Language pt. 1 and 2

5 Characteristics of Language

1 Communicative

2 Arbitrary

3 Structured

4 Generative

5 Dynamic

Communicative

Language allows for communication between individuals

Arbitrary

There need be no relationship between linguistic symbols and their referents • Cat = gato = neko

Structured

Rules specify how symbols can be combined • Noun + verb + adverb

Generative

Symbolic elements can be combined to create a large number of meanings

Dynamic

The characteristic of languages to constantly change as new words are added and grammatical rules altered

Phonology is

How do we produce and perceive different sounds?

Syntax/Semantics

Syntax: the structure of sentences

Semantics: the meaning of sentences

Morphology is

How are sounds combined to make words?

Pragmatics

What is the social purpose/intention of the sentence?

Phoneme

• The smallest unit of sound in a language

• No meaning on its own

• Roughly correlates with letters (a = ah or ay) • About 44 phonemes in English

Challenges

• Word boundaries

• Phoneme variability

Challenges — Word boundaries

There are often no pauses between words in spoken speech

• University-of: vowel formant

Challenges - Phoneme variability

Speakers vary tremendously with respect to the pitches and durations of their phonemes

Resolving ambiguity

• Taking into account the surrounding context of the sentence

• Taking into account the visual cues (i.e. McGurk effect)

Morphemes

structured collections of phonemes that make up the smallest units of spoken language that have meaning

• Very roughly correspond to words but can also be the parts of words

Stem morphemes

The sound of a spoken word

• Apple

Bound morphemes

The sound of prefix or suffix attached to a stem morpheme

• Apples

Word Recognition (spoken)

• The recognition of spoken morphemes

• The spoken word recognition process does not wait until it has collected all the phonemes of a word, and fully recognized exactly the word it is hearing

• The brain starts to think about similar words as phonemes are spoken

Word Recognition (written)

• Eyes don’t look at one letter at a time but process letters in parallel and jump between words

• Words that have irregular pronunciations often take longer to process for reading aloud

• When we read or hear an ambiguous word, we quickly use context to determine which meaning is appropriate (“I went to the bank.” • “I needed to deposit some money, so I went to the bank.” • “I wanted to relax near the water, so I went to the bank.”)

• Both banks are active until we figure out the context (unless the context is super clear up front)

Word Recognition (written) (short definition)

• Eyes don’t look at one letter at a time but process letters in parallel and jump between words

Syntax — Phrase structure

the hierarchical organization of a sentence; represented using a tree diagram that shows the relationships between words.

Syntax*

• Syntax tells us what is a proper way of expressing something in a language and what is not.

• Phrase structure: the hierarchical organization of a sentence; represented using a tree diagram that shows the relationships between words.

• Phrase structure grammar: The grammar that governs the use of phrase structures. (All sentences are composed of noun phrase + verb phrase)

Syntactic Ambiguities

• Upon reading or hearing the first several words of a sentence, the language system is already trying to build a syntactic structure that might work for the sentences

•Garden-path sentence: • “Put the apple on the towel in the box.” • Grammatically correct, but wrongly guessed • Like walking down a dead-end in a garden

Semantics (short definition)

• The meanings of words and sentences

Semantics

• The meanings of words and sentences

• Cognitive linguistics emphasizes how language is processed together with other cognitive mechanisms. (• It’s not just that words have meanings • Sentences can go through visual imagery, visual perception, and spatial reasoning)

•Image Schemas: Two-dimensional schematic diagrams that embody the meaning of various relational linguistic terms, especially verbs and prepositions

Image schemas – metaphorical meaning

• Fictive motion: The figurative use of action verbs.

( The road runs through the valley)

• Conceptual metaphor: A metaphorical concept relating to the mind.

( His mind is full of ideas; Life is a journey • Many conceptual metaphors are at the root of how we reason about the world and how we use language.)

Image schemas – metaphorical meaning

• Semantics can be influenced by the grammatical gender system for languages that use male and female determiners

• First 3 adjectives that come to mind for a bridge?

(Spanish: big, strong, towering • German: beautiful, fragile, elegant)

Pragmatics

the branch of linguistics that addresses the social intentions of language use.

Speech acts

acts that demand a response from the listener.

5 speech acts

1 Assertives

2 Directives

3 Commissives

4 Expressives

5 Declaratives

Speech acts 1 - Assertives

spoken statements in which the speaker asserts his or her belief

• You are good students.

