LIN3713 exam 1

Major Domains of Language=

Content, Form and Use

Productivity:

Describes the combination of a small number of discrete units into seemingly infinite novel creations

Speech

Describes the neuromuscular process by which humans turn language into a sound signal that is transmitted through the air

From a linguistic perspective, a grammar is

a description of a person's linguistic knowledge.

Descriptive adequacy -

a grammar must specify the relationships between various sequences in the language.

Observational adequacy

a grammar must specify what is and what is not an acceptable sequence in the language. A grammar is observationally adequate if it generates all of the acceptable sequences in a language and none of the unacceptable sequences.

Current thinking on innate language centers on the concept of parameters.A parameter is

a grammatical feature that can be set to any of several values.Parameter-setting theorists believe children are born with the parameter and with the values of the parameters. They then learn through experience which value is present in their native language.Parameter-setting models provide a solution to the question of how innate processes interact with a child's language experience.

A Module is

a specialized problem-solving device in the brain that responds to information of a restricted type.

Transformational grammar was an influential theory of grammar formulated by Chomsky in the late 1950s

Inspired psycholinguistic work in the 1960s and 1970s.

Semanticity:

Language allows people to talk about events that are decontextualized, or removed from the present.

Brain Injury

Language impairment can also occur as a result of injury or damage to the mechanisms of the brain involved with language.Brain injury can occur in utero, perinatally, and after birth.Brain injury resulting from physical trauma is called Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI).This type of language impairment is influenced by the severity of the injury and the site of damage, and the characteristics of the child before the injury occurred.

Developmental Disability

Language impairment often occurs with certain developmental disabilities including intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder.

4 characteristics of language

Language is socially shared - language is shared by members of a community, is a code that uses a system of arbitrary symbols, code is conventional - language must follow specific, systematic and rule-governed conventions to make it nonrandom, representational tool - language includes symbolic representations of linguistic concepts that are organized in a vast network, and also, the formal syntactic rules that organize these confcepts into orderly, suface-level representations.

Significance of Sign Language

Unlike spoken language, sign production can occur in parallel with, and unimpeded by respiratory activity. So we might expect some interesting differences in the way signed and spoken languages are produced.

2 questions are at the heart of psycholinguistics:

What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language?What cognitive processes are involved in ordinary language use?

Transformational Rules

Within transformational grammar, the derivation of a sentence is a two part process.First, phrase-structure rules are used to generate the underlying deep structure.Second, a sequence of transformational rules is applied to the deep structure and intermediate structures, ultimately generating the surface structure of the sentence.Transformational rules apply to the entire string of constituents.Transformational grammar can explain certain aspects of language, such as deep-structure ambiguity, that cannot be accounted for entirely by phrase- structure rules.

Dialects -

natural variations of language that evolve within specific cultural or demographic boundaries. Examples in US include Appalachian English, African American Vernacular English, and Spanish Influenced English

A grammar that includes only one level of structure is

not descriptively adequate

Perceptual event -

speech process is initiated with a mental, abstract representation of the speech steam to be produced

Free morpheme -

stand alone, convey meaning on their own

Generally speaking, much our linguistic knowledge is

tacit rather than explicit. That is, we know how to do something without knowing how we do it

Genetic predisposition -

twin studies reveal that about 16% of variability in language of 4 year old children can be contributed to heredity.

Linguistic Productivity -

the ability to create and comprehend novel utterances.Current psycholinguistic accounts make the assumption that instead of storing sentences, we store rules for creating sentences.The number of rules needed is finite, but the rules can be combined to form an unlimited number of sentences.Not all aspects of language are productive and must be mastered by rote learning. For example, irregular past tense verbs in English (fell, went, swam)

Language is

"a socially shared code that uses a conventional system of arbitrary symbols to represent ideas about the world that are meaningful to others who know the dame code.", a Module of Human Cognition

some Remarkable Features of Language

Acquisition Rate Children, universality concept: as applies to languge suggests that all persons around the world apply the same cognitive infrastructure to the task of learning language and that this cognitive infrastructure is particularly suited to the task of developing symbolic representations for objects and actions.

Duality of Patterning:

At one level, there is a large number of meaningful elements, or words. At another level, there is a relatively small number of meaningless elements that are combined to form words. These meaningless elements are individual speech sounds.

Similarities between signed and spoken languages

Duality of Patterning The three major parameters of sign language are hand configuration, place of articulation, and movement, Morphology ASL has a rich morphological system that signals various grammatical distinctions including person, number, aspect and reciprocity.Linguistic Productivity The property of embedding one sign into another occurs in ASLPhrase structure Like English, ASL sometimes marks grammatical categories via word order. Thus, ASL makes some use of temporal order ASL also uses spatial processes to convey syntactic distinctions.

