Video Module 21: Language Structure Flashcards
phonemes
the smallest unit of speech that can be used to distinguish an utterance from another in a given language
- in other words, the smallest unit of sounds which are linguistically significant
- different languages have different phonemic inventories
- children appear to be sensitive to any and all sets of phonemes at birth, but they gradually lose this sensitivity as they age and learn about which sound distinctions matter in their language
How do we produce phonemes?
We produce phonemes by modulating air flow:
1. voicing: vocal folds vibrating or not
2. manner of production: how sounds are produced by restricting airflow; e.g. stops vs. frication
3. place of articulation: where the air is restricted in the vocal tract; e.g. lips, velum
speech segmentation
a process by which we perceive word boundaries in continuous streams of speech
- many words have no clear boundaries, yet we learn how to segment speech based on what is relevant to our language
What does it mean to say that we have a categorical perception of phonemes?
We perceive varied sounds as belonging to the same category based on the relevant phonemic categories of our language
- e.g. aspirated /p/ and unaspirated /p/ are in the same phonemic category in English; there is no distinction
- Sometimes distinguishing between sounds relies on voice onset time (VOT), or the time between the beginning of a phoneme and the onset of the vibration of the vocal folds
evidence for categorical perception of phonemes
Researchers did a study in which they altered the voice onset time (VOT) in auditory stimuli for participants. Participants would decide if they were hearing /ba/ or /pa/.
- Found that participants did not perceive a “gradient” from /ba/ to /pa/; instead, there was a sudden switch in their perception from /b/ to /p/
- We are sensitive to between-category differences, but not to within-category differences
morphemes
the smallest unit of meaning within a language that
- contain meaning by itself
- root words: single morphemes that are standalone words
- affixes: single morphemes that are added to root words to alter their meaning
syntax
rules for combining different types of words to create meaningful sentences and phrases
- apply to grammatical categories, such as nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc.
—grammatical categories are classes of expressions that share a common set of grammatical properties
- phrase structure rules govern the pattern of branching in a phrase structure tree (e.g. sentences must contain both an NP and a VP)
syntactic ambiguity
in which there may be more than one interpretation of a sentence, and these interpretations depend on the multiple possible syntactic structures of a sentence
- can only be resolved through clarifying meaning with the speaker or creating a syntactic tree
- speakers of ambiguous sentences may resolve ambiguity by using prosody, context, etc.
garden path sentences
a type of ambiguity which initially leads us to one interpretation of a sentence, but that initial interpretation turns out to be wrong
- e.g. “Fat people eat accumulates” “The man whistling tunes pianos”
- requires reinterpretation of the categories to which words in the sentences belong to
- can be affected by extralinguistic context (e.g. visual or situational context)
prosody
patterns of pauses and pitch changes that characterise speech production
- emphasises elements of a sentence and highlights the sentence’s intended structure
semantics
the meaning of words we are talking about
- sentences can be syntactically correct, yet have no semantic meaning (e.g. “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”)
- semantics is separate from syntax
pragmatics
contextual information that helps us interpret language
- implications and inferences within language
