Rationalism, Empiricism, and the Foundations of Language

Comprehensive practice flashcards covering Rationalism vs. Empiricism, Cognitive Ontology, Innateness, Epistemology, Phonetics, and Phonology.

Cognitive Ontology

The study and specification of what kinds of representational formats and entities exist in the human mind, and how algorithms and mental representations mutually constrain one another.

Icon

A non-arbitrary mental or physical representation characterized by a direct resemblance between the representation and the object it represents.

Symbol

An arbitrary representation in which there is no physical or perceptual resemblance between the representation and the object it denotes (such as the written word 'FOX').

Empiricism

The epistemological perspective asserting that knowledge is founded upon sensory experience, holding that senses alone provide the primary basis for learning without requiring innate knowledge.

Rationalism

The epistemological perspective asserting that knowledge arises primarily from innate reason and structured cognitive architecture, holding that sensory experience alone is insufficient for learning.

Innateness

In cognitive science, traits, mechanisms, or representational structures that are not learned, but rather form part of an organism's biological endowment specified by genetics.

Meno's Paradox

The classical puzzle of inquiry stating that a person cannot search for what they already know (as inquiry is unnecessary) nor what they do not know (because they do not know what to search for or how to recognize it).

Doctrine of Recollection

Socrates' resolution to Meno's paradox via the myth of the Lethe, proposing that immortal souls acquire knowledge across previous lives, forget it before rebirth, and experience learning as the recollection of forgotten truths.

Theory of Forms

Plato's essentialist metaphysical theory stating that perfect, non-physical ideals ('forms') exist for all entities and qualities, and that physical objects in the worldly realm are merely imperfect shadows of those forms.

Allegory of the Cave

Plato's metaphor for human perception, depicting prisoners chained in an underground cave who perceive shadows cast on a wall as true reality, unaware of the actual objects and fire producing them.

Tabula Rasa

John Locke's empiricist characterization of the mind at birth as an 'unscribed tablet,' possessing only innate perceptual concepts (such as RED or SOFT) which combine to form all complex ideas.

Maturation

A biological or physical process of developmental change (such as puberty or sensory visual development) that unfolds without depending on evidence, hypotheses, or learning.

Domain-Specificity

The degree to which a cognitive faculty or system depends on specialized representations and dedicated mechanisms (modules) rather than domain-general associative processes.

Hume's Fork

David Hume's epistemological distinction dividing all human inquiry into 'matters of meaning' ($\text{a priori}$, analytic, and necessary) and 'matters of fact' ($\text{a posteriori}$, synthetic, and contingent).

Iron Rule of Explanation

Francis Bacon's foundational scientific principle requiring that all scientific claims and debates must ultimately be settled through systematic empirical testing and observation.

Theory-Ladenness of Observation

Karl Popper's insight that human observation is never neutral or raw, but is always motivated, directed, and structured by prior hypotheses and theoretical commitments external to the observation itself.

Cartesian Skepticism

René Descartes' philosophical stance demonstrating that because sensory evidence can be distorted by illusions and hallucinations, the senses cannot serve as certain foundation for knowledge, establishing 'Cogito ergo sum' as bedrock truth.

Principles of Association

David Hume's three associative mental mechanisms by which thoughts are linked: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect (which Hume argued is a mental custom or habit rather than a directly perceived property).

Kantian Synthesis

___ reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism, asserting that while experience provides raw sensory content, innate, non-learned cognitive categories (such as space, time, and causality) are necessary to structure perception.

Infant Causal Perception

The automated cognitive phenomenon demonstrated by Leslie et al. (1987) showing that infants perceive causality directly by at least $6$ months ($22\text{--}27$ weeks) of age, an effect easily broken by spatial or temporal gaps.

Aṣṭādhyāyī

The formal linguistic treatise on Sanskrit grammar composed by Pāṇini around the $6\text{--}4\text{th}$ century BCE, which pioneered generative, algorithmic models of language.

Descriptive Linguistics

An objective, scientific approach to linguistics that characterizes and models how speakers actually use language and account for variation, rather than dictating prescriptive, normative rules.

Duality of Patterning

The architectural property of human language wherein discrete, meaningless perceptual categories (such as phonemes) combine into structured hierarchies to form meaningful units (morphemes, words, phrases).

Phoneme

The smallest abstract, contrastive category of speech sound in a language that serves to distinguish one word from another.

Minimal Pair

A pair of words or linguistic signs differing in only one phonetic feature or phonological parameter (such as 'bat' versus 'pat' in English or 'apple' versus 'onion' in ASL), establishing a phonemic contrast.

Consonant Articulatory Parameters

The three anatomical dimensions that define consonant production: place of articulation (where constriction occurs), manner of articulation (how airflow is constricted), and voicing (whether the vocal folds vibrate).

Vowel Articulatory Parameters

The primary physiological dimensions determining vowel sounds based on vocal tract resonance, specifically tongue height, tongue backness, and lip rounding.

Formant

A concentration of acoustic energy around a specific frequency produced by the resonance of the vocal tract, where the first two formants ($F_1$ and $F_2$) typically suffice to distinguish vowel identity.

