Chapter 10: Language

Is language a distinctly human trait?

• Kanzi (monkey)

  • prompting what he wants based off a picture board (form of communication)

• language is different than an animals communication system

  • inborn capability for communication

  • most scientists doubt animals other than humans have a true “language”

  • many efforts to teach animals language

    • ASL and other symbolic systems

    • Washou (monkey produced 100+ signs)

    • chimps, gorilla, dolphins, parrots…

What is special about language?

• language is hierarchically structures

  • sounds → words → phrases → sentences

  • this structure is absent in animal communication

• discrete units can be recombined to make other utterances

• language is productive (generative), infinitely creative

  • recall chomsky discussion

  • know all the rules of language and grammar

• language is grammatical

  • rules about “legal” combinations

    • e.g., order of adjectives…noun location (sensitive to violations)

• language is arbitrary

  • why does “cat” represent a cat?

  • why subject-verb-object in English?

• language is symbolic

  • represents something (symbol of something else)

• language allows us to talk about displaced objects (or hypotheticals)

  • abstract concepts that you can’t see

• humans are the only species that use true language

  • rule based process

Human Language

• can be broken down into a number of levels

  • phonemes (phonology)

    • the sounds of language

  • morphemes (lexical or semantically level)

    • smallest meaningful language units

    • content and function morphemes; free and bound morphemes

  • words (lexical or semantic level)

  • phrases (syntax)

  • sentences (syntax and semantics)

  • discourse (conceptual and belief)

Phonology: Phonemes

• different features/characteristics of sounds

  • voiced or unvoiced

  • place of articulation (p/b [lips], t/d [tongue behind teeth], k/g [soft palate]…)

  • manner of production (nasal/air flow m/n)

• combine the features to produce many phonemes

• only use a few (40) in English… other languages use many more (100+ in some African languages)

• San Bushmen people use “clicks”

  • clicking sounds produced with the tongue or mouth

Speech Perception

• not a simple process of “phoneme detection”

  • no markers at the beginning or end of phonemes (or words)

  • effect of content and co-articulation (phonemic overlap)

  • idiosyncratic speech habits

    • unique production and perception of phonemes

• categorical perception

  • the tendency to hear sounds merely as members of a category

  • all sounds of a given category sound identical

  • perceive abrupt transitions between sound categories

Importance of Top-Down Processing

• speech recognition programs still quite weak (even Siri)

• one reason is humans make use of top-down knowledge to aid speech perception (misheard lyrics)

• meaning and segmentation

  • I scream = Ice Cream

• Phoneme Detection

  • Bat vs Baf vs /b/

Lexical/Semantic Level: Words

• how we represent words:

  • phonographic representation

    • sound of the word (phonemes)

  • orthographic representation

    • spelling of the word

  • semantic representation

    • meaning of the word

  • homophones (and homonyms)

    • ate/eight, bank/bank, bear/bare, litter/litter

Words

• sense

  • meaning of a word (or phrase)

• referent

  • what the word refers to in the world

  • much more specific telegraph

• generativity of language

  • critical characteristics, ability to create new words

  • allows us to deal with/describe novel situations

  • may lighten the attentional load for new language learners

  • often created by re-combining or applying function morphemes

  • rather consistent in how we apply function morphemes

  *think of all the new words we have created in the past 100 years

Note on the “rules” of language

• many no longer talk about the rules per se

  • an influence of connectionism/PDP models…

• prescriptive rules

  • how things ought to be done

    • required, prerequisite

  • focus for many linguists (and English teachers)

• descriptive rules

  • how things are done

  • focus for cognitive psychologists and psycholinguists

2 Measures of Knowledge of Language

• competence

  • what you are able to do understand…often under ideal conditions (e.g., formal knowledge of grammar rules, ability to recognize words)

• performance

  • how you actually use language…in more “real world” conditions (e.g., slips of the tongue, spoken language — including grammatical errors)

Language Development

• children begin to learn language in utero

  • recognition of/sensitivity to prosody of mother language

  • can hear and feel mothers language in utero

  • infants have preference for mothers voice because they have more experience with it since development in the womb

• language skills develop through infancy

  • vocal play — 16 weeks

  • babbling with syllable production — 36 weeks (ASL babble)

    • not accidental, its planned

    • mirrors sophisticated alternate language skills

  • recognition of phonemes across infancy at birth (ALL speech sounds in the world — drops at 6 months)

