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Language (Y1) - Coggle Diagram
Language (Y1)
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Key aspects of language
Phonology - the fundamental sounds that make up spoken language -
- Phoneme - basic auditory unit of spoken, natural language - English has 34-44, dependent on accent
- Smallest sound that could change and change the meaning of the word
-> Dipthongs - letters placed together to make one sound
-> Semivowels
-> Consonants - stops, whisper, affricates, fricatives (voiced and unvoiced), nasals
-> Vowels
- Critical to understand language
- Rabin and Schafer (1978) - phonemes in American English - organisation due to articulation
Moon et al, 2013 - infants, even pre-birth, and children learn how natural sounds are divided into these meaningful phonemic units
- 30 hour old babies were exposed to vowels unique to their mother's language and to vowels unique to another language
- Babies sucked harder on a dummy when listening to the foreign language - novel stimuli (high amplitude sucking)
- Exposure effect of learning phonemes of own language in utero
- Suggests babies listen to speech in the womb and learn about it
Children are better at phonemic discrimination - in English, it is easy to distinguish between a 't' and a 'd' despite words like wedding and wetting sounding similar - at 6 months of age, children can distinguish the phonemes of any language
- Innate ability to acquire any language
- In Thai, there are three sounds for d and t, due to the /dt/ phoneme, and so different languages have different phonemes
- Acquisition -
-> 6 month olds can distinguish non-native language distinctions
-> By 12 months old, they can no longer
-> There is a decline in this ability during the first year of life as a specific function of language experience - reorganisation of perception
Different phones that are treated as the same phoneme within a language of allophones - phonemes are abstract representations of the phonological units of language - subjective recognition by native speakers
- Ability to distinguish allophones decreases with age - critical period beyond which the adult is tuned into native language
- Phonological and phonotactic rules describe what sounds go together - rules based on what sounds natural and easy to produce
- Speech segmentation relies on knowledge of word boundaries using information about phonotactic probabilities in language
- Minimal pairs - words that differ by one phoneme
Morphemes - meaning units, building blocks of words - morphology - special case of syntax
- Free and bounded morphemes (singular and plural)
- Verb endings are inlectional morphemes
- Derivational morphemes - create new words with new meaning when added to a stem and change the rules of its use
- Applies to adjectives and verbs
- Function words - words that do the grammatical work of a sentence - do not change
- Lexicon - part of semantic memory system
- Words are symbols - meaningful sounds and generally have a particular referent - greetings and social conventions
- Semantics - meaning of words, morphemes - relationship between objects and the words used
Semantics - the meaning of language, words, phrases and utterances
- Conceptual meaning - linguistic function of a word e.g. money is used in exchange for goods and services
- Associative meaning - concepts related to the word e.g. money and wealth
- Issues -
-> Homonyms - semantically ambigious words where the orthographic and phonological information overlap but the semantic information does not
-> Polysemy - semantically ambigious words due to the fact they have different, similar functions
Studying semantics - semantic association task; a task in which the participant classifies stimuli based on meaning; the detection and classification of semantic relationships between words
- Processing the third word is harder because we have to suppress the relevant meaning of a phonological neighbour (van Ogden, 1987)
- Classifying flowers - tulip, rob, row - third is harder
- Semantic relationships - the final pair is easier due to associative meaning (semantic priming) - doctor and nurse, quicker to recognise the word
- Lexical decision making task - a task in which participants must classify whether a string of letters are a word or not
Syntax - principles that govern the structure of language - sentence structure governed by the rules and principles by which we consider sentences grammatical
- This provides governance, but we also have freedom to structure sentences due to generativity
- Governs utterances, with languages differing in their preferred word order
- English is an SVO language - subject-verb-object, whereas other languages are SOV like Dutch
- Rarest sentence construction - OSV and VSO
- Sentence acceptability - study syntax; do they make sense?
