PSY3051 WEEK 12 (LANGUAGE)

• Communication


  The transfer of information between one individual and another

  Not all communication is language, but almost all language is communication
• Communication vs Language

  Toni Morrison's novels: both language and communication

  Auslan: both language and communication

  Cat postures: communication, not language

  Traffic lights: communication, not language
• When Is Language Not Communication?

  Mental monologues (e.g., rehearsal of information in a phonological loop)

  Speech by the last speaker of a dying language

  Speech between two people who don't speak each other's languages
• The Study Of Language In Psychology (Behaviourist)

  Behaviourist theories emphasised the role of reinforcement in language acquisition

  e.g., B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior, 1957

  Key idea: children learn to produce language because their parents reinforce it
• The Study Of Language In Psychology (Cognitive)

  Pointed out that reinforcement alone cannot explain language acquisition

  Children say things that they have never heard their parents say (e.g., 'I eated my breakfast')
• Chomsky's Universal Grammar


  A cognitive theory of language acquisition

  Language is coded in our genes

  Underlying basis of all human language is similar
• Defining Language (Universal Features)

  A distinction between first-person and second-person

  Asking and answering questions

  Hierarchical: sounds are joined into words, words are joined into sentences

  All languages have rules ('syntax') for how things should be joined together

  Capable of conveying any idea that a speaker wishes to convey

  Change over time

  Used to make infinitely many new utterances
• Defining Language (Non-Universal Features)

  Not all languages are based on sound (e.g., sign languages are visual)

  Not all languages have past vs. present tense (e.g., Vietnamese and Pirahã are tense-less languages)

  Not all languages have a distinction between nouns and verbs (e.g., Riau Indonesian)

  Not all languages have numbers (e.g., Pirahã, many Australian Aboriginal languages)
• Communication That Is Not Language

  Signs with fixed meanings

  Signs cannot be combined according to fixed rules to make new meanings

  Cannot convey any possible intended meaning

  The signs cannot be combined recursively
• Rules Of Language

  Every language has rules on how elements are put together to form meaningful wholes

  Word order

  Subject-verb agreement

  Grammatical tense
• Word Order


  'My friend caught and ate a fish' versus '

  A fish caught and ate my friend
• Subject-Verb Agreement


  I think, you think, he thinks, she thinks, they think, etc.
• Grammatical tense


  I think, I thought, I will think, I have thought, I had thought, I am thinking, etc.
• Pragmatics


  Being concise, waiting until someone else has finished speaking before you say something
• Language Rules Are Hierarchical

  Different sounds are organised into phonemes

  Different phonemes are organised into morphemes

  Different morphemes are organised into words

  Different words are organised into sentences

  Different sentences are organised into conversations and narratives
• Phonemes


  The shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of a word
• Phonemes (Minimal Pairs)


  Evidenced by minimal pairs: words that differ only by a single phoneme

  ton vs. done tells us that /t/ and /d/ are different phonemes in English

  ear vs. eel tells us that /r/ and /l/ are different phonemes in English

  appal vs. appeal tells us that /o/ and /i/ are different phonemes in English
• Phonemes (Corresponding)


  Do not always correspond to the same written letter, or vice versa

  In English, /f/ is sometimes can be spelled 'f' (fun), 'ph' (phobia), or even 'gh' (enough) T

  he written letter 'c' can be part of a /k/ (panic), a /tch/ (cello), or an /s/ (celery)
• Phonemes (vs Sound)


  Not the same thing as a sound: different sounds may be part of the same phoneme

  Two sounds that correspond to the same phoneme are called allophones of that phoneme.

  For instance, aspirated versus unaspirated 'p' in English ('pin' versus 'spin')

  For instance, the rhotic approximant ('r') versus the lateral approximant ('l') in Japanese
• Phonemes (Different Languages)


  Different languages have different sets of phonemes

  For monolinguals, it is very difficult to hear the distinctions between sounds from within the same phoneme

  It is difficult to learn new phonemes as an adult (both hearing the difference and producing them in speech)
• Phonemic Restoration Effect


  Listeners perceive (or 'infer') phonemes that are covered up by an extraneous noise

  This tells us that the meaning of a phrase changes what phonemes we perceive

  Our minds 'fill in' missing phonemes based on context
• Morphemes


  The smallest unit of language that carries meaning or grammatical function

  The word girl has one morpheme: 'girl'

  The word girlish has two morphemes: 'girl' and '-ish'

  The word girlishness has three morphemes: 'girl', '-ish', and '-ness
• Morphemes (Syllables)

  Morphemes do not always correspond to syllables (morphemes make meaning, syllables don't)

  Crocodile: one morpheme, three syllables (and eight phonemes)

  Dogs: two morphemes, one syllable (and four phonemes)
• Morpheme (Sequence Of Sounds)

  The same sequence of sounds can correspond to more than one morpheme

  -less: means something different when used by itself compared to when used as part of a word ('heartless')
• Morpheme (Allomorphs)

  The same morpheme may have different allomorphs

  In English, 'a' (a grapefruit) versus 'an' (an orange) are both allomorphs of the indefinite article morpheme
• Defining Words

  There is no definition of word that applies to all languages

  Bloomfield (1928): Words are the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by itself 'computer', 'walked', 'red' But what about 'of', 'the', or 'a'?
• What Constitutes A Word

  Decided by consensus among the speakers of a language

  In English, words are usually a maximum of 5 syllables, usually a maximum of 4-5 morphemes

  In other languages (e.g., German, Turkish), words may be much longer
• Groups Of Words

  Lexicons

  Corpuses
• Lexicons


  Their knowledge of all the words in a language

  The words' spelling, sound, meanings, syntactic usage, pragmatic usage

  Different speakers of a language may have different lexicons (e.g., specialised or technical language)

  Words can be conceptualised as lexical items
• Corpuses

  A collection of words from a specific source e.g., articles on Wikipedia, news articles about the pandemic, scripts of American soap operas

  Good for understanding the statistics of a particular body of language
• Speech Segmentation

  When we hear spoken language, our minds automatically break it up

  Based on context, understanding of sound and syntactic rules
• Difficulty Of Speech Segmentation

  To get an idea of how complex a process this is, try listening to speakers of a language that you don't speak In this case, speech segmentation is very hard
• Lexical Ambiguity


  Words can be ambiguous both in how they are written and in how they sound
• Homographs


  Words that are written the same way but mean different things

  Wound: 'I've been feeling tightly wound' vs. 'It's only a flesh wound
• Homonyms


  Words that sound the same (in spoken language) but mean different things

  Stair/stare: 'We passed upon the stair' vs. 'It's rude to stare
• Homonyms And Homographs

  Some words can be both homonyms and homographs

  Foil: 'I wrapped my leftovers in aluminium foil' vs. 'I have a nemesis and I'm going to foil his plans
• Resolving Lexical Ambiguity

  If one meaning of a homograph/homonym is much more frequent than another, we say that that meaning is dominant

  A homograph/homonym with one more frequent ('dominant') meaning is said to show biased dominance

  A homograph/homonym with several equally dominant meanings is said to show balanced dominance
• Context


  Used to clear up the meaning of a word after all meanings have been activated
• Activation


  Proportional to dominance

  When no context is available, dominance determines meaning
• Lexical Decision Task


  Measures how rapidly participants can identify items as words vs. non-words