Psycholinguistics - Introduction and Syntax

Contact Information

• Email: Jeremy.Goslin@plymouth.ac.uk
• Office: PSQ B221
• Office Appointment: Tuesdays 3-4

Introduction to Language and Psycholinguistics

• Language and speech are unique to humans.
• Language processing is a complex cognitive ability.
• Virtually all humans acquire language without explicit instruction.
• Any language can be learned, independent of the parent's language.
• Language is a powerful tool for perpetuating human intelligence.

Linguistics

• Deals with human language competence.
• Focuses on what we know about language that enables us to speak and understand.
• Involves implicit knowledge (knowing what is right) and explicit knowledge (formal rules).

Subfields of Linguistics:

• Phonology: The study of how sounds are used in a language.
• Phonetics: The study of speech sounds and their production.
• Syntax: The study of word order.
• Semantics: The study of meaning.
• Pragmatics: The study of language use.
• Morphology: The study of words and word formation.

Modern Psycholinguistics

• Examines the psychological processes underlying our language abilities.
• Focuses on linguistic performance: what we do and how knowledge is used.
• Seeks to understand how and why we:
  • Learn a language.
  • Make errors.
  • Accommodate accents.
  • Acquire multiple languages.
  • Deal with ambiguity.
• Noam Chomsky challenged Skinner’s behavioral approach, contributing to the Cognitive Revolution.
• Key concepts: modularity, language nativism.

Language Acquisition

• Speed of Acquisition:
  • Children acquire language rapidly.
  • Adults don't explicitly teach language to children.
  • All normal children learn language when exposed to it in a normal language environment.
• Critical Period: There is a sensitive period for language acquisition.
• Poverty of the Stimulus:
  • Children cannot learn language from exposure alone.
  • Input is degenerate (containing errors, hesitations, slips of the tongue).
  • There isn't enough training data or sufficient stimulus.
  • Children are exposed to sufficient examples of grammatical constructs to deduce grammar.
  • Not enough stimulus.
• Specificity to the Species:
  • Syntax is uniquely human.
  • Suggests a genetic basis for grammar.

Syntax

• The study of the structure of language.
• Aims to relate surface form (phonology and words) to semantics.
• Independent of semantics (e.g., "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is grammatically correct but meaningless).
  • "Furiously sleep ideas green colourless" is ungrammatical and meaningless.
  • "The boy quickly in the house the ball found" is ungrammatical but with meaning.

Chomsky’s Universal Grammar

• We can produce/understand an infinite number of sentences despite finite storage in the brain.
• Syntax is a cognitive reality.
• Universal grammar is biological.
• We are not born with a particular grammar (e.g., English).
• Infants detect patterns in the surrounding language and match them with already stored structures.
• They switch on the structures that match and switch off those that don’t (subconsciously).
• Children develop language; they do not learn it in the classical sense.

Syntactic Structure

• Sentences are not linear arrangements of words.
• Sentences are hierarchical organizations of constituents.
• Chomsky introduced the concepts of surface structure vs. deep structure in "Syntactic Structures" (1957).
• Example: "The wolf ate the little pigs"
  • Constituents: The wolf, ate, the little pigs.

Constituents

• A constituent is a group of words that functions as a unit.
• How to determine constituency:
  • Substitution test:
    • Only constituents can be replaced by pro-forms (pronouns, pro-verbs, etc.).
    • Example: "The wolf ate the little pigs" can be replaced by "The wolf ate them" or "It ate the little pigs".
  • Stand-alone test:
    • A constituent can often be replaced by a question expression (who, what, where).
    • Example:
      • Q: What did the wolf do?
      • A: Ate the little pigs.
      • Q: What did the wolf eat?
      • A: The little pigs.

Pro-forms

• Pronouns: she, he, it, they, us, her, that
• Pro-verbs: do, be
• Pro-adverbs: there, then, here
• Pro-adjectives: such, so, thus

Parsing and Phrase Structure Diagrams

• Parsing: Breaking a sentence into its component parts and indicating the relationships between these components.