Later Psycholinguistics, The second period of interdisciplinary psycholinguistics took hold in the late 1950s with the emergence of the linguist Noam Chomsky.

He argued that the behaviorists' accounts of language were inadequateLanguage development became an especially popular topic during this time, Theoretical analysis of language development emphasized the role of innate factors.This period was characterized by an effort to incorporate linguistic theory in psychological research as well as by the view that innate linguistic mechanisms are necessary to explain child language acquisition.

Early Psycholinguists Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) was a major figure in scientific psychology.

He believed that the study of language could provide important insights into the mind.He developed a theory of language production which stated that the sentence, not the word, is the primary unit of language and saw the production of speech as the transformation of a complete thought process into sequentially organized speech segments.

Differences between signed and spoken language

Iconicity and Arbitrariness, In English and most spoken languages there is not an intrinsic relationship between the set of sounds and the object to which the sounds refer. In contrast American Sign Language (ASL) possesses a high degree of iconicity - many of the signs resemble the objects or actions to which they refer.

Species Specificity:

Only humans have to capacity for language

In English, the basic word order is subject-verb-object, or SVO

Other languages use word order in different ways

Model of Speech Production : According to the basic model of speech production there are three stages to speech production

Perceptual event, Motor Schema, Speech Output

Heritable Language Impairment/ Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

Refers to depressed language abilities with no other concomitant impairment of intellect.due to its specificity to language functioning, this condition affects about 7-10% of childrenSLI is the most common type of communication impairment affecting children

Speech Perception

Refers to how the brain processes speech and language.It is different from auditory perception, which is a more general term for how the brain processes any type of auditory information, speech perception involves processing phonemic information

Relationship of Speech to Language

Speech is the voluntary and complex neuromotor behavior people use to share language.Language does not depend on speech because it can be shared by other means like writing and reading, however speech depends wholly on language because language gives speech its meaning.Speech and language are independent processes so some people can have a speech disorder yet have excellent language skills

From the 1920s to the 1950s, psychologists expressed relatively little interest in language and instead preferred to speak of "verbal behavior"

The behavior of speaking correctly was assumed to be a result of being raised in an environment in which correct language models were present and in which speech errors were corrected.

Communication, People use communication for three basic purposes:

The process of sharing information among two or more persons, a sender and a receiver,, to request, to reject and to comment

Sound Fundamentals

The transmission and reception of speech involves four acoustic events: creation of the sound source, vibration of particles, reception by the ear, and comprehension by the brain.

Current Directions More recently there has been an upsurge in interest in phonology, semantics, and pragmatics.

There has also been a strong sure of interest in language productionDevelopment of techniques to see visual images of the brain has stimulated interest in brain mechanisms associate with language.We are beginning to see application of psycholinguistic principles that are useful to society.Psycholinguistic research has been applied to topics such as reading, bilingualism, and language disorders.

Speech Output -

airflow, vocal fold vibration, and oral cavity movements are all finely manipulated to carry out the motor schema to create speech. Feedback relays information about speech output back to the origination of the perceptual target and motor schema.

Within linguistic theory, language is a

an infinite set of well-formed sentences.

Psycholinguistics is part of a field of study called cognitive science. Cognitive science is

an interdisciplinary venture that draws upon the insights of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to study the mind and mental processes.

Is Language Innate? Nativists assert that children

are born with some linguistic knowledge, and empiricists claim that children acquire language form linguistic experience.

Distinctive Features -

are characteristics of speech sounds whose presence or absence distinguishes the sound from other sounds (voicing, bilabial, etc.). Distinctive features are helpful in identifying how to formulate linguistic rules.

Phonemes -

are differences in sound that contribute to meaning; they are indicated by slashes (/p/ versus /b/)

Phones -

are speech sounds. Two sounds are different phones if they differ in physically specifiable way (aspirated versus unaspirated p ). They are indicated by brackets.

Phrase Structure rules, Phrase structure ambiguity -

are syntactic rules that specify the permissible sequences of constituents in a language., the assignment of words to constituents is ambiguous.

Morphemes

are the smallest unit of language that carry meaning, they are combined to create words.

Bilingualism -

children raised bilingually show language differences not seen in children raised monolingually. This includes switching between the syntax and vocabulary of the two languages, this is called code switching

Deep structure ambiguity -

comes from a single surface structure that is derived from two distinct deep structures. It cannot be explained by phrase-structure rules.

Preintentional communication -

communication in which people assume the relationship between a communicative behavior and its referent.

Some language theorists argue that the human brain

contains a language specific module developed solely to process linguistic information.