Speech Acts 2 Directives

instructions or requests dispatched from the speaker to the listener.

• Please listen to the lecture.

Speech acts 3 Commissives

commit the speaker to a later action

• I’ll give you candy at the end of class.

Speech acts 4 Expressives

expresses the psychological state of the speaker

• I hope you are enjoying the lesson.

Speech acts 5 Declaratives

spoken statements in which the sentence itself is the action that changes the state of affairs

• The information in this slide will be on the exam

In pragmatics Social context ….

plays an important role in this process of establishing intent.

Language Acquisition

•We are not born to speak, but the process of language learning can sometimes look effortless and quick.

Linguistic Universal

• Rules that appear to be followed by all languages across the world.

Linguistic Universal —- Universal grammar

Features that are present in the grammars of all natural languages

Linguistic Universal — Universal properties of all languages

• The ordering of syllables in a word

• Maximal onset principle: Consonants usually precede vowels; a feature found in all languages.

• The ordering of the subject and object in sentences

(Subject before object: The student answered the question.)

(Objective before subject: The question, the student answered)

Linguistic Universal —— Chomsky’s view on universal grammar

• Each individual language at a fundamental level is not really different from others but represents merely a variation on a theme

•Universal grammar is a collection of language rules, hardwired into our brains from birth

• “The language organ” is a module specifically for language

(Innate, genetically prespecified, domain-specific, and independent of other cognitive capacitie)

Negative Evidence

• Some think it is impossible for a child to learn the grammar of a language without receiving explicit corrective feedback for grammatical errors

• Children are constantly exposed to people speaking sentences that are deemed grammatical (i.e., positive evidence).

•When children are grammatically incorrect, they don’t always get corrected (i.e., negative evidence)

• So… how do they still learn?

• Some linguists believe: If children do not receive negative evidence from the external environment, then there must be something internal (perhaps an innate universal grammar)

What does Chomsky think now?

• He no longer believes in most aspects of universal grammar •He does believe that recursion is universal

  • Nesting structures

  • The dog who chased the cat is scared of the lion who chased the dog • Allows expression of complex relationships

  • Can create infinite nested sentences

• He did believe (as of 2018) that alien languages may have some properties that mirror human languages

  • The role of language is to allow for biological communication in the most optimal way

  • More next class

Developmental Perspective of language learning —- Cooing stage

the earliest period in language development, when infants exercise their vocal cords and mouths.

Developmental Perspective of language learning — Babbling stage

A stage in language development where infants produce many sounds occurring in the languages they are commonly exposed to

Developmental Perspective of language learning — One-word stage

a stage in language development where words are first used in a symbolic and semantic fashion.

Developmental Perspective of language learning — Two-word stage

a stage in language development in which children first produce two-word utterances.

Developmental Perspective of language learning — U-shaped pattern of language development:

purely imitative copying 🡪 trying to understand a rule 🡪 learning of the exceptions to that rule.

Domain-specific mechanisms

processing of a single type of information, like linguistic

Domain-general mechanisms

can process different types of information

Domain-specific mechanisms

• Language is localized to the left hemisphere in most people

• Infants show bias for speech vs. nonspeech – an attentional specialization

• Linguistics universals and difficulty teaching animals syntax suggests human grammar is unique

• Syntactic rules can be derived without negative evidence, suggesting a distinct language mechanism

Domain-general mechanisms

• The left hemisphere could be good at processing any auditory stimuli

• These biases can be due to general learning mechanisms (e.g., attention, memory)

• Statistical learning (not logical, symbolic) enables infants to detect patterns in syntax

• Cognitive processes (e.g., pattern recognition, memory, categorization) can explain learning

Evaluating Language Acquisition

• Saffran and Theissen (2007): General vs. specific is too strict

  • McMullen and Saffran (2004): Adult localized cognitive abilities could be the product of domain-general mechanisms that were developmentally given domain-specific information

• Approaches to tackle domain-general vs. -specific:

  • Seeing what changes (neural, cognitive, or behavioral) occur early on versus later

    • At 10-12 mo, infants become attuned to native language sounds

• Applying technological advances to see which brain areas (local or global) are at work for different types of knowledge in early infancy

Critical period

A period of development when, if language is not learned during this time, it will be difficult to learn in the future

