The role of linguistics in CS
Stages in Language Acquisition
Cooing stage (by 3 months)
Early in first year
Utter sounds distinguishable from crying sounds- Indicative of various kinds of feelings & needs
Begin to use vocal apparatus to develop motor gestures which eventually will produce speech
Babbling stage (6-8 months)
Repetitive patterns (Mama, Papa, Gaga, Gugu)
Intonation pattern begin to develop
Learning to distinguish between the sounds of their language and the sounds that are not part of the language
Lose the ability to discriminate between sounds that are not phonemic in their language - 6 months
Holophrastic stage (8-18 months)
Single words for various meanings
More comprehension than production
Children can perceive or comprehend many more phonological contrasts than they can produce themselves
Two word stage (18-24 months)
mini sentences - simple semantic relations
No syntactic or morphological markers like determines, prepositions, auxiliaries or inflectional affixes
Telegraphic stage (24-30 months)
Lack of functions words (like determiners, prepositions, inflectional affixes, or auxiliaries), and use of content words
Resemblance to telegraphic speech
subject-verb = "chicken eat" & verb-object = "eat chicken"
Use of syntactic and grammatical function words at the later stage
Second Language Acquisition
- The acquisition of a second language by someone (adult or child) who has already acquired a first language
- Infant's brain ready to acquire language
-Innate mechanism enables us to learn L1
-Maturation effect - Argued to be different from L1 Acquisition
Hypotheses 1
the existence of a language acquisition device (LAD)
A special neurological system in the brain that facilitates language development
Sensitive to the types of structures that occur in human languages
As children mature, changes to LAD occur
Older learners are less successful in inducing linguistic systems to which they are exposed
nonlinguistic constraints
some of the constraints crucial to success in language acquisition are nonlinguistic
Maturational changes which lead to more difficulty in language learning occur in these nonlinguistic constraints on perception and memory
Hypotheses 2
Interference from our first language
Hypotheses 3
developmental change in the language acquisition mechanism as we mature
Language Deprivation
Abused or feral children
Feral child is a human child who, from a very young age, has lived in isolation from human contact
May be lost or abandoned children raised in extreme social isolation
remain unaware of human social behavior, and unexposed to language
survive in the wild through their own efforts or "adopted" by animals
extremely rare phenomenon, and there are only just over a hundred known cases
Critical period
A stage when language learning takes place naturally
Language learning becomes difficult after the stage has passed
Early exposure to language serves as means to normal linguistic development
Linguistics & Neuroscience
Language loss
Language loss- language becomes less available to users (i.e. lost some or all of linguistic system which once was in fully developed form)
First language attrition (native language)
Second language attrition
Brain damage patients (aphasia)
Research on subjects provided insight into the way language is organized in brain
The extent & location of damage to brain determine aphasic patient's language deficits
Broca's aphasia = nonfluent aphasia
Wernicke's aphasia = fluent aphasia
Understanding what has happened to the linguistic system of an aphasia depends on
understanding what constitutes language (linguist)
devising tests to make known the deficit (cognitive psychologist)
clinical observation and testing of patients using neuroimaging techniques (neuroscientist)
The study of aphasia brings together experts from linguistics, cognitive psychology and neuroscience
Linguistics & Philosophy
consciousness
language & thought revisited
Linguistics & AI
Preliminary Insights
Development of computer technology
machine translation
Automatic translation
Difficulty with translation
input (source language)
output (target language)
memory (words of source language & their equivalent in target language)
translation in one sentence may make no sense at all in another
different language make use of different word
Language & Thought
linguists search for underlying commonalities among language
Thoughts that are expressed in language exist in advance of their being expressed
Thoughts exist before they are expressed using language
Thoughts = propositional representation