8. LANGUAGE: NATURE AND ACQUISITION

What is Language?

• Language is an organized system for combining words to communicate.

• Communicative by nature and interacts with psycholinguistics (the psychology of language in relation to the human mind).

Language Characteristics

1. Communicative

2. Arbitrarily symbolic

3. Regularly structured

4. Structured at multiple levels

5. Generative

6. Dynamic

The Basic Components of Words

• Phone: smallest unit of sound (like a click or vocal sound).

• Phoneme: smallest speech sound that distinguishes meaning (e.g. "s" vs. "f").

• Morpheme: smallest unit of meaning (e.g. "recharge" = "re" + "charge").

• Content morphemes: carry core meaning.

• Function morphemes: add grammatical nuance (e.g. suffixes like “-ing,” or articles like “the”).

The Basic Components of Sentences

• Language is built using rules (syntax).

• A sentence usually has a noun phrase (e.g. "the student") and a verb phrase (e.g. "answered the question").

• Syntax is key in understanding relationships between words.

Language Comprehension – Understanding Words

• Pronunciation differences due to accents or personal speech habits.

• Coarticulation: blending sounds together.

• Speech segmentation: separating a continuous stream of sound into individual words.

Speech Perception

• Speech Perception as Ordinary

• Phonetic refinement theory and TRACE model: recognizing speech in stages

• Acoustic features → Phonemes → Words.

• Bottom-up and top-down processes interact.

• Speech Perception as Special

• Categorical perception: grouping sounds even with differences.

• Motor theory of speech perception: interpreting speaker’s mouth movements.

Understanding Meaning – Semantics

• Denotation: the dictionary meaning of a word.

• Connotation: emotional or implied meaning.

• Together, these form the full semantics of a word.

Understanding Sentences – Syntax and Grammar

• Syntax: how words are ordered.

• Grammar: overall system for structuring language.

• Prescriptive grammar: rules about how we "should" use language.

• Descriptive grammar: how people actually use it.

Analyzing Sentences

• Phrase-structure grammar: breaks sentences into functional components.

• Parsing: assigning syntactic roles.

• Transformational grammar: explains different sentence forms from a common deep structure.

Reading

• Involves two major processes:

1. Lexical processes: he steps your brain takes to recognize words, jump between them with your eyes, and understand their meaning while reading

2. Comprehension processes: understanding sentences and texts.

Understanding Conversations and Essays – Discourse

• Comprehend discourse:

• Retrieve meanings of known words from memory.

• Infer meanings of unknown words from context.

• Use propositional representations.

• Build mental models based on context and point of view.