LANGUAGE

• Language


  An organized way to combine words to communicate, unique to humans, a communication system that is learned instead of biologically inherited
• Language


  • Communicative
  • Arbitrarily symbolic
  • Regularly structured
  • Structured at multiple levels
  • Generative, productive
  • Dynamic
• Communicative property


  Language permits us to communicate with one or more people who share our language
• Arbitrarily symbolic


  Language creates an arbitrary relationship between a symbol and what it represents, words do not have to look or sound like what they describe, meanings of words are determined by conventions, different words have different meanings
• Regularly structured


  Only particularly patterned arrangements of symbols have meaning, and different arrangements yield different meanings
• Structured at multiple levels

  The structure of language can be analyzed at levels of sounds, words, sentences, paragraphs and text
• Generative property


  Productivity refers to our vast ability to produce language creatively using rules of language to create an unlimited number of new utterances
• Dynamic nature


  Languages constantly evolve, allowing for new developments with the creation of new words and ideas
• Structure of language


  • Phonology
  • Morphology
  • Syntax
  • Semantics
  • Pragmatics
• Phonology


  The study of the sounds of language, phonemes are the smallest units of speech
• Morphology


  The study of word structure, morphemes are the smallest units that denote meaning, including root words, prefixes and suffixes, content morphemes convey core meaning, function morphemes add nuances, lexicon is the entire set of morphemes for a language
• Syntax


  The rules used to put words together for a sentence, including noun phrases and verb phrases
• Semantics


  The study of meaning in a language, including denotation (definition) and connotation (additional nuances of meaning)
• Approaches to language comprehension

  • Speech perception
  • Grammatical structure approach
  • Discourse macro-level analysis
• Speech perception


  We hear sounds, put sounds together to form words, comprehend phrases, and understand the ideas being conveyed, often done with slurred, accented, or incomplete speech input
• Coarticulation


  One or more phonemes begin while other phonemes still are being produced, also occurs in ASL
• Phonetic refinement theory


  Analyze auditory signals, then go to higher-level processing using context to help figure out what is heard
• TRACE model


  Three levels of feature detection: acoustic features, phonemes, and words, speech perception is highly interactive
• Categorical perception


  Voice onset time (VOT) is the time between the beginning of the pronunciation of the word and the onset of the vibration of the vocal chords
• McGurk effect


  Lip movements to one sound "ba", soundtrack indicates "da", people hear a blended sound "tha"
• Motor theory of speech perception

  The movements of the speaker's vocal tract provide a listener with phonetic information, disrupting participants' lip representation in the primary motor cortex made it more difficult to distinguish speech sounds that involved lips or tip of the tongue in their articulation
• Semantics


  Denotation is the definition of the word, connotation is the additional nuances of word meaning (emotional, social, cultural)
• Coprolalia


  The involuntary utterance of socially inappropriate words or sentences, seen in Tourette's syndrome
• Syntax


  The grammatical arrangement of words into a sentence or phrase, descriptive grammar describes the structures, functions, and relationships of words, prescriptive grammar is the "correct" way to structure sentences
• Syntactical priming


  Exposure to a particular syntactic structure leads speakers to reproduce the same structure in subsequent speech, considered a priming phenomenon
• Syntactical priming example


  • If you just heard "The cat is being chased by the dog", you are more likely to say "The mouse is being chased by the cat" versus "The cat is chasing the dog"
• Phrase structure grammar


  Psycholinguists use phrase structure rules to represent the relationships between and within phrases
• Tree diagrams


  • Used to reveal relationships between and within phrases, e.g. "The girl looked at the boy with the telescope"
• Create tree diagrams


  • The rude girl pushed the boy.
  • Wild horses ran the plains.
  • Sally kissed the crying child.
• Phrase structure rules


  1. PS 1 S (sentence) = NP + VP

  2. PS 2 NP (noun phrase) = det + (adj) + N

  3. PS 3 VP (verb phrase) = V +NP

  4. PS 4 N (noun) = boy, dog, man, book

  5. PS 5 V (verb) = ate, broke, kissed

  6. PS 6 adj (adjective) = quiet, red, happy, wormy

  7. PS 7 det (determiner) = a, the
• Tree diagrams are used to reveal relationships between and within phrases
• The girl looked at the boy with the telescope can be represented in two ways
• Create Tree Diagrams


  1. The rude girl pushed the boy.

  2. Wild horses ran the plains.

  3. Sally kissed the crying child.
• Garden path sentences


  Ambiguous nature helps us to understand complexity within language
• Deep structure


  The structure of the sentence that conveys the connections between sentences
• Surface structure


  The actual phrase structures that may occur from transformations
• Transformational Grammar


  1. Use phrase-structure rules to generate the underlying tree structure (deep structure)

  2. Apply a sequence of transformational rules to the deep structure to generate the surface structure of the sentence

  3. Transformations occur by adding, deleting, or moving constituents
• Experiments do not consistently show that the number of transformation rules applied should affect how long it takes to process a sentence
• Constituent structure


  Similar to phrase structure
• Functional structure


  All the information needed for semantic interpretation (subj, obj, past tense information)