    • at birth we can recognize all phonemes for every language in the world

    • come into the world ready to learn any language but eventually that goes away and we only learn the language we are exposed to

  • first word around 52 weeks

  • “rules” of language around 3 years

• specific patterns of errors

  • many patterns appear almost universal

• underextensions (dog refers to only golden retrievers)

• overextensions (dog refers to any animal with 4 legs)

• overregularization (add “ed” to make all verbs past tense)

• children’s information smart “errors”

• role of parent/caregivers — focus on communication vs language

• fast mapping (as early as 13 months — full speed by 2 years)

  • process where children acquire words, syntax, vocabulary very quickly

  • 50 words by 1 year, 1000 words by 3 years, 10000 words by 5 years

Overregularization

• of particular interest to psychologists and psycholinguists

• human data

  • for brief period language gets worse

• not likely due to imitation

  • has been used to attack behaviourist (learning) account of language

• has been modelled successfully with connectionist/network models

Syntax

• grammar

  • which combination of words are “legal”

• syntax

  • rules governing the sequence of words in a phrase/sentence

  • the role each word plays in a sentence

  • verb, nouns, adjectives, etc

• syntax does not equal meaning

  • sentences can be syntactically correct but meaningless

Levels of Language

• deep structure vs surface structure

  • deep structure = intended meaning

  • surface structure = words and phrases used

    • the boy threw the ball

    • the ball was thrown by the boy

    • landing places can be dangerous

      • is this from a pilots perspective that the act of landing a plane can be dangerous or is it from the perspective of someone else saying that planes that are landing can be dangerous

• Chomsky said there are specific rules that allow us to move between the levels (transformational grammar)

Decoding Language

• detecting ambiguity

• detect phrase structure (active vs passive)

• detect function words or function morphemes

• detect “minimal attachment” (drop the “who”, “which”, “that”)

• focus on what is appropriate in the sentence

Other Cues to Decoding Language

• Prosody

  • the rise and fall of speech intonation and the pattern of pauses

  • can give us cues as to the intent of the utterance

    • “oh, isn’t that nice” (different meanings based on intonation)

  • these cues missing in email/text and often result in misinterpretation of statements

    • development of emoticons

• pragmatics

  • knowledge about how language is normally used (what we say is not always what we mean)

  • Grice’s Conversational maxims/”rules”

    • turn-taking…(develops very early on in life — we know to take turns in conversation)

      • cooperative exchange

      • direct vs indirect

      • relevance to the interaction

    • social roles and settings influence pragmatics

      • superior vs peers; gender, cultural differences (eye contact)

Bilingualism

• recall reference to “arbitrary” features of language

• early human development advantage…(early infancy; and again before 10 years)

• developmental evidence for bilingual children having greater working memory, executive functioning skills, and problem-solving skills

  • strength in perspective-taking and negotiation skills because we have another mental perspective with another language

• adult hope

  • we can “gain” with “re-educating” neural circuits, learning second and third languages

Linguistic Relativity

• linguistic determinism or linguistic relativity (Benjamin Whorf)

  • the language we use determines/affects how we perceive and think about the world

  • multiple languages = multiple modes of thought

    • some experimental evidence to support “more language = more distinctions”

  • languages differ in how to describe events (so and so made a mistake vs mistakes were made)

  • interactive model: language shapes cognition and cognition shapes language but ultimately, it’s your experience (top-down) that is key…

Organization of Language

• language relies on well-defined patterns

  • patterns in how individual words are used

  • patterns in how words are put together into phrases

• language has a hierarchical structure

Hierarchical Structure

• highest level → ideas intended by the speaker or ideas that the listener derives from the output

  • expressed in sentences

Sentences

• coherant sequences of words that express the speaker’s intended meaning

  • composed of phrases

Phrases

• composed of words

Words

• composed of morphemes

Morphemes

• the smallest language units that carry meaning

  • bound or free

• made up of phonemes

Bound Morphemes

• add information crucial for interpretation

  • -ed

  • -s

  • -ing

Free Morphemes

• can stand alone and refer to particular objects, ideas, or actions

  • sun

  • walk

  • on

  • the

  • happy

  • well

Phonemes

• smallest units of sound that serve to distinguish words in a language

Word’s Sounds

• sequence of phonemes that make up the word

Orthography

• sequence of letters that spell the word

Generativity

• the trait that enables someone to combine and recombine basic units to create new and more complex entities

• linguistic rules are generative because they enable a person to combine and recombine a limited set of words to produce a vast number of sentences