Competence vs. Performance

The distinction between an individual's internalized, implicit cognitive knowledge of their linguistic system (competence) and their actual real-time execution or production of language subject to memory or bodily limits (performance).

Voice Onset Time (VOT)

The temporal interval measured in milliseconds between the release of a consonantal constriction and the onset of vocal fold vibration (voicing).

Categorical Perception

The cognitive phenomenon where continuous variations along a physical acoustic spectrum (such as voice onset time) are perceived as distinct, discrete perceptual categories separated by sharp boundaries.

High Amplitude Sucking (HAS) Procedure

An experimental habituation paradigm using a sensor-equipped pacifier to measure changes in sucking rate and strength, indexing auditory discrimination in infants aged $0\text{--}4$ months.

Perceptual Narrowing

A developmental phenomenon whereby infants lose the ability to discriminate non-native speech sound contrasts (such as Hindi retroflex dental stops) between $6\text{--}12$ months of age as their perceptual systems reorganize around native language input.

Motor Theory of Speech Perception

The hypothesis proposing that listeners perceive speech sounds by internally recovering and mapping incoming acoustic signals onto the speaker's intended vocal tract articulatory gestures.

McGurk Effect

An audio-visual perceptual illusion demonstrating that visual cues from a speaker's lip movements integrate directly into speech perception, altering what auditory phoneme is perceived.

Phonotactics

The subbranch of phonology governing the language-specific structural rules and constraints that define permissible sequences, clusters, and positions of phonemes within words and syllables.

Flapping Rule

A North American English phonological rule in which the alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ are realized as a voiced flap ($[ɾ]$) when occurring between two vowels where the following vowel is unstressed.

Marr’s framework

describing an information processing system as accomplishing goals according to some algorithm, regardless of the physical substrate

Phonology

how a language’s sounds are structured

Essentialism

things or people possess a core, unchanging set of characteristics, and that focusing strictly on what is vital leads to better outcomes

• “dog essence” and it is by virtue of that essence they are dogs

• but they vary in size, fur, number of legs…

unwritten tablet

Aristotle's metaphor for the mind prior to sensory experience, positing that asking what exists in the mind before experience is like asking what is written on a page before anyone has begun writing.

cloze probability

measures how predictable a word is in context

• say “two” and the next word is very often “say,” like “two, say, three…"

lexical access

Looking up the meaning of a word when hearing its phonemes in your mental lexicon, the mind’s dictionary of word sounds, meanings, and syntactic categories

serial search

check words one at a time, too slow

parallel search

hearing a word activates all entries consistent with the input so far - and the set shrinks as more sounds come in

homophones

words that sound identical when spoken, but have different meanings and, usually, different spelling

cross modal priming

an auditory prime followed by a visual target on screen

250ms

time at which parallel activation model narrows down meaning of a homophone given the context of a sentence

cohort

all lexical entries sharing a sound sequence (cat, capture, capital, catapult)

trace model

keeps the cohort model (build from the onset, winnow as the phonemes arrive), but adds that once the word ends, its final syllables can activate rhyming entries

visual world paradigm

psycholinguistic research method that tracks a person's eye movements in real time while they listen to spoken language and look at a visual scene or object arra

parser

mental system that figures out how words fit together

• takes a stream of words, assigns each a syntactic category, and builds and phase structure tree saying who did what to whom

• can’t wait until the sentence ends

top down parsing

begins with the sentence node and predicts what must come next (NP, then VP)

bottom up parsing

start from the words themselves, then build NP, etc.

garden path sentence

starts by building one structure, then the next words reveal that structure was wrong

• fully grammatical

• “the man who hunts ducks out on weekends”

• the reader will successfully reconstruct its actual grammatical structure despite momentary ambiguity

modularist view of sentence processing

modules are fast, automatic, and encapsulated

• phonological processor (identify phonemes) → lexical access (retrieve words and syntactic category) → syntactic parser → semantic processer → pragmatic processor (enrich w context and intent)

shadowing

you repeat each word of a sentence back as fast as you can, staying only about 200ms behind the speaker

interactionist view of sentence processing

allows everything to talk to everything- syntax, meaning, context, plausability

structures

the different ways the parser can organize words into syntax trees

• hearing a word, you can attach to the VP or NP

• minimal attachment: choosing the structure that adds the fewest nodes (adding a PP to the VP)

consonants

made by constricting airflow, dependent on place, manner, and voicing

vowels

changes in resonance, tongue position

three places of articulation

Bilabial, labiodental, alveolar

double dissociation

vowels and consonants are cognitively distinct categories

formants

bands of concentrated energy on a spectrogram at particular frequency ranges, produced by the vocal tract's resonances.

Categorical perception

a continuous acoustic dimension (like VOT) is perceived as discrete categories with a sharp boundary, so equal physical steps don't produce equal perceptual changes.

flapping

a phonological rule in North American English where a /t/ or /d/ between vowels becomes a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ], making pairs like writer/rider sound identical. It's conditioned by prosodic context (stress and position), not memorized word-by-word.

hume’s theory of cause and effect

we observe the sequence of events, but we don't directly observe the necessary connection itself.

• you learn that touch flame → feel pain

maturation

developmental changes that occur as an organism grows and its biological systems develop- physical