WEEK 12 - Language

• What is communication? Transfer of information between one individual and another
• Not all communication is language but almost all language is communication
• Auslan = language and communication

  Cat postures = communication not language

  Traffic lights = communication not language  
• In what scenarios is language not communicative? When things we say are not for purpose of communicating with another individual

  
  

  
  

  e.g. mental monologue – rehearsal of information in phonological loop to remember a list of things

  speech by last speaker of a dying language (no one else can speak the language)

  speech between two people who don’t speak each other’s language
• How did behaviourists think of language? Emphasis on role of reinforcement in language acquisition, the idea that children learn to produce language because their parents reinforce it
• Why is the behaviourist approach not accepted anymore? Cognitive theorists of language point out reinforcement alone cannot explain language acquisition e.g. children saying things they never head parents say
•  What did cognitive theorist Nom Chomsky propose?

  1. language is coded in our genes

  2. underlying basis of all human language is similar
• What are universal features of language?

  1. a distinction between first-person and second-person statements

  2. all languages have a way of asking and answering questions

  3. all languages are hierarchical = hierarchy of rules for languages, phonemes to lexical, to syntax to semantic

  4. all languages have rules = syntax, for how things should be joined together ot make grammatical sentences

  5. all languages are capable of conveying an idea that a speaker wishes to convey

  6. all living languages change over time

  7. can be used to infinitely new utterances
• Hence, language is unique but the same – illustrating that language is built into our genes
• What are non-universal features of language

  1. based on sound e.g. sign languages are visual

  2. not all languages have past vs present tense e.g. Vietnamese

  3. not all languages have distinction between nouns and verbs

  4. not all languages have numbers
• Why are traffic lights and cat posture not considered language but communication?

  -              These are signs with fixed meanings – cannot change over time, cannot combine signs to make new meanings

  -              Cannot convey any possible intended meaning

  -              Signs cannot be combined recursively
•  

  What are language rules on how elements should be put together:

  1. word order

  2. subject-verb agreement

  3. grammatical tense

  4. pragmatics

   
• What are hierarchical rules (organised layers)?

  1. phonemes

  2. morphemes

  3. words

  4. sentences

  5. conversations and narratives
• What is a phoneme? Shortest segment of speech that if changed, changes meaning of a word
• How are phonemes evidenced? By minimal changes in words e.g. ton vs done, giving completely different meaning
• What are examples of phonemes that do not correspond to same written letter? “ph” and ‘f’ and ‘gh’ have same sound – hence phoneme is not a sound
• What are allophones? Two sounds corresponding to the same phoneme
•  Different languages have different sets of phonemes
• For monolinguals, difficult to hear distinctions between sounds within same phoneme

  It is difficulty to learn new phonemes as an adult (hearing and producing is difficult), babies born with ability to distinguish phonemes and unlearn ones that don’t matter
• What is the phonemic restoration effect? Listeners can perceive/ infer phonemes that are covered up by extraneous noise

  In this example, we hear the covered phoneme present and the cough in a separate auditory stream

  
• What is a morpheme? Smallest unit of language carrying meaning or grammatical function e.g. “girl” > “girlish” (2 morphemes)
• Same sequence of sounds can correspond to more than one morpheme

  “less” and “heartless” (where ‘less’ has 2 different meanings/ functions)
• Different morphemes have different allomorphs ‘a grapefruit’ vs ‘an orange’ > ‘a’ and ‘an’ allomorphs of the same morpheme
• There is no consistent way of defining a word that applies to all languages
• In English, words are usually a maximum of 5 syllables of 4-5 morphemes
• How are knowledge of words organised?

  1. lexicon – subjective, about their knowledge of the language

  2. corpus  - objective
•  

  What is a speaker’s lexicon? Their knowledge of all words in a language, the way in which an individual’s knowledge of words in a language are stored, subjective use of language

  -              Contains spelling, sound, meanings, syntactic usage (where and when grammatically), pragmatic usage (where and when context-wise)
• Different speakers of the same language may have different lexicons / different mental structures for the same language especially for specialised/ technical language

  e.g. ball means different for ballroom dancer than it does an NBA player
• Words can be conceptualised as lexical items
• Different speakers may have different lexicons e.g. specialised or technical language
• What is a corpus? A collection of words from a specific source e.g. articles on Wikipedia, news articles about the pandemic > good for understanding statistics of a particular body of language – objective collection of words
• In what ways are words ambiguous? Can be written the same meaning different things or sound the same meaning different things e.g. homonyms (sound same mean diff), homograph (written same, mean diff)
• When is a meaning dominant? When homograph/homonym is more frequent than the other
• When is biased dominance shown? A homograph/homonym being dominant

  When is balanced dominance shown? A homograph/homonym being equally dominant 
•  

  Context – used to clear up meaning of a word after all meanings have been activated

  Activation proportional to dominance
• When no context is available dominance determines the meaning
• What is a lexical decision task? Measures how rapidly participants can identify items as words vs non-words
• What does the word frequency effect show? That common words are identified faster than uncommon words, also shown through eye tracking studies which show overt visual attention to low frequency words
• Semantics refers to the meaning of words, sentences and conversations
• Syntax refers to language-specific rules for combining words into phrases and sentences e.g. grammar, structure of words, word order