  • new words are created all the time

Syntax

• rules governing the sequences and combinations of words in the formation of phrases and sentences

Phrase-Structure Rules

• constraints that govern what elements must be contained within a phrase and what the sequence of those elements must be

Tree Structure

• a style of depiction often used to indicate hierarchical relationships, such as the relationships among the words in a phrase or sentence

Prescriptive Rules

• rules describing how things are supposed to be instead of how they are (normative rules)

  • we should be skeptical of these rules because they are changing with the passage of time (thou and ye are no longer used but they used to be the only acceptable way of speaking)

Descriptive Rules

• rules that simply describe the regularities in a pattern of observations with no commentary on whether the pattern is proper, correct or desirable

Function of Phrase Structure

• people have somehow internalized these rules and obey them in their use of and also their judgement about language

Extralinguistic Context

• the social and physical setting in which an utterance is encountered

  • cues within this setting usually guide the interpretation of the utterance

Prosody

• the pattern of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production

  • can be used to emphasize the elements of a spoken sentence, to highlight the sentence’s intended structure, or to signal the difference between a question and an assertion

  • guides understanding

  • can clarify a sentence

Pragmatic Rules

• principles describing how language is ordinarily used

  • listeners rely on these principles to guide their interpretation of what they hear

Maxim of relation

• specifies that a speaker shouldn’t be more informative than is necessary

Common Ground

• set of beliefs and assumptions shared by conversational partners

  • speakers and listeners count on this shared knowledge as a basis for making inferences about points not explicitly mentioned in the conversation and also as a basis for interpreting elements of the conversation that would otherwise be unclear or ambiguous

Aphasia

• disruption of language caused by damage to specific parts of the brain

  • humans have a considerable amount of neural tissue that is specialized for language

    • damage to this tissue can disrupt language understanding language production or both

Broca’s Area

• an area in the left frontal lobe of the brain

  • damage here causes nonfluent aphasia

Nonfluent Aphasia

• a disruption of language in which a person loses the ability to speak or write with any fluency

  • can understand language they hear but cannot write or speak properly (speech is labored and fragmented)

  • in extreme cases, patients can’t utter any words at all

Wernicke’s Area

• an area in the temporal lobe of the brain where the temporal and parietal lobes meet

  • damage here causes fluent aphasia

Fluent Aphasia

• disruption of language in which afflicted individuals are able to produce speech but the speech is not meaningful and the individuals are not able to understand what is said to them

  • patients can talk freely but they say very little (don’t make any sense) — nonsense speech

Biology of Language Learning

• by 3 or 4 years of age almost every child is able to converse at a reasonable level

Specific-Language Impairment (SLI)

• a disorder in which individuals seem to have normal intelligence but experience problems in learning the rules of language

Sign Language

• children can learn language even if their communication with adults is strictly limited

  • evidence comes from deaf children who have no opportunity to learn sign language — these children invent their own gestural language (home sign) and teach it to others

Overregularization Error

• error in which a person produces a form that is consistent with a broad pattern, even though that pattern does not apply to the current utterance

  • foots instead of feet

  • runned instead of ran

• error in which someone perceives or remembers a word or event as being closer to the norm than it really is

  • misspelled words read correctly

children are very sensitive to patterns in the language that they’re learning and they’re able to figure out the principles that govern these patterns

children rely on prosody as clues to syntax so adults often exaggerate these when speaking to children to help them

Animal Language

• the greatest success in teaching animals language involves animals that are genetically very similar to humans

  • Kanzi learned to communicate with extensive training but not to a human level (skills well below the average 3-4 year old human with no explicit training)

Wolf Children

• children could be rehabilitated but could not learn language although some learned to speak a few words

Linguistic Relativity

• the proposal that the language people speak shapes their thought, because the structure and vocabulary of their language create certain ways of thinking about the world

  • notion that language shapes thought is generally attributed to anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf

Whorfian Hypothesis

• the language you speak forces you into certain modes of thought

  • people who speak different languages inevitably think differently (linguistic relativity)

Bilingualism

• children raised in bilingual homes generally learn both languages quickly and well

  • early in development they tend to have smaller vocabularies than monolingual children but they soon catch up

• children raised bilingually might develop certain skills that help them avoid confusing their 2 languages so that they develop a skill of turning off their French-based habits in a certain environment so they can speak uncompromised English and the same for English in other environments

  • might end up better at switching between competing tasks or avoiding various types of distraction