Week 8-Language Development 1

Question 1

Why is language so important according to Noam Chomsky?

Answer 1

It’s our ‘human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are unique to us currently (valued by many cultures)

Question 2

How is language valued in different cultures?

Answer 2

-With the people of Mali, infant= Kuntu (thing) only becoming a Muntu (person) when she begins to speak
-For Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, the infant belongs to the world of animals/spirits until she utters her first word

Question 3

How is language a central part of human behaviour?

Answer 3

Many human activities would be
extremely difficult to perform
without language e.g.planning a trip, teaching someone to drive, having a good night out etc.

Question 4

How would you define language?

Answer 4

A communication system sharing functions with the signalling systems of other species such as:
–Attracting mates
–Threatening competitors
–Warning close kin

Question 5

How do crickets find a mate?

Answer 5

*Male crickets emit species-specific mating songs to attract females
*Breeding experiments show that hybrid males produce hybrid songs

Question 6

How do red deers resolve conflict?

Answer 6

They roar at each other, the deepest roar wins because it reflects chest size so predicts likely outcome of fight

Question 7

How do vervet monkeys warn close kin?

Answer 7

Alarm Calls (different calls in response to different predators)

Question 8

Hockett’s design features: how does tradition/displacement differ in animals and humans?

Answer 8

T=Animal languages (e.g., cricket song) tend to be wired-in BUT Human languages transmitted across generations through
learning

D=Animal languages (e.g., vervet alarm calls) are stimulus-bound BUT Humans can talk about
objects and events remote in time and space (don’t always just respond to what is seen e.g. general topic discussions)

Question 9

Hockett’s design features: how does duality of patterning and openness differ in animals and humans?

Answer 9

DoP:Animal languages=a fixed set of meaningful sounds BUT Human languages=a fixed set of meaningless sounds combined to
express a potentially infinite no. of meanings

O:Animal languages=closed systems BUT Human languages= open systems where new words
can be invented (e.g., Macbook) + new messages expressed

Question 10

How do symbolic systems differ in animals and humans?

Answer 10

*Animal signals=manipulates the behaviour of other animals
*When humans produce utterances, they have an effect on
other people’s behaviour AND also
call up ideas in other people’s minds

Question 11

What are combinatorial systems?

Answer 11

Sentences aren’t just bags of
words, the structure conveys meaning e.g., dog bites man VS
man bites dog

Question 12

Define Compositionality

Answer 12

The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its parts + the way they’re combined
*Parts are sometimes more than one word long e.g., John kicked the bucket VS The bucket was kicked by John

Question 13

What’s the relation between words and their meanings?

Answer 13

it’s arbitrary and conventional (de
Saussure, 1916 “dog but Japanese= “inu”
*Humans have to learn lots of arbitrary word-meaning pairs, but these ‘symbols’ allow them to call up ideas in other people’s minds

Question 14

Give some word rules

Answer 14

*Specify how words may combine to express more complicated meanings
*Rules do not depend on meaning
*Possible to generate utterances that are perfectly understandable but NOT grammatical e.g., was a good game
*Also possible to generate utterances that don’t make sense but ARE grammatical e.g., Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre
and gimble in the wind (Lewis Carroll)
*We recognise that these sentences are grammatical and can even use their structure to extract some meaning from them

Question 15

Explain Infinite Generativity

Answer 15

*At any point in an English sentence there are on average 10 words that could be produced next (a hundred million trillion
different sentences could be produced)
*Every English sentence can be
made longer by embedding it within another sentence e.g., The old man was the murderer OR Lewis didn’t realise Morse suspected the old man was the murderer

Question 16

How did language evolve?

Answer 16

Chomsky (1988):Language must have evolved as a by-product of the increase in overall brain size as complex grammar has no obvious selective advantage

Corballis (1992):Language evolved to free the hands from having to make communicative gestures and
allow us to use tools and communicate at the same time

Question 17

How did Language
evolve according to Pinker & Bloom (1990)?

