L&C Lecture 7 - Words & Syntax

• Language is a complex communication system representing semantic information symbolically using hierarchical and recursive rules.

Language Structure

• Recursion: nesting rules and meanings within each other.
• Symbolism: Arbitrariness where a word's form has no inherent connection to its meaning.

Syntax

• Defined as the structural rules that govern a language.
• Core features are duality of patterning and recursion

Duality of Patterning

• Involves two levels of patterns: meaningless and meaningful.
• Meaningless parts (phonemes) combine to make meaningful units (morphemes).

Compositionality

• Meaningless parts combine into meaningful units, which then form higher-order compositions.
• Hierarchy exists where meaning of composition comes from components combined with rules.
• Rules and meaningful combinations lead to compositionality.
• Principle notes that a complex expression's meaning arises from meanings of its parts/combination rules.
• It is contentious whether nonhuman animals exhibit compositionality, despite combining signals.

Recursion

• Language features nesting of rules and meaning
• Word recursion: Nesting of meanings within meanings to create clauses
• Phrase recursion: Nesting clauses within others
• Clauses/phrases can be nested to create complex sentences, which is a special language feature.
• Language trained apes struggle with nesting and tracking, marking difference from human language.

Word Structure

• Morphology is the study of word structure.
• A word is the smallest meaningful unit that can be uttered alone.
• Morphemes don't necessarily stand alone.
• A word is made from one or more morphemes.
• Free morphemes stand alone with meaning, like "dog", "run", "happy", "cat"
• Bound morphemes cannot stand alone
• Examples of bound morphemes include s, ed, and ing.
• Inflectional morphemes modify a word's grammatical properties without changing its core meaning.
• Derivational morphemes alter a word's meaning or grammatical category.

Linguistic Laws

• Languages change over time due to cultural pressures, conforming to linguistic laws. -There are over 6000 languages with evolutionary history

Zipf’s Law of Brevity

• States frequently used words tend to be shorter.
• This applies across languages, with common words being shorter in length.
• This law is evident in function words like "the," "and," "of," "a" in English.
• Evident in animal communication in at least 15 species.

Menzerath’s Law of Compression

• The greater the whole, the smaller the size of the parts
• The more syllables there are in a word, the smaller the size of syllables
• The longer a sentence is, the shorter the clauses are
• one syllable word such as "there" has a long syllable length
• Multi-syllable words have shorter syllables
• Applies to chromosome structure: species with more chromosomes have smaller chromosomes.
• applies to genes, where genes with more exons have them shorter in length.
• Evident in animal communication of gibbons, galadas, chimpanzees and penguins.

Heaps' Law

• Describes relationship between the size of a text and vocabulary growth.
• Fewer new words appear as a text's length increases.
• Reuse of short, familiar words results in increased efficiency as the text progresses.

Principles of Word Learning

• Fast mapping is ability emerging in first year of life
• Involves rapid word learning with minimal exposure; quick but requires repeated exposure.
• Children form tentative understanding after few exposures
• Use basic contextual cues to infer meaning in communication.
• Children use fast mapping to expand vocabulary quickly.
• Slow mapping involves refining a word's meaning over time through repeated exposure in different contexts.
• Requires consistent exposure in diverse contexts to understand varied meanings.
• Aids in deeper learning/context generalization, enabling appropriate word use in varying situations.
• Fast mapping provides the initial hypothesis for a word's meaning, which is incomplete and error-prone
• Slow mapping refines/corrects child's overall word understanding over time.

Other Principles

• Children learn to help new words means (Markman)
• Mutual exclusivity means that children expect each word to have different meanings
• Whole object assumption involves labeling the entire object, not just parts/characteristics.
• Taxonomic assumption involves associating new words with similar objects in same taxonomic category (family).

Taxonomic Assumption

• Children typically group objects by theme.
• In learning context, new words refer to a taxonomic likeness, not thematic.
• Applying same name to same-shaped objects over color exhibits shape bias; emerges between 18-24 months.

Word Learning

• Dogs don't show shape bias but can generalize by texture and size.

Syntax Learning

• During language learning syntax can lead to mistakes
• Children show over-regularization errors, or over-generalization
• Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words
• Children correct mistakes with exposure

Syntax Learning continued

• The rules allow for rapid and efficient language learning
• Mistakes are made, but rules allow easy learning
• Kids don't have random strategies but rather learning biases
• Other animals are unlikely to have such tools