatical information (plurals)
- Derivational, change the meaning and or the word category (un, ness, ly)
What is the principle of compositionality
The meaning of a phrase depends upon the structure and meaning of words present
There have to be rules for saying what combination of meanings goes with
Each type of structural combination of parts
A definite determiner can be added to a singular noun to make
A noun phrase
In complex sentences there may be more than one
Eventuality
Clauses may be related structurally via
Co-ordination or subordination
What is pragmatic meaning
Indirect meaning (e.g. I’ve stopped eating fast food, suggests I used to eat it)
What are the three stages of processing
- Words
- Structure
- Meaning
What is more heavily researched, production or comprehension of language
Comprehension, easier to measure
What has been studied more spoken or written language
Written, for pragmatic reasons
What’s the segmentation problem
To understand spoken language we have to break the sound stream into words according to what makes sense
The process of identifying words relies on
A set of interconnected detectors, one for each word you know
What is syntactic processing/ parsing
The process of working out structure in comprehension using stored rules
What are the two main ideas about how we process structure
- 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
How did Broca’s aphasics seem to process sentences
Putting the main content words together so the sentence is ‘good enough’ to produce a meaning
In dialogue comprehension and production are
Intertwined
What is alignment is dialogue
Adjusting the way you speak to sound similar to the person you speak to
How is audience design useful for dialogue
Makes it more likely someone will understand you