Answer 17

Language evolved as a system for
communicating complex cognitive
representations (i.e., thoughts) more clearly/efficiently
–This allows the possession of complex grammar to have huge adaptive significance
*Compare:
–This forest is full of animals you can eat
–This forest is full of animals that can eat you

Question 18

Give an example of language invention

Answer 18

Pidgin:simple language for communication between groups with no common language (Hawaiian pidgin: Da baby cute)

Creole:pidgin that becomes a native language for the next generation e.g., Tok Pisin (speakers add complexity as they use language)

*Fixed word order, agreement, articles where the human brain has some ability that invents
language

Question 19

How did Nicaraguan Sign Language (Kegl, 1994) develop?

Answer 19

*Deaf children taught lip reading in speaking school
*Children invented sign language
with syntactic agreement (Senghas
& Coppola, 2001)
–Verb agrees with subject
*Spatial modulation is agreement in NSL
–Younger learners have a more
complicated language than older
learners
–Children have some innate ability to create language

Question 20

Can other animals learn
human-like languages?: Alex (Pepperberg, 1998)

Answer 20

*Alex is an African Grey Parrot who could name objects and properties of objects + answer quite complicated questions and spontaneously expressed his desires
*Learning takes a long time (each item takes the same amount of time as the last)
Human lexicons are open systems:
–No limit to the number of words
–Vocabulary Spurt (Benedict, 1979)
–Fast mapping (Carey & Bartlett, 1978)

Question 21

Can other animals learn
human-like languages?: Rico (Kaminski, Call & Fischer, 2004)

Answer 21

*A Border Collie reported by his
owners to understand 200+ German words
*Tested at the MPI for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig
*Rico responded appropriately to 37/40 words (by fetching objects from another room)
*Rico was able to do fast mapping of new words (‘plork’ referred to
a new object presented alongside 7 objects whose names he knew)

Question 22

Do animals understand the
compositionality of language?: Kanzi (Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker & Taylor, 2001)

Answer 22

A male Bonobo Chimpanzee whose mother was taught a lexigram language
–Mum never learned the language, but child Kanzi acquired it without training (Kanzi understands spoken English/english structures whether novel or with no visual cues to meaning)

Question 23

What aspects of language can animals understand?

Answer 23

*Arbitrary associations (word-meaning combos) (Dogs learn new words quickly other animals more slowly)
*Compositionality (structural knowledge):Alex understands adjective-noun combinations
*“red ball” = RED + BALL
–Kanzi can use sentence structures to follow novel instructions
*“Can you pour some coke in the
water” (reversible actions)

Question 24

Is animal language use really symbolic?

Answer 24

-Animals use language to manipulate other people’s behaviour
-Don’t use language to call up ideas in other people’s minds
-Don’t use social language (e.g., How are you?)

Question 25

How does language work?

Answer 25

*System needed that allows words to be built out of meaningless sounds/sentence sequences of words
*Combine elements into sequences
Sounds: /k A t/ = cat
Words: Dog bites man/Man bites dog
*Linguistic rules govern the sequence-building processes
*Internal representations: sounds, words and rules

Question 26

Define Phonology

Answer 26

the speech sounds of a language

Question 27

Define Phonemes

Answer 27

sounds signalling differences in meaning
*Minimal pairs (two words with different meanings that differ only in one phoneme)
–Bat Pat /b//p/
–Pick Pill /k//l/

Question 28

What variation can there be in speech sounds?

Answer 28

*Free variation (just how you say it) - the /t/ in ‘hot’ can be aspirated or not, without signalling a change in meaning (/aspirated t/ and /non-aspirated t/ are different phonemes of Zulu)
*Contextual variation - the /k/ in ‘keel’ is articulated towards the back of the mouth and the /k/ in ‘cool’ towards the front (one /k/ phoneme in English, but /back k/ and /front k/ are different
phonemes of Arabic)

Question 29

Why are phonemes not the same as letters/graphemes?

