Understanding Language Structure

• Language is a complex, dynamic communication system using symbols organized by rules to convey meaning.
• It allows humans to share thoughts and knowledge across generations.
• Language is a social and cognitive phenomenon integral to human culture and consciousness.
• Human language is generative and creative, allowing for infinite novel utterances.
• Its creativity comes from combining symbols and rules flexibly.

Hierarchical Nature of Language

• Language has a hierarchical structure organizing linguistic elements from basic to complex levels.
• Phonemes are the smallest units of sound, such as /k/, /æ/, /t/ in "cat".
• Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units, e.g., "cats" has "cat" (root) and "-s" (plural marker).
• Words are combinations of morphemes representing specific concepts.
• Phrases are words grouped into meaningful units, e.g., "the red balloon".
• Sentences are full propositions expressing complete thoughts, e.g., "The boy kicked the ball".
• Discourse is extended language use like conversations or narratives.
• Each level builds upon the previous, reflecting language's structural complexity.

Rule-Based Nature of Language

• Language operates according to various rule systems.
• Phonological rules govern how sounds combine and change in speech, e.g., the plural ending "-s" in "cats" sounds like /s/ but in "dogs" like /z/.
• Morphological rules determine how words are formed from morphemes, e.g., "unhappiness" = un- + happy + -ness.
• Syntactic rules structure sentences, e.g., subject-verb-object order in English: "She eats apples".
• Semantic rules define meanings of words and how meanings combine, e.g., "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" follows syntax but is semantically nonsensical.
• Pragmatic rules concern language use in context, such as adjusting speech for formality or indirect requests.

Historical Milestones

• Paul Broca (1861) discovered that damage to the left frontal lobe (Broca's area) causes expressive aphasia which meant difficulty producing language, while comprehension remains intact; a patient with this aphasia might say things like "walk store" instead of “I will walk to the store."
• Carl Wernicke (1874) identified Wernicke's area, located in the posterior left temporal lobe, and damage leads to fluent but meaningless speech, like "The bus rides quickly on the Sunday salad".
• B.F. Skinner (1957) argued in 'Verbal Behavior' that language is learned via operant conditioning, including reinforcement, imitation, and association, and that children learn to speak by mimicking others and receiving feedback.
• Noam Chomsky (1957) challenged Skinner, stating that children generate sentences they have never heard before.
• Chomsky introduced the concept of an innate Universal Grammar, consisting of structural rules common to all languages.
• Humans are biologically predisposed to acquire language.

Psycholinguistics

• Psycholinguistics studies how individuals comprehend, produce, and acquire language.
• Comprehension is understanding spoken or written language, which includes identifying sounds, parsing sentences, and interpreting meanings.
• Representation is the mental storage of language elements such as vocabulary and syntax.
• Speech Production means the processes involve planning and articulating speech, from idea formation to motor execution.
• Acquisition is the developmental process by which humans learn language; this includes first language acquisition in children and second language learning in adults.

Lexicon

• The lexicon is the mental dictionary containing knowledge about words.
• This involves word meanings, pronunciation, grammatical categories, and associations.
• The entry for "run" includes definitions as both a noun (“a morning run") and a verb ("to run fast"), along with syntactic and morphological variations (runs, running, ran).

Semantics and Lexical Semantics

• Semantics involves interpreting meaning in language from words, phrases, and sentences.
• Lexical Semantics focuses on word meanings and relationships.
• Synonyms are words like "Big" and "large".
• Antonyms are words like "Hot" and "cold".
• Polysemy refers to words like "Paper" that can mean the material or an academic essay.
• Homonyms are words like "Bat" (animal) vs. "bat" (sports equipment), which have the same spelling/pronunciation but have different meanings.

Differences in Frequency

• Some words appear more often in language than others.
• Words like “the” and “and” are among the most frequent English words, while "fjord" or "turpitude" are rare. High-frequency words are processed more quickly and easily.
• The word frequency effect means that people respond more rapidly to common words than to rare ones, as observed in reaction time experiments and in faster recognition of words such as "dog" compared to "cypress.".
• Lexical Decision Task involves participants indicating whether a string of letters forms a real word.
• The answer for "table" YES, and "slome" NO.
• Typically, high-frequency words yield faster and more accurate responses.

Variable Pronunciation

• Words have different pronunciations depending on dialect, speech speed, context, or coarticulation.
• The word "butter" might sound like "budder” in American English.
• Listeners use context and prior knowledge to understand variable pronunciation.