Language Deprivation

• Birds: Some birds need to be exposed to the sounds of their own species in a specific window to be able to produce them

• Second language acquisition: Learning a second language when young is much easier than in adulthood

• Victor: Very little language ability even after being taught due to living in the wild completely alone

• Genie: Language acquisition following living in social isolation (since 20 mo) is possible but severely impaired: imitation 🡪 words and names 🡪 some grammar

Evaluating language deprivation

• Limitations:

  • Small samples

  • Too many confounds

• What they still teach us:

  • Language depends on both biological readiness and environmental input

  • The critical period is likely a true phenomenon

  • Raises questions about how experience shapes neural specialization

Language use in non-human animals

• Animals in the wild communicate with one another.

  • Often to signal danger, food, mating, etc.

  • But this form of communication is not language (e.g., no grammar)

• Can animals learn language?

  • Gardner et al (1989): Washoe (a chimp) was able to learn ASL

  • Patterson (1978): Koko (a gorilla) learned ASL and better syntax

  • Premack (1976): Sarah (a chimp) learned to use plastic tokens to represent words and relationships

  • Savage-Rumbaugh et al (1993): Kanzi (a chimp) learned to use geometric patterns (lexigram) to identify objects, understood simple sentences, and could announce an action he was about to take

Arbitrariness

Animals may use symbols only through training and association, not true symbolic understanding

Displacement

Some evidence that while chimps can comprehend lexigrams/ASL, not all actually use the symbols in the intended way

Structure

• True syntax means combining symbols in novel, rule-governed ways

• Primates only produce short, repetitive strings

Primates may show some…..

comprehension of language, but syntax and generation of novel sentences are absent.

Aphasia

Various kinds of neurological language deficits.

Broca’s aphasia

• Comprehension is intact but there are impairments in speech production

  • Broca’s area: the lower portion of the left frontal lobe

  • Despite struggling to speak, some can sing or use automatic phrases (cussing, saying thank you) fluently – Why?

Wernicke’s aphasia

• Speech production is intact but there are impairments in comprehension

  • Wernicke’s area: the left temporal lobe

  • Shows that syntax and semantics are partially separable in the brain

  • Many patients aren’t aware that their speech is nonsensical – What does this say about comprehension and self-awareness?

Computational linguistics

• builds algorithms to let computers:

  • Support information search

  • Understand and summarize

  • Follow spoken instructions

  • Produce creative outputs

Deep learning

• a neural network trained on back propagation using multiple hidden layers to detect patterns

  • Allows models to learn semantics, syntax, and context

• OpenAI – GPT:

  • Trained on large-scale text to generate new text

Evaluation of natural language processing

• Speech recognition systems still have difficulty with noise, differences in pronunciation, and word ambiguity.

• Language generation also needs to rely on real-world knowledge and context

• But it is evolving quickly:

  • Going from “what are the rules” 🡪 “how would a child learn it?”

    • Assessing how large language models can be correct as well as predictive

    • Open questions about ethics, authorship, and bias

Generating a language: Esperanto

• Created in 1887 by Zamenhof, aimed to be easily learnable international language

  • Rational transparency: language should make meaning obvious

• Regular grammar, phonetic spelling, minimal irregular rules

• Morphologically productive:

Generating a language: Chakobsa

• Dune (Villenueve’s 2021 film): communication reflects power, secrecy, and embodiment

  • E.g., battle sign language

• Languages are embedded in the body: prosody, gestures, timing – rather than only syntax or vocabulary

Generating a language: Heptapod

• Arrival (2016) introduced the Heptapods, who use semagrams

• Their language is:

  • Nonlinear: not sequential

  • Semasiographic: meaning-based, not phonetic

• After learning the language, a linguist is able to “travel through time”

  • Open question: does language shape thought or vice versa?

5 Takeaways

• Language is multifaceted

• Communication beyond humans

• Language and machines

• Language as a human creation

• Language is a mirror of cognition and a tool for shaping it

Takeaways — Language is multifaceted

Arises from the interaction of biology, learning mechanisms, and the environment

Takeaways — Communication beyond humans

Animals show some language comprehension abilities, but limited syntax and generation of new ideas

Takeaways — Language and machines

Neuroscience shows that language is not just a single module

Takeaways — Language as a human creation

Constructed languages highlight our ability to design new linguistic systems

Language is a mirror…..

of cognition and a tool for shaping it