Lecture 15: Language

language

a symbolic shared system for purposeful communication

Neurolinguistics

understanding the neural underpinnings of language

aphasia

impaired language function, usually from brain injury

Brocas Aphasia

YES: comprehension

NO: speech production and articulation

• only nouns and verbs

left inferior frontal gyrus

Wernicke’s aphasia

fluent speech but incomprehensible

posterior superior temporal lobe left hemisphere

Paraphasias

verbal: substituting a word with something related to

• brother → sister

Phonemic: swapping or adding sounds when talking

• crab salad → sad cralad

Neologisms

Invented words

conduction aphasia

the pathway between Brocas and wernickes area

can read, write, and speak

cant repeat words or sentences

what hemisphere is language

left

prosody and pitch belong to what hemisphere

right

mood, attitude, gestures belong to what hemisphere

right

Nurturist View of language

not an innate abilities, its a skill

involves trial and error and modeling

Naturist View

language is acquired rapidly

we can understand and speak what we have not heard before

the innateness hypothesis

the innateness hypothesis

we are born with principles of grammar

convergence

children are exposed to different learning situations yet converge on the same grammar

poverty of stimulus argument

the linguistic enviornement of a child is not sufficient enough for a child to learn a language via reinforcement, rules or imitation alone

child doesnt here a enough language to acquire all language

support nurturist view

phonemes

smallest linguistic unit (letters)

used to produce morphemes

morphemes

the smallest meaningful units of language (words)

dog

syntax

rules that govern how words are arranged in a sentence

semantics

the meaning

lexical ambiguity

one word with more than one meaning

80% of words are like this - they are the basis of puns

BARK - roof and tree bark

homophones

words that sound the same with different meanings

sentence parsing

dividing a sentence into words

identifying them as nouns, articles and verbs

more than one way to parse a sentence

garden path sentence

a sentence with multiple syntax structures

Theories of sentence parsing

syntax first

constraint based model

syntax first

we use grammatical rules to interpret a sentence as we hear or read it

local or specific

constraint based model

we use non-grammatical information to help interpret sentences and resolve ambiguity

global hollistic

sapir wharf hypothesis

language changes how we think and perceive, people who speak different language think differently