-> While we can often easily distinguish grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, sometimes they can appear to be acceptable in a comparative illusion
-> Syntax rules are not always the best grammar judge
Pragmatics - the context within which the language is used
- The study of the meaning in context and it deals with implied meaning as opposed to the mere lexical meaning expressed
- How utterances are used, interpreting what speakers mean, how people make sense of each other
- Gricean Maxims of pragmatics - rule of conversation for efective, cooperative communication where all interlocutors are understood
-> Maxims of quality, quantity, relation and manner (Week 1)
- Just because we have many ways to say words, it does not mean they are all acceptable
A huge number of things impact this, including semantics and pragmatics
- We are very good at detecting these 'weird' language usages - acceptable sentences are all grammatical, but not all grammatical sentences are acceptable (Jurafsky, 1992)
-> Garden path sentences - grammatically correct sentences that often lead to initial incorrect parsing (analysis) due to their syntactic ambiguity - leads readers up the garden path - last word changes suspected meaning
-> Semantic ontology - some concepts are bounded (dead or alive) - when you stop being one, you are the other - you switch; unbounded concepts mean that you can be both concepts on a scale (wide and narrow)
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Language and psychology
Linguistics - the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of grammar, syntax and phonetics
- Ascribe meaning to words - we are able to attribute language to symbols easily and automatically
- Psycholinguistics - the scientific study of the psychological reality of language use including -
-> Language acquisition
-> Use of language
-> Language comprehension
-> The psychological mechanisms used to process and represent language in the mind
Language - Human systems of communication and personal expression which have been built upon symbols and representations
- Representations - words that stand in for the things they are intended to represent
- In turn, these cause us to create internal, mental representations of the words
- Language and thinking - at least three principles characterise human language: generativity, recursion and displacement
- Generativity allows a speaker to use a small number of words / grammatical structure to compose and infinite number of sentences and new ideas
--> Can create entirely new ideas from unique arrangement of words
--> Could have conveyed the same idea with different descriptions - use more concise one
- Recursion - any sentence can be extended indefinitely by embedding clauses or phrases within or following it - ability to create complex sentences
- Displacement - quality of language that allows one to converse about things that do not exist, exist in other places or are abstractions
--> Abstractions such as future tense, counterfactuals, beliefs, past tense and similes
Case of Genie - issues developing syntax (grammar rules) which suggests that there is a critical period of language development and acquisition - it also suggests that there is an interaction between cognitive and environmental factos in forming language acquisition
- Language is vital to evolution as it promotes social bonds and interactions as it is an effective way to persuade others
- Speech production is conceptually driven - top-down manner
- Principal use of language is through speech
- Non-language vocalisations convey information and gestures can supplement or substitute for spoken language - body language and tone of voice are also important
- 6000 languages, but many are going extinct, such as indigenous languages - 4% of languages spoken by 96% of the population
- Languages vary based on their lexicons and rules for sentence construction - but all can express complex and new ideas
Linguistic universals - Aitchison, 1977 -
- have consonants and vowels
- combine basic sounds into larger units
- have nouns and verbs
- can combine words in meaningful ways
- can express who did what to whom
- can express negatives and questions
- structure dependent
- allow recursion
Issues - sign language, some of these distinguishing categories are not clear cut, tonal languages rely more on tone for communication, syllable is also a universal unit of speech, unusual classes of consonant sounds such as the click Xhosa
- Evolutionary - aided communication in hunting as it mimics natural environment sounds and would not have startled prey
Hockett's design features for human language (1960) - 16 total - these are 16 features that are unique to human languages; some animal communication share some features, but only human language has them all
- Vocal-auditory communication channel
- Broadcast transmission and directional reception
- Rapid fading
- Interchangeability
- Feedback
- Specialisation
- Semanticity
- Arbitrariness - relationship between meaning and sounds of the word
- Discreteness
- Displacement
- Productivity - novel utterances
- Cultural transmission
- Duality of patterning
- Prevarication
- Reflexiveness
- Learnability
Concepts are not independent, and only apply fully to spoken language, not sign language.
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Methods for studying language -
- mistakes between children and adults (tenses)
- brain imaging
- studying language perception and production of damaged patients (Broca and Wernicke areas)
- temporarily damaging or enhancing brain areas with TMS
- building machine translation systems
- questionnaire experiments
- computational analyses of text corpora
- cross-cultural studies e.g. colour terms and perception
- recording from monkeys
- eye movements from reading studies
- building computational models of reading
- behavioural experiments
What we can learn about language from brain damaged patients - neuropsychology:
- Broca's aphasics - difficulty with grammar and speech production
- Wernicke's aphasics - difficulty with semantics
Sex and gender differences in language, cognitive and perceptual abilities:
- Girls on average have better vocabulary - bedroom culture
- This is relative to boys, at whatever age
- However, variability within boys and girls is huge
- Importance of joint attention and parent-child book reading
- Memory tasks - every memory task favours women
-> Similar story as far as huge variation within women, men and small differences in averages
- Spatial (e.g. possible object rotation) tasks - tend to favour men
- Again, small average differences compared to standard deviation between men and women
Summary - at least three principles characterise human language - generativity, recursion and displacement
- At least 4 key aspects of language interpretation and production - phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics
- Recognising spoken words is difficult, but we are very good at using context to overcome these issues
- Many researchers believe that the capacity for language is a special internal faculty comprising innate, specialised neural and cognitive structures and 'wiring' - Trace and cohort models
- Animals communicate, but do not have language - unlike human language, animal communication systems are closed ended rather than open ended
Speech errors
Malfunctions - slip of the tongue, Freudian slips and tip of the tongue effects and aphasias
- Hesitations and pauses -
-> Disfluencies - more common than actual errors, and vary with the situation and the individual; natural characteristic of fluent speech
