Language and Cognition Notes

Language is a crucial aspect of what makes us human.
It enables revisiting the past and projecting into the future.
It is essential for dealing with the present and transferring complex ideas.
Language allows for creativity, enabling the creation and understanding of novel sentences.
The average person has a vocabulary of 20,000-40,000 words, while the average university student has over 70,000 words.
With just 20 words, it's possible to create a decillion (a number with 30 zeros after it) grammatically correct sentences.
The rules for combining words are abstract and unconscious, referred to as tacit or implicit rules.

Language appears to be innate; humans seem predisposed to acquire language.
The idea is that we are born with a blueprint for language, which we fill in based on exposure during childhood.

Bilingualism involves code-switching, which is common when you can't remember a word in one language and substitute it with a word from another language.
Bilingualism creates more connections between the brain's two sides, initially slowing cognitive processing but eventually leading to faster task-switching abilities.

Most knowledge used when speaking a native language is tacit, meaning it's difficult to describe.
The WUG test is used to test children's tacit knowledge of forming plurals.

Sentences must be grammatically correct to make sense.
Syntax is the grammatical structure of sentences; it's the rules for how we put words together.
Noam Chomsky demonstrated that grammar can be disentangled from meaning using the famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

Phonemes are the basic units of spoken language; English has 40 phonemes.
Phonology is the study of the sound patterns of language, including rules for combining sounds.

Morphemes are the basic units of meaning in a language; they can be standalone words or parts of words.
Morphology is the study of morphemes.
Example: The word reduplicated can be broken into “re-“ (prefix), “duplicate” (base word) and “-ed” (suffix).

Pragmatics involves the rules for interpreting meaning based on context and social rules.
It takes the listener's perspective into account and goes beyond the literal meaning.
Lexical meaning refers to how words' meanings change according to their context.
Implications in conversation highlight the importance of understanding implied meanings.

English has precise rules about the order of adjectives that native speakers intuitively understand.

Metaphors go beyond the literal meanings of words.
People with right hemisphere damage may have difficulty understanding metaphors.
For e.g, the phrase "I am so hungry I could eat a horse" illustrates a metaphor.

Sentences are composed using a phrase structure, where adjectives, nouns, and verbs are combined.
A noun phrase and a verb phrase combine to create a complete sentence.
Phrase structure diagrams illustrate the relationships between words in sentences.
This structure explains why words cannot be randomly strung together.

Recursion allows us to create an infinite number of sentences from a finite vocabulary.
Example: Starting with "Squidward hates ice cream" and adding layers such as "SpongeBob heard a rumour that…"

Four factors make language comprehension challenging: negation, passivity, nested structure, and ambiguity.

Sentences containing negative words (no, not, can't, don't, won't) take longer to process.
Double negatives cancel each other out, resulting in the opposite meaning.
Phrasing instructions positively is better when communicating with children.
Example: Claiming Anika is "not incompetent" implies something different from saying Anika is competent.
The Clark and Chase experiment demonstrates the effect of negation on understanding.
Adding a negative increases the time it takes to process by about 300 milliseconds.
In exam questions, negative words are often capitalized to highlight them.

The passive voice should be avoided because it makes the object of the action the subject of the sentence.
Passive sentences are more complex and harder to understand, especially for those with less formal education.

Ambiguity in language arises from words with multiple meanings (homonyms).
Sentences with ambiguous words or structures are more difficult to understand.
When encountering an ambiguous word, listeners narrow down to the most common meaning first and revise if necessary.