Answer 29

–Writing systems can use different letters to express the same phoneme (e.g., the /k/ in cat and the /k/ in kite)
*The phonology of a language is specific to that language (/th/ is a phoneme of English but not of French)
*Since phonemes are sounds that signal differences in meaning, intonation(rise/fall of voice) is a phoneme of English

Question 30

Define Morphology

Answer 30

the meaningful forms of a language

Question 31

Define Morphemes

Answer 31

forms associated with units of
meaning (i.e., Atoms of meaning)
Dog + s DOG + PLURAL
Jump + ed JUMP + PAST

Question 32

What’s Inflectional morphology?

Answer 32

does not change the syntactic category or meaning of the word
–Dog + s DOG + PLURAL
–Jump + ed JUMP + PAST

Question 33

What’s Derivational morphology?

Answer 33

can change its syntactic category or meaning
–Un + cover REVERSE + COVER
–Sad + ness SAD + STATE ->noun

Question 34

What evidence is there for morphology?

Answer 34

Wug test (Gleason, 1958):
Children are shown the card saying “this is a wug there’s two of them so there’s two ______” and asked to fill in the blank
*Novel word, so children must generalise X+PLURAL -> X + s
*Language-specific(kids have got to learn it): Chinese=no number on nouns

Question 35

Explain English past tense
acquisition

Answer 35

*Regular past tense: walk=walk+ed
*Irregular past tense: go -> went
U-shaped curve (Marcus et al. 1992):
–Early correct production of irregulars e.g., went, came
–Overgeneralization of –ed rule
*goed, comed
–Correct production of both regular and irregulars e.g., went, came
–Words + Rules

Question 36

Give an example of Un-prefixation (Bowerman, 1982)

Answer 36

“I hate you and i’m never going to unhate you!”

Question 37

Define Syntax

Answer 37

the rules that control how words are ordered (The dog bit the man (Active)/The man was bitten by the dog (Passive)
*Rules of syntax/grammar operate on constituents i.e., types of words (e.g., Noun Phrase) not words
Passive syntactic rule:
*NP VERB NP -> NP IS VERB BY NP
(Early oiling prevents rheumatism
(Active)/Rheumatism is prevented by early oiling (Passive))

Question 38

What’s the replacement rule test for constituents?

Answer 38

If a set of words can replace another set of words, then those words are the same constituent e.g.:
*Some boys are bigger than others
*They are bigger than them
*Colourless green ideas are bigger than shapeless square theories
*Same constituent -> Noun phrase

Question 39

What’s Recursion?

Answer 39

*Rules of syntax can call themselves
–S -> NP + V + NP
–[The old man] was [the murderer]
–S -> NP + V + S
–Morse suspected [the old man was the murderer]
–Lewis realised [Morse suspected
[the old man was the murderer]]
*Finite number of words and rules which together can generate an infinite number of sentences
S=sentence
NP=noun-phrase
V=verb

Question 40

Define Semantics

Answer 40

the meaning of words (concepts) and sentences

Question 41

How do children infer word meaning?

Answer 41

they infer the word meaning from the way in which they are used by others contextually
–FAT: This is spaghetti
–CHI: Uh-oh. He’s doing that labelling thing again, so /spaghetti/ must mean ‘spaghetti’
–MOT: Eat your spaghetti!
–CHI: Well, I know what spaghetti is and I know what she wants me to do with it, so /eat/ must mean ‘eat’

Question 42

True or false: many words have no direct referents

Answer 42

True as their meaning is defined in terms of their relation to other words or concepts in the system

Question 43

Define Pragmatics

Answer 43

how we use language to do things in the world
Literal meaning=the meaning that is derived from the words/the structure
Implied meaning=the meaning in a
particular context
–Autistic children have trouble with pragmatics (Happe, 1994)

Question 44

Give rules for conversation (Grice, 1975)

Answer 44

1.Quantity: Don’t say too much or too little
2.Quality: Be truthful
3.Relation: Be relevant
4.Manner: Be clear
helps us to understand why
people say things

Question 45

What are 5 things used in Linguistic Representations

Answer 45

1.Phonemes
2.Morphemes
3.Syntax
4.Semantics
5.Pragmatics