W4- Language

Linguistics

The scientific study of language and its structure, including grammar, syntax, and phonetics.

Psycholinguistics

The scientific study of the psychological reality of language use, including language acquisition, use, comprehension, and the mechanisms for processing language.

Language

The human systems of communication and personal expression which have been built upon symbols or representations.

Representations

Words that ‘stand in’ for the things they represent, leading to internal mental representations.

Generativity

The principle that allows a speaker to use a small number of words and structures to compose an infinite number of sentences and ideas.

Recursion

A principle that enables any sentence to be extended indefinitely by adding clauses or phrases.

Displacement

The quality of language that permits discussing non-existent entities, remote locations, or abstractions.

Phonology

The fundamental sounds that make up spoken language, critical for understanding language.

Semantics

The meaning of language, including conceptual and associative meanings.

Conceptual meaning

Linguistic function of a word. E.g. Money – object that is used in exchange for goods and services.

Associative meaning

Concepts related to the word. E.g. Money – rich, job, work, coin, poor, evil etc.

Issues with Semantics:

Homonyms are words with overlapping spelling and sound but different meanings (e.g., 'organ' as a musical instrument or body part; 'bark' as tree surface or dog sound).

Polysemy refers to words with related but distinct meanings (e.g., 'bright' as luminous or intelligent).

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.

Lexical decision task – a task in which participants must classify whether a string of letters are a word or not.

Syntax

The rules and principles that govern the structure of sentences.

Pragmatics

The study of meaning in context, focusing on implied meanings and how utterances are used.

Gricean Maxims

Rules of conversation that facilitate effective communication: quality, quantity, relation, and manner.

Phonemes

The most basic auditory units of spoken language, crucial for distinguishing meaning.

What are Phonemes decided by?

• Place of articulation – where air flow is obstructed.

• Typically by the moving articulator (part of the tongue) and passive articulator (part of roof of mouth).

• Manner of articulation – how the air flow is obstructed (oral, nasal).

How is speech produced?

Air from the lungs passes through the vocal tract, vibrating over the vocal cords and filtered by facial muscles before exiting via mouth and nose.

The sound mainly develops in the last six inches of the roughly one-foot tube—the oral cavity—where anatomical adjustments modify airflow.

The brain signals the larynx to vibrate, creating the glottal waveform; tightening vocal cords raises pitch. Airflow is further shaped by tongue, teeth, lips, and facial muscles.

The Segmentation Problem

Speech is a continuous flow of sound without clear pauses.

We use top-down processing, relying on language knowledge and word structure, to segment words effectively.

Using Language Constraints to Segment Words

Word Legality (Norris et al., 1997):

Harder to hear 'apple' in 'fapple' than in 'wuffapple'; unlikely to accept impossible-word segmentations.

Stress (Cutler & Butterfield, 1992):

First syllable stress guides segmentation; e.g., 'conduct ascents uphill' may be misheard as 'the doctor sends the bill' or 'a duck descends some pill', mistaking stress cues for new words.

Top-down processing

A cognitive process that uses prior knowledge or context to aid in language comprehension, particularly in segmenting speech.

TRACE speech perception model (McClelland and Elman, 1986)

Describes how auditory features, phonemes, and words relate.

Uses a programmed connectionist (neural network) model in Java.

Runs simulations to compare predicted and real behaviour.

Information flows both bottom-up and top-down.

Positives of the TRACE model

TRACE can explain context effects.

It allows for the use of higher-level information to affect lower-level information.

Negatives of the TRACE model

It overstates contextual influence and predicts non-existent top-down effects.

For example, it claims detecting the /t/ in 'vocabutaire' should be difficult, yet phonological anomaly allows detection.

Cohort Model

A model explaining word recognition through auditory presentation and contextual factors that influence recognition.

A word can be recognised before it uniqueness point if the context supports only one candidate in the cohort.

Positives of the Cohort Model

It allows for the use of higher-level information to limit lower-level information.

Negatives of the Cohort Model

If the first phoneme is mispronounced, we would never be able to recognise a word.

Findings suggesting context does not eliminate words from the cohort.

Revised Cohort Model (Marslen-Wilson, 1990)

Solved the two problems:

Early stages now unaffected by context, making the revised model less interactive and more bottom-up.

Words aren’t removed but have reduced activation that can be reactivated with new input, addressing mispronunciations.

How do we read new (or non-) words?

Over 90% of non-words follow familiar grapheme-phoneme rules.

Deciding pronunciation is harder with words like "kint" or "zint" due to irregular examples like "pint".

Pronunciation is simpler when no similar irregular words exist.

History of Language Theory

Behaviourists like Skinner saw language as learned via reinforcement.

Chomsky countered, proposing innate Universal Grammar facilitates language acquisition beyond input.

These shared features imply an innate, universal internal language faculty.

Children learn effortlessly—spoken or signed—due to specific genes and a preference for speech sounds.

Non-Human Language

Animal communication lacks key linguistic properties—generativity, recursion, displacement—preventing it from expressing infinite or abstract ideas.

Efforts to teach chimps speech fail due to anatomical limits; Washoe's 130 signs represent communication, not language.

Nim Chimpsky's signing resulted from operant conditioning, not genuine language.

What is unique to human language?

Vocabulary: young native English adults >10,000 words, up to 50,000+

Recursion: nested thoughts ("I think that you think...")

Grammatical complexity: cases, genders, honourifics (e.g., Japanese, German)

Sequence learning: monkeys memorise; infants learn patterns

Displacement: language beyond immediate context in time and space

Language development: from simple roots to complex systems via children (pidgin to creole)

Transmission: across generations

Methods for studying language

- Language errors in children and adults (e.g., "he goed to the store")

- Brain imaging: EEG, fMRI, MEG

- Neuropsychological studies of language in brain-damaged patients

- Modulating brain activity with TMS/tDCS in volunteers

- Developing machine translation systems

- Questionnaire-based experiments

- Computational analysis of text corpora

- Cross-cultural studies on colour terms and perception

- Monkey recordings on language and mirror neurons

- Eye movement studies during reading

- Computational models of reading

- Behavioural experiments

Broca's aphasia

A language impairment characterized by difficulty with grammar due to brain damage.

Wernicke's aphasia

A language impairment characterized by difficulty with semantics due to brain damage.