Science of language final exam

Denotation

The dictionary definition of a word

Bachelor → a young, unmarried man

Connotation

concepts associated with or evoked by a word

The Bachelor, or a handsome man

Semantic features - DOG

break words into semantic features to allow us to talk about natural classes

Dog and cat are [- human], girl and boy are [- adult]

Synonymy

different words that share at least one semantic feature

Remember - recall

Small - little

Antonymy

words that have opposite semantic features

sharp vs dull

Homophony

words with different meaning but same pronunciation

bank (by a river, place to keep money)

club (weapon, social org)

Polysemy

One word with multiple related meanings

Crane

• a bird

• a piece of construction equipment

• to stretch the neck ;

• all similar

Syntactic Ambiguity

Two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words, as opposed to lexical ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word

“Mary hit the boy with the bicycle” - syntactic or semantically ambiguous?

syntactic - it is not a question of different word meaning but structure

mary had the bike

or the boy had the bike

Semantically ambiguous

A sentence where words could have different meanings and create ambiguity

“She couldn’t find the smaller mouse”

“I saw her duck”

both semantically and syntactically ambigiuous

Compositionality

Some words have meanings that change depending on their context

• ex. some adjectives have meaning that does not change - RED

• some do, like big - big city vs big mouse

Entailment

If a sentence A entails a sentence B, sentence A cannot be true without B being true as well.

“john is a big man” entails the sentence “john is a man”

verbs and adjectives entail features of their argument

Diachronic language change

studying language changing at different points in time/ across time

Protolanguage

an ancestral language from which many languages developed

How to analyze if languages are related?

• see if their sound changes are systematic

• and if they target the same sound

Grimm’s Law (first germanic sound shift)

how stop consonants developed to proto-germanic from proto-indo-european (PIE) - VOICELESSNESS

• voiced stops became voiceless stops

• voiced stops become voiceless fricatives

• /bh/, /dh,/, /gh/ to /b/ /d/ /g/

Bhratar (Sanskrit) to Brother

Decem (Latin) to /t/en

The Great Vowel Shift

middle english change

chain shift where long vowels changed

Long/low vowels become raised- A and O become EEs and OOs

High vowels became diphthongs - OO to OW

[a] becomes fronted to aye

examples of the shift

• Divine - divinity

Divine probably sounded like “deeveen”

many vowels were replaced with SHWA

• cuhmunicashun

OO → OW, pronoonce to pronounce, but we still say pronunciation

Canadian raising

diphthongs raise before voiceless consonants - raising starting point of dipthong

Write vs ride

rice vs rise

Vowel reduction

Unstressed “u” in jugular or insulation

Labov “R-less” study

He went to Saks, Macy’s and S. Klein in NYC - they ranges from bougie to common

The “rlessness” became more evident in salespeople in less bougie stores

shows that there are differences within a region

Hypercorrection

overcorrect speech → him and I, when you actually can say “me”

Aphasia

Commonly caused by stroke,

acquired neurogenic language disorder

Non fluent aphasia

Able to describe nouns, cannot make full sentences, speech takes effort

“Uh .. mother.. dishes.. door”

Fluent aphasia

grammatically ok but not much content, hard to understand. word-finding errors

“mother is away here, working her work out of her”

Semantic paraphasia

substitution of word in place of the intended target - substitution of a word with a different but similar meaning

“table” for chair

phonemic paraphasia

substitution of a word with a similar sound.

car for cat or “wishdasher”

Neologism

nonwords with no clean relationship to target word

• “I can’t mention the tarripoi”

Conduction aphasia

Fluent aphasia with spontaneous speech

damage to articulate fasciculus, white matter that connects Broca’s to Wernicke’s

Localization hypothesis

Specific brain regions are uniquely responsible for specific language functions

“Broca’s is for production” “Wernicke’s is responsible for understanding”

Issues with the localization hypothesis

• oversimplified - only studies simple tasks, ignores real world context, patients don’t fit into even categories when it comes to localization

• lacks anatomical precision

  • lesion location doesn’t always explain symptoms

• there are networks of regions working together

Strong modularity

Subsystems work independently

• incorrect!

McGurk experiments

A sound is repeated frequently, when we have our eyes closed we hear “da” but when they’re open we see the mouth is saying one thing but the sound is actually another and it creates the perception of a third sound

shows our visuals and sound work together in speech perception

Anti modularity

The brain is connected with no discrete subsystems

• incorrect

• but our brains have patterns, people with brain injuries don’t have all sound or speech missing

Weak modularity

• best guess for brain functioning

• some different systems but they interact with eachother

Click experiments

Click in the middle of a word in a sentence, but many interpret the click as after the word - “that the girl was happy (click) was evident from the way she laughed”

shows how syntax interacts with other forms of perception, processing sound and syntax work at the same time

Synchronic language study

Studying language at one point in time

How do we know the great vowel shift happened?

Words that share the same root have different vowels. a vowel shortened prior to the GVS provides evidence that it took place - ex. sign → signal, original was /i/

Orthography

Why does language change?

economy - Ease of production

clarity - ease of perception

analogy - words that are may common may get more irregulars and vice versa. others stay simple

language contact!

Werker and Tees Perceptual Tuning Study

Infants vs adults listening to a track with sounds from native language to non native language with a categorical change

Babies look at teddy bear when they hear different phoneme

English speaking adults cannot hear the difference between Hindu phonemes, but babies can within 1 year old

What is perceptual tuning?

Tuning out phonemes that do not belong to your native language, poorer discrimination after 1st year of life

Saffran, Aslin and Newport sensitivity to statistics

Infants are sensitive to reoccuring words in language

Heard nonwords said in a very quick order and if certain morphemes were repeated they could distinguish them as words vs part words

shows that there is a sensitivity to statistical patterns that is present in language acquisition