Bound morpheme -

contribute to word meaning but are no words themselves.

Critics of modularity argue that language

emerges in response to an individual's culture rather than to any specific internal architecture or that language is processed by a general neural network that operates on all aspects of language.

A grammar is a

formal device with a finite set of rules that generates the sentences in the language. Thus, grammars are theories of language composed of hypotheses about the structure or organization of some part of the language.

Gender -

girls have an advantage over boys in language development, and boys are more likely to have difficulties with language development or language impairment.

lexical theories of grammar in which greater emphasis is placed on

individual lexical items (words). Lexical-functional grammar has also been called psychologically realistic grammar because it takes psychological or processing considerations into account.

Explanatory adequacy -

involves the ability to explain the role of linguistic universals in language acquisition.

Transformational grammar theories share the idea that syntactic structure

is at the heart of our linguistic knowledge. This view has been controversial within linguistics.

Modularity

is cognitive science theory about how the human mind is organized within the brain structures.

Form

is how words, sentences and sounds are combined and arranged to convey content.

Linguistics

is the branch of science that studies the origin, structure and use of language.

Surface Structure -

is the superficial arrangement of constituents and reflects the order in which the words are pronounced

Deep Structure -

is the underling structure of a sentence that conveys the meaning of a sentence.

Simultaneous and Sequential structure, The structure of spoken languages is

largely sequential in nature. There are rules that specify the correct order of phonemes, within syllables, syllables within words, and words within sentences. Sign language is organized spatially more than temporally. Meaning of utterances is not specified by the order of signs but by the combination of features simultaneously present in the sign.

Types of feedback -

linguistic (involves speaking), nonlinguistic (refers to use of eye contact, facial expression, posture, and proximity), paralinguistic (refers to pitch, loudness, and pausing).

Indirect requests -

more polite than direct commands. "Can you open the door?" versus "Open the door!" Forces us to consider language in a social context.

Symbolic communication, or Referential communication,

occurs when an individual communicates about a specific entity, and the relationship between the entity and its referent is arbitrary.

Use

pertains to how people draw on language functionally to meet personal and social needs.

Language-Learning Environment -

quality and quantity of language experienced play a significant role in a young child's language development. Quantity refers to amount of language a child experiences and the quality refers to the characteristics of the language spoken in the child's environment. Caregiver responsiveness, which refers to the promptness, contingency, and appropriateness of caregiver responses to children's bids for communication, is also an important aspect of the language-learning environment.

Content

refers to the meaning of language

Intentional communication -

relies on the shared spatial position among the sender, the recipient and the referent.

Speech involves the precise activation of muscles in four systems:

respiration, phonation, resonation, and articulation

Syntax (form) -

rule of language governing the internal organization of sentences.

Morphology (form) -

rule of language governing the internal organization of words.

Pragmatics (use) -

rules of language governing how language is used for social purposes.

Semantics (content) -

rules of language governing the meaning of individual words and word combinations.

Phonology (form) -

rules of language governing the sounds used to make syllables and words. Phonotactics governs how sounds are organized on words.

There are four broad areas of language knowledge:

semantics (meanings of words and sentences), syntax (grammatical arrangement of words in sentences), phonology (system of sounds in language), and pragmatics (social rules involved in language use).

Model of Communication - three components:

sender, receiver, and shared symbolic means form communication

Morpheme -

smallest meaningful unit in a language.

Feedback is used

to prevent communication breakdown.

Psycholinguistic research in the early and mid-1960s was guided by the belief that the structures and rules of transformational grammar were psychologically real; that is,

that they were a part of how people comprehend and produce language. It was assumed that the distance between surface and deep structure was an accurate index of the psychological complexity of a sentence. This was called derivational theory of complexity (DTC) Early studies supported DTC, but later studies contradicted it.

Tacit Knowledge -

the knowledge of how to perform various acts.

Explicit knowledge -

the knowledge of the processes or mechanisms used in these acts.

Psycholinguistics is

the psychological study of language The psychology of language deals with the mental processes that are involved in language use. Three sets of processes are of primary interest: language comprehension, language production, and language acquisition.

Garden Path Sentences -

the sentence leads you down a garden path to a predictable destination until it is obvious you are mistaken and must backtrack to reinterpret the sentence. In the course of comprehending language we are making decisions, we are doing mental work.

Morphology -

the system of rules that governs how we use different forms of the same word to convey different shades of meaning.

Modules are termed domain specific because

they can process only specific types of information.

Motor Schema -

this is rough motor plan based on the abstract representation of the perceptual target. It organizes the phonemes into syllable chunks to be executed. The rough plan is sent forward to the major muscle groups involved in speech production.