Lecture 8 - Words & syntax

Question 1

What are the structural rules that govern a language known as?

Answer 1

syntax

Question 2

What are the 2 core features of syntax?

Answer 2

1. duality of pattering = meaningless units (phonemes) combine to form meaningful units (morphemes)
2. recursion = the nesting of rules and meaning in language

Question 3

Duality of pattering and compositionally?

Answer 3

• Meaningless parts are combined to form meaningful units which are combined to form higher-order compositions
• The meaning of the composition emerges from its components and the rules that combine them
• Rules + meaningful combinations = compositionality

Question 4

Structure of words?

Answer 4

• the study of word structure is morphology
• a word = the smallest unit of meaning that can be uttered in isolation

Question 5

What is the difference between a word and a morpheme?

Answer 5

• morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning but do not necessarily stand alone
• a word may consist of one or more morphemes

Question 6

What is Zipf’s law of brevity?

Answer 6

• words that are more frequently used tend to be shorter in length
• shown for all languages tested so far
• evidence in at least 15 animal species so far
• the shortest calls in the repertoire are used most frequently

Question 7

What is Menzearath’s law of compression?

Answer 7

• the more syllables in a word, the smaller the size of syllables
• the longer a sentence (no. of clauses) the shorter the clauses
• looked at gelada baboon vocal sequences
• found that longer vocal sequences have shorter constituent calls

Question 8

How do children come to connect words to their meanings?

Answer 8

1. fast mapping:
   -> rapid word learning with minimal exposure time
   -> fast but needs repeated exposure to be maintained
2. slow mapping:
   -> gradual word learning through exposure to context of use
   -> requires repeated exposure of the word in different contexts to acquire its meanings

Question 9

What are the principles of word learning?

Answer 9

• for any new word there are many possible meanings and possible referents
• to help learn words children use principles to guide their learning
• a key principle is ‘mutual exclusivity’ = children expect different words to have different meanings

Question 10

What is the Dax experiment?

Answer 10

• paradigm used to explore mutual exclusivity
• toddlers presented with a familiar and a novel object
• ‘give the dax’
• dax = random word they have never come across
• result = toddler choose the novel object

Question 11

What did Markman say about the principles of word learning?

Answer 11

• children use whole object assumption = that a word labels the entire object, not parts or characteristics of it
• they also use taxonomic assumption = normally children will organise by theme but during word learning they will organise by family (taxonomically)

Question 12

What is shape bias?

Answer 12

• this is applying the same name to same-shaped objects
• children depend on shape to distinguish 2 objects
• however they start to use other features as well

Question 13

What mistakes can children make during language learning?

Answer 13

• an early grasp of syntax can lead to mistakes
• children may show over-regularisation errors
• over-regularisation = extending regular grammatical patterns to irregular words e.g. he bited me
• children correct their mistakes as they are exposed to irregular forms