• Phrase structure diagrams (tree diagrams):

  • Show hierarchical relations between constituents.
  • S = sentence, Det = determiner (article), N = noun, V = verb, NP = noun phrase, VP = verb phrase.
  • Example:

  ```latex
  
  \begin{tikzpicture}[level distance=1.5cm,
  every node/.style={fill=white,circle,inner sep=2pt},
  level 1/.style={sibling distance=4cm},
  level 2/.style={sibling distance=2cm}]

  \node (S) {S} % Root node
  child {node (NP) {NP}
  child {node (N) {Groucho}}
  }
  child {node (VP) {VP}
  child {node (V) {shot}}
  child {node (NP2) {NP}
  child {node (Det) {an}}
  child {node (N2) {elephant}}
  }
  };

  \end{tikzpicture}
  

Syntax, Meaning, and Ambiguity

• Sentences like "One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas" can be ambiguous due to syntactic structure.
• Syntax provides scaffolding for meaning.
• Examples: "Fighting animals could be dangerous" and "Visiting relatives can be tiresome" demonstrate how different syntactic structures lead to different interpretations.

Generative Grammar

• Phrase Structure Rules and axiom define what is syntactically legal, deriving deep syntactic structure from surface form.
• Start with a start symbol (S).
• Apply rules.
• Finish when only terminals remain, resulting in a derived structure.
• Phrase structure tree represents the history of derivations.
• Example Rules:
  • $S \rightarrow NP + VP$
  • $NP \rightarrow Det + N$
  • $VP \rightarrow V + NP$
  • $Det \rightarrow the$
  • $N \rightarrow wolf$
  • $N \rightarrow pig$
  • $V \rightarrow ate$
• Example sentence: "The wolf ate the pig".

Syntax Exercise

• Constructing phrase structure trees.
• Given rules:
  • $S \rightarrow NP \ VP$
  • $VP \rightarrow V \ NP | V \ NP \ PP$
  • $PP \rightarrow P \ NP$
  • $V \rightarrow \text{"saw"} | \text{"ate"} | \text{"walked"}$
  • $NP \rightarrow \text{"John"} | \text{"Mary"} | \text{"Bob"} | Det \ N | Det \ N \ PP$
  • $Det \rightarrow \text{"a"} | \text{"an"} | \text{"the"} | \text{"my"}$
  • $N \rightarrow \text{"man"} | \text{"dog"} | \text{"cat"} | \text{"telescope"} | \text{"park"}$
  • $P \rightarrow \text{"in"} | \text{"on"} | \text{"by"} | \text{"with"}$
• Construct your own sentences and phrase structure trees using the rules.

Syntactic Structure in Novel Word Acquisition

• Example from Anthony Burgess’s "A Clockwork Orange" (Nadsat language).
• Demonstrates how syntactic structure aids in understanding novel words within a sentence.

Syntactic Recursion

• Some rules generate constituents that contain themselves (e.g., $NP \rightarrow NP + PP$).
• Syntactic recursion: One constituent can be embedded inside another constituent of the same type.

Infinite Rule-Governed Creativity

• No limit to the depth of syntactic recursion.
• Example: "This is [the dog that chased [the cat that killed [the rat that ate [the malt that lay in [the house that Jack built.]]]]]]"
• Chomsky: "Infinite rule-governed creativity":
  • Finite series of syntactic rules.
  • Limited number of words.
  • Unlimited number of possible sentences and meanings.

Lecture 1 Summary

• Chomsky: genetic basis for human syntax.
• What is syntax and what does it do?
• The requirement for a hierarchical deep syntactic structure.
• How to derive syntactic constituents.
• Stand-alone test.
• Substitution test.
• Representing syntactic structure using phrase structure diagrams.
• Activity: Constructing sentences using generative grammars.
• Activity: Understanding sentences using generative grammars.
• What makes humans unique: syntactic recursion.

Reading for this lecture

• Main Text:
  • The psychology of language : from data to theory by Trevor A. Harley
    • Chapter 2: Describing language
    • Chapter 10: Understanding the structure of sentences
• General Background Reading:
  • Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct, HarperCollins.