-> Filled pauses are more frequent than silent pauses and can serve to announce a delay in speech
-> Pauses allow next words to be articulated
-> Pause use varies on context
-> Some disfluencies can facilitate comprehension and hesitations have also been implicated as a cue for deception
Slips of the tongue - Freud (parapraxes) - action slips are errors can be informative in regards to language processing
- Freudian slips - semantic slips to a phonologically similar word - show the cognitive processes underlying sentence formulation, rather than unconscious motivation or conflicts
Examples of types of speech error - Fromkin (1971) -
- phonological substitutions
- semantic substitutions
- additions
- deletions / omissions
- blend
- transposition / exchange errors (spoonerisms)
- perseveration
- anticipation
Majority of speech based errors are sound based, and tend to occur at one linguistic level
- Shows the importance of the phrase as a unit of production, as errors rarely jump across phase boundaries
- Exchange errors show a lexical bias
- Stressed and unstressed syllables do not change - suggests a systematic process of sentence construction in which the skeleton does not switch but details do, and that those details exchange with other parts of the language category
- Spoonerisms - swapping words or first letters of words in sentences
- Tip of the tongue state -
-> Temporary inability to access a word from memory
-> Brown (1991) - occurs about once a week, is universal, increases with age, affects recall of proper names, involves an available initial letter, accompanied by other words and is resolved on almost half of occasions
-> TOT experience can cause phonological or semantic errors
-> Bilinguals are more prone to this experience - due to lexicon crossover - lexical activations increase the likelihood of this state
Connectionism - McClelland and Cleermans (2009)
- Computational models used to model aspects of human perception, cognition and behaviour, the learning processes underlying this behaviour and the storage / retrieval of this information from memory
- They are representations of the connections in our cognitive networks and how we process information when cognition is occurring (models of connection)
- Central features - emphasis placed on mechanisms of change - some mechanisms involved in cognitive processes should be informed by the manner in which the system changed over time as it developed and learned
- Activation - how each neuron propagates and activates mechanisms of cognitions in neural networks
- Representation - pattern of activation when something is being perceived and also the value that the connection weights link to processing units due to the weight of previous experiences
-> Patterns of activation formed during processing are not necessarily stored as memories, but instead leave a repeatable trace in the network through the adjustments they make to connection weights
- Processing - propagation of activation signals among processing units - continuous time process subject to random variation; same input can give different real-time trajectories
-> Much of our experience is a continuous flow, with many networks settling into attractor states (attractor networks) which are a stable pattern of activity that remains until a reset occurs so the next input can be presented
- Learning - adjustment of the connection weight due to the frequency of the use of that connection in cognition e.g. frequently used heuristics and categories cause stronger weighting
- Knowledge is always implicit whereas symbolic systems are explicit - connectionism relies on knowledge stored in connections, and this leads to consciousness
- Some parts of the connectionist modelling are used to control the states of activation in other parts of the network
-> Difference between weight-based processing and activation-based processing - activation based on activation, maintenance and updating, weight based on adaptation to amounts of input and output
-> Activation more flexible and faster - speed and flexibility are both salient characteristics of high-level cognition
-> Activation based processing is a central characteristic of the frontal cortex - evolved for controlled processing such as working memory, inhibition, executive control and monitoring of ongoing behaviour
-> Processing in the frontal cortex is therefore characterised by mechanisms of active maintenance through which representations can remain strongly activated for long periods of time so these representations can bias processing elsewhere
- Connectionist models can be thought of as implementing a process of global constraint satisfaction whereby biased competition between neural coalitions result in the network settling onto the most likely interpretation of the current input
- Strong link between attention, working memory, cognitive control and availability to conscious experience due to the connected nature of the processing between these areas - information processing occurs depending on the operation of the same computational principles
Discourse - multi-sentence speech and includes dialogue, conversation and narrative - social conventions that affect language processing become increasingly relevant and people rely on schemas to process language
- Pragmatics - understanding the context and use of the language
- Difference between linguistic competence and communicative competence
- Effective discourse is based on shared understanding between those engaging in conversation
- Conversations involve turn taking and cooperation, following implicit social conventions - range of cues
- Universals in turn taking patterns - Gricean Maxims
- Denotes - literal meaning
- Connotations - implied meaning
Dabrowka (2015) - What is universal grammar, and has anyone seen it?
- Explanations - universality (all human languages have the same properties), convergence (all have the same grammar despite having different input) and poverty of the stimulus (children know things they could not have learned without available input)
- However, there are few true universal and most languages are distinct and so the fundamental cross linguistic fact that needs explaining is diversity, not university
- Differences in adult native speakers knowledge of the grammar of their language, and so children do not all learn the same grammar
- Unique in our ability to language learn
- Universal grammar is therefore instead an acquisition style that is a language making capacity, rather than an innate knowledge bank of language structures that allow it to be learned
Okanda et al (2015) - Gricean Maxims in preschoolers:
- Studied violations of the maxims in Japanese children aged 4-6 and adults
- Understanding of the maxims was assessed - quality, quantity, relation and manner
- Sensitivity to violations increased with age - at 4, it was chance, at 5 they understood some maxims (first quantity, then the others) and 6 year olds and adults understood all the maxims
- Preschoolers acquired the maxim of relation first, and found quality the most difficulty to comprehend
- Adults and children differed in their comprehension of the politeness maxim - development of pragmatic understanding of the maxims and implications for the construction of developmental tasks from early childhood to adulthood
Miller and Eimas (1995) - Speech Perception Review:
- Map acoustic signals onto lexical signals and language comprehension in which in the early stages we analyse the continuous signal of speech onto discrete prelexical linguistic representations