Lecture 20 Flashcards
What’s the standard story of language?
Language is the sequential processing of symbols to gain understanding and communicate. However, it isn’t that simple as understanding and communication uses higher functions than linear/sequential processing. Also, we use language for thinking, emotion, identity etc.
Is language innate?
Chomsky argued that humans are born with a language acquisition device with knowledge about grammatical structure. At 16 months, children learnt 10 new words a day on average. Language also develops in deaf children even though there is barely any exposure to it. Also a man with Broca’s aphasia (damage to broca/wernicke’s area) could understand speech but not produce it, showing there’s a specific area for language.
However, there is also evidence against it being entirely innate. It’s considered more as a predisposition that requires a lot of environmental influence. It’s an innate motivation as there isn’t much evidence for a language acquisition device.
Discuss the skills involved when using language
Encoding the voices, understanding the meaning of words, understanding grammar and intonation and listening to the speaker. Language is basically unlimited which adds to the complexity of it as well. On top of this language can have surface meanings or deeper meanings like double entendres. Therefore, understanding context is also important so that we aren’t mislead by these.
We need to balance language fluency and language speed. This can make language production difficult and can result in errors when trying to stay flexible. For example, we tend to under-specify and use general terms like ‘stuff’. Also, alcohol can cause dysfluencies/reduce language richness.
Discuss the types of language error?
Spoonerisms; accidentally swapping the first letters of two words.
Freudian slips; accidentally using derogatory language in a sentence due to a ‘slip revealing your true desires’.
Semantic substitutions; using a word meant for a different category, e.g. a tennis bat instead of tennis racquet.
Morpheme-exchange errors; swapping words in a sentence like ‘I dogged my walk’.
Number agreement errors; using the wrong pronouns/verbs, e.g. the government have done this. However it should be ‘has’.
Discuss language as a shared symbolic system
We encode a thought into a code (language) which is then decoded by the receiver. This is the same with any communication system.
Discuss the structure of language
The basic unit of spoken language is called phonemes; vowels and consonants (the amount of these vary across languages).
The units that denote meaning are called morphemes; roots (the basic word), prefixes (ad-, pre-, sub-) and suffixes (-ed, -ly, -s). They follow rules.
The grammatical rules are the syntax; the order of words in a sentence.
Discuss Chomsky’s views on syntax
He disagreed with Skinner’s point of view; language is learnt via reinforcement and conditioning. Therefore, language should just be copies of what people have previously heard and there shouldn’t be room for creativity. Chomsky believed that language is rich and flexible and therefore people should refer to a set of rules for language. If people just refer to a set of rules then an infinite number of grammatically correct utterances can be created as opposed to Skinner’s view. However, this doesn’t cover everything because you can follow the rules of syntax but the sentence can be meaningless. Chomsky admitted that phrase structures alone are insufficient, semantics aka meaning is also important. Chomsky’s ideas only intended to cover the structure of language. The message determines the structure.
Discuss psycholinguistics
This was developed from Chomsky’s research. However, it doesn’t focus on the structure of language, it focuses on the psychology of language and the meaning/functions it has. It explores meanings of individual words as well as meanings of sentences. Language is only considered successful if it conveyed meaning. Grice created 4 maxims from this idea; relevance, quantity, quality and manner of language. Additionally, someone’s goals can distort what they say. Psycholinguistics account for the fact that the same words with different syntax can convey different meanings and therefore that context is extremely important. This is what emojis and acronyms are for; to convey meaning/context. However, sometimes acronyms can get misunderstood so the context of the sentence helps understand the meaning. Context is also important with jokes, with translation (looking at other sentences to prevent mistranslation from occurring) and with ambiguous sentences.
Discuss linguistic relativity
Different languages have different lexicons (amount of different words to convey an object (PC, computer, laptop etc.)), different syntactic structures and different implicit assumptions. This could all lead people to think differently, this is linguistic relativity/the whorfian hypothesis. For example, language can influence perception; if you’re presented with a half crescent and told it’s the letter C, that’s how you’ll reproduce it but if you’re told it’s a moon, you will draw a moon as context is influencing your thought. This is how illusions can occur, like the picture of a vase/2 faces. Language doesn’t control thought but it influences it; the Loftus car crash study. However, many argue that it controls thought and perception to a certain degree (linguistic determinism) as you cannot think about ideas if there is no name for them. There is no evidence for this as Danish people were just as able to classify colours even though they only have two names for colours (mili and mola).
Discuss the hermeneutic circle
This is the idea that to understand the parts of language (words), you need to understand the whole (sentence). However, you also need to understand the whole to understand the parts. E.g a joke without a punch line or a punch line without a joke. Context cannot always decipher the meaning due to sentences being too complicated but sometimes context can make a meaningless phrase meaningful.
