Lecture 9(Language) (1).pptx

Language Lecture 9 Overview of Major Topics Covered in Chapter 9 Linguistic Universals and Functions. Phonology: The Sounds of Language. Syntax: The Ordering of Words and Phrases. Lexical and Semantic Factors: The meaning in Language. • Brain and Language. • • • • Introductory Definitions • Ling...

Language Lecture 9 Overview of Major Topics Covered in Chapter 9 Linguistic Universals and Functions. Phonology: The Sounds of Language. Syntax: The Ordering of Words and Phrases. Lexical and Semantic Factors: The meaning in Language. • Brain and Language. • • • • Introductory Definitions • Linguistics: The academic discipline that studies language. • Psycholinguistics: The study of language as it is used and learned by people. Defining Language • Webster’s: the words, their pronunciation, and the methods of combining them used and understood by a community b (1) : audible,articulate, meaningful sound as produced by the action of the vocal organs • Language: A shared, symbolic system for communication. Linguistic Universals • Hockett (1960) proposed 13 linguistic universals Features or characteristics common to all known languages. • We will focus on 4 (plus 2 that are implied). Semanticity, Arbitrariness… • Semanticity: Language conveys meaning. o Not all sounds convey meaning  cough. • Arbitrariness: No inherent connection between the units in a language and the meanings referred to by those units. o Spoken words are disembodied from their referent  whale small word, microorganism large word …Flexibility, Naming… • Flexibility of Symbols: The connection between symbols and meaning in language is arbitrary o As such we can change connections and invent new ones (automobilescars). • Naming: we assign names to everything in our environment, even our feelings, thoughts and concepts. o Terms do not have to have physical referents. Displacement and Productivity • Displacement: The ability to talk about something other than the present moment. Conjugate our verbs • Productivity (generativity): Language is a productive and inherently novel activity – we generate sentences rather than repeat them. Generative grammar is based upon a set of rules. Five Levels of Language Analysis 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Phonology Syntax Semantics and Morphology Conceptual Belief Competence Versus Performance • Competence: The internalized knowledge of language and its rules that fully fluent speakers of a language have. • Performance: The actual language behavior a speaker generates. • Chomsky (1957) argues that competence is a purer basis for understanding linguistic knowledge than is performance. Dysfluencies and Linguistic Intuitions • Dysfluencies: Irregularities or errors in otherwise fluent speech. • Linguistic Intuitions: Chomsky’s approach to studying language– involves asking people to judge whether a sentence is “acceptable.” Whorf’s Hypothesis • The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis: The language you know shapes the way you think about the events in the world around you. • Does language constrain thought? Can we think about ideas that our language doesn’t name? 1. Phonology • The sounds of language and the rule system for combining them. • Phoneme: A category of language sounds that are treated as the same sound, despite any physical difference among the category members. It is the smallest unit of sound that makes a difference to the meaning of a word. • English has about 46 phonemes. Producing Consonant Sounds • Place  where the articulation of a sound is produced • Manner  how a sound is produced • Voicing  whether the vocal cords vibrate immediately or not All three variables influence the range of phonemes used in a language (i.e., they are the constraints on how sounds are produced). • Categorical Perception • All the sounds within a set of boundaries are perceived as the same, despite physical differences among them. • Example: The hard /k/ sounds in cool and keep– we perceive these as belonging to the same category, the /k/ phoneme. Productivity and Phonology • A small number of units (phonemes) can be used to generate an essentially infinite number of words. • Phonemes are combined into words by using rules. • Phonemic Competence: Extensive knowledge of the rules of permissible English sound combinations. Speech Perception • Is not just stringing phonemes together. • The “same” sounds change from speaker to speaker, and from word to word, depending on what sounds precede and follow (e.g., coarticulation – where more than one sound is articulated at the same time). • This variability in sounds is called the Problem of Invariance -- the problem is that sounds are not invariant. 2. Syntax • A tax levied on alcohol and tobacco? • The arrangements of words as elements in a sentence to show their relationship to one another; or a sentence structure. • Here, we are interested in how words are sequenced to form meaningful utterances. Syntactic Grammar • The set of rules for ordering words into acceptable, well-formed sentences. • Is descriptive (versus proscriptive). • Examples: Word order  red fire engine vs. fire engine red Phrase order  NP and VP Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar • Goal: Describe the universal aspects of syntactic knowledge. • Words come in groupings. • Groupings can be altered to express different meanings. Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar Phrase Structure Grammar • The constituents of the sentence, the word groupings and phrases that make up the whole utterance, and the relationships among these constituents. Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar Deep Structure • An abstract, syntactic representation of the sentence being constructed. • Is passed along to the transformational rules to yield the surface structure (the actual form of the sentence). • Is also submitted to a semantic component that computes sentence meaning. Ambiguous Sentences and Parsing • Visiting relatives can be a nuisance. This sentence’s surface structure is ambiguous – has more than one meaning. Alternative meanings can be revealed by PARSING the sentence – dividing the sentence into phrases and groupings. Reveals two deep structures. Transformational Rules • Convert the deep structure into a surface structure, a sentence ready to be spoken. • Different transformations lead to different types of sentences (e.g., future or past tense). Limitations of Transformational Grammar • Makes meaning a secondary factor to the syntactic component? • Decide on syntax first, and then figure out what we’re going to talk about??? • Chomsky, however, did emphasize the joint importance of syntax and semantics. The Cognitive Role of Syntax • To help the listener determine the meaning. • To minimize comprehension’s processing demands  there are an infinite number of possible sentences. • Bock (1982) “the cognitive psychology of syntax”  related to mental effort. Automatic Processing practice/overlearning Planning  accessibility of semantics 3. Semantics and Morphology • Retrieving word meaning from memory. • The Mental Lexicon: The mental dictionary of words and their meanings. • Also involves relating words to other words. Morphemes • Morphemes: The smallest meaningful unit of language. o Free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand alone. o Bound morpheme: a morpheme, which, although contributing to word meaning, is not a word itself. -The word jumped consists of a free morpheme, jump, and a bound morpheme, ed. Case Grammar • Fillmore (1968) • The semantic analysis of sentences involves figuring out what semantic role is being played by each word or concept in the sentence and computing meaning based on those semantic roles. Case Grammar • A sentence is made up of a verb and a collection of nouns in various cases in the deep structure sense. • Sentence processing involves semantic parsing (as opposed to syntactic parsing), in which we focus on the semantic roles played by the content words in the sentences. Evidence for Semantic Grammar Approaches. • Predicts: Listeners begin to analyze sentences immediately, by assigning each word to a particular semantic case role. • Garden Path Sentences: The old train the young. After the musician played the piano was rolled off the stage. Brain and Language • Aphasia  lack of or bad language: A general class of brain disorder where language is disrupted. Three basic forms: Broca’s (syntax and speech production) Wernicke’s (speech comprehension) Conduction aphasia (word repetition). Broca’s Area Wernicke’s Area Broca’s and Wernicke’s Aphasia Other Aphasias • Anomia: Impairment in the normal ability to retrieve a concept and say its name. Involves damage to the left temporal lobe. • Agraphia: Disruption in writing. • Alexia: Disruption in reading. • Pure Word Deafness: Person cannot understand spoken language.