No Silences Between Words

• Speech Segmentation involves listeners parsing continuous streams of speech into distinct words.
• Contextual clues help listeners achieve speech segmentation.
• Familiar word patterns help listeners achieve speech segmentation.
• Statistical learning (recognizing which sounds frequently co-occur) help listeners achieve speech segmentation.
• “The sky is falling," has no pauses between words, but it can still be segmented properly due to familiarity with English.

Understanding Ambiguity

• Lexical Ambiguity occurs when a word has multiple meanings.
•  "Bank” can mean a financial institution or the side of a river.
• Context helps resolve which meaning is intended.
• When accessing multiple meanings, listeners may activate multiple meanings of ambiguous words initially, but context quickly guides selection.
• "She sat on the bank and watched the water" primes the riverbank meaning.
• Lexical Priming means prior exposure to one meaning of a word can bias interpretation, and that reading a story about dogs may cause the word "bark” to be interpreted as a dog sound rather than tree bark.
• Meaning Dominance refers to one meaning being more frequent.
• Biased dominance occurs when "bank" means a financial institution.
• Balanced dominance refers to how multiple meanings are similarly common.
• "Pitch” can equally refer to music, sports, or sales.
• Context and frequency work together to resolve ambiguity.

Understanding Sentences

• Syntax refers to the rules that govern sentence structure, including word order and hierarchical relationships.
• "The cat chased the mouse" has a different meaning than "The mouse chased the cat."
• Parsing is the real-time process of analyzing a sentence's syntactic structure to derive meaning, by deciding how words relate to each other grammatically.
• The Garden Path Model of Parsing suggests that readers initially choose the simplest grammatical structure, which may later prove incorrect.
• "The old man the boats," makes readers initially misinterpret "man" as a noun before realizing it is a verb.
• Constraint-Based Approach describes how parsing integrates multiple sources of information simultaneously - syntax, semantics, context, and memory load.
• The sentence "The man saw the boy with the binoculars" can mean that the man used binoculars to see the boy., or that the boy had the binoculars.
• Language users anticipate upcoming words based on grammar, context, and world knowledge.
• In "She spread the bread with...," listeners predict "butter," which facilitates faster comprehension.

Understanding Text & Stories

• Inferences involve:
  • Anaphoric Inference, wherein one connects pronouns to their referents, such as in the sentence "Tom dropped the plate. It shattered. It" = plate.
  • Instrumental Inference, which means guessing tools or methods
  • In the sentence “He cut the paper”, scissors implies using scissors
  • Causal Inference which involves, inferring cause-effect as with “He got sick because he ate spoiled food."
• Narrative is a type of discourse that follows a structured format with events unfolding over time.
• Narratives include characters, goals, conflicts, and resolutions, helping readers construct coherent mental representations.
• Effective storytelling relies on temporal sequence, causal coherence, and thematic unity.
• Coherence ensures logical connectedness across propositions, as both local coherence (between adjacent sentences) and global coherence (entire discourse structure) are necessary for comprehension.
• Situation Models describe how readers mentally simulate the described world, by incorporating spatial relationships (e.g., "The cup is on the table."), temporal order (e.g., "Then he went outside."), intentions and emotions of characters, and how these models facilitate prediction and comprehension.

Having Conversations

• Given-New Contract involves speakers presenting information by linking what is already known (given) with new ideas in phrases such as "I met a girl yesterday. The girl had a red scarf."
•  "The girl" is now given information.
• Common Ground means effective communication depends on shared knowledge and assumptions between speakers.
• Using technical terms requires ensuring that the listener has a background in the subject.

Language Extensions

• Music and Language share cognitive and neural resources, particularly in syntax and rhythm.
• Brain imaging studies reveal overlapping activation in Broca's area for both music and language processing.
• Prosody makes the rhythm, pitch, and intonation patterns in speech.
• Prosody helps convey emotions, indicate sentence boundaries, and distinguish questions from statements ("You're going." vs. "You're going?").
• Emojis are graphical representations that supplement or replace words in digital communication.
• Functionally, emojis act like gestures or facial expressions, clarifying tone and emotional content.
• Tonic and Return to Tonic mean in music, the tonic is the base note, and a return to it resolves tension.
• In language, language structures (e.g., completing a story or a clause) provide closure and satisfaction.

Deficits and Disorders

• Broca's Aphasia is a language disorder characterized by impaired speech production with relatively intact comprehension.
• Speech is effortful and lacks grammatical markers ("want... coffee... shop"). Congenital Amusia is a developmental disorder affecting musical pitch processing that can also affect the perception of speech prosody, making it difficult to detect emotional tone or questions.
• Language Disorder (DSM-5) is defined as persistent difficulties in language acquisition and use across modalities due to deficits in comprehension or production.
• Symptoms include limited vocabulary, short utterances, and difficulty following discourse, significantly impacting academic and social communication.