1. Chapter 9 Pt 1
Language

2. Language – shared symbolic system for communication.
Natural Language: Emerged from peoples’ attempts to communicate.
culturally agreed upon (arbitrary)
symbolic system
- refers to things not currently present.
/ to abstract concepts (e.g., love)
Nearly five thousand languages are spoken in the world today.

3. Is language Learned or do humans have an innate ability to learn language?

4. 7th Century BC – Egypt Psamtik – thought language was innate (inborn)!
He sought to discover the origin of language by conducting an experiment with two children. He gave two newborn babies to a shepherd, with the instructions that no one should speak to them, but that the shepherd should feed and care for them while listening to determine their first words. The hypothesis was that the first word would be uttered in the root language of all people.

5. When one of the children cried "bekos" with outstretched arms the shepherd concluded that the word was Phrygian because that was the sound of Phrygian word for "bread." Thus, they concluded that the Phrygians were an older people than the Egyptians, and that Phrygian was the original language of men.

6. We are not born speaking. Language must be acquired
We are not born speaking! Language must be acquired. If we think of all that is entailed in knowing a language, it seems quite a challenge. Child acquire language very quickly. By 5 they have mastered grammar. 3 year old talking about a monster on TV.

7. Noam Chomsky The ability to learn language is instinctive
His theory explains why all babies
language development follows a pattern.
Humans have a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) – a structure within the brain that allows babies to absorb and understand the rules of language they are being exposed to. The brain is able to analyse the language and work out the system that the language uses.

8. Explains why children can quickly understand and then use their language creatively and correctly without ever being formally taught or ‘knowing’ the rules

9. All languages have a Grammar
Nouns and verbs
Subjects and objects
Consonants and vowels
Basic word order (English is Subject, Verb, Object)
e.g., The man kicked the Ball.
Greenberg (1963) – in 98% of languages subject comes before the object.

10. Pidgin and Creoles Languages
Pidgin is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. Commonly used in trade. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language. A pidgin may be built from words, sounds, or body language from multiple other languages and cultures. Pidgins allow people or a group of people to communicate with each other without having any similarities in language and do not have any rules, as long as both parties are able to understand each other. 

11. Creoles have been nativized by children as their primary language, with the result that they have features of natural languages that are normally missing from pidgins. Hawaii Creole

12. Language Bioprogram Hypothesis Bickerton (1984)
Creolization occurs when the linguistic exposure of children in a community consists of a highly unstructured pidgin. Children use their innate language capacity to transform the pidgin into a language with a highly structured grammar. As this capacity is universal, the grammars of these new languages have many similarities.

13.  Bickerton (1983), ungrammatical utterances made by English-speaking children (2 – 4 years) are very similar to perfectly grammatical sentences of English-based creole languages.
Child
Creole
Where I can put it?
Where I can put om?
Hawaii
Daddy throw the nother rock
Daddy t'row one neda rock'tone
Jamaica
I go full Angela bucket
Guyana
Lookit a boy play ball
Luku one boy a play ball
Nobody don't like me
Nobody no like me
I no like do that
Johnny big more than me
Let Daddy get pen write it
Make Daddy get pen write am
I more better than Johnny

14. The Birth of New Sign Language in Nicaragua

15. What About English?
History of English (to 2.15) The Roman army departed in 410 AD. Mercenary soldiers brought in who were Angles and Saxons from northern Germany. Norman conquest of England in Ruling class spoke a dialect of French. Lower class spoke a dialect of German.

16. Psycholinguistics
The study of language as it is learned and used by people. Looks at the “pragmatics” of natural language use.

17. Language Universals Features that are common to all languages.
Semanticity - language conveys meaning!!
Semantic universals
- All languages have pronouns.
- All Languages distinguish between male and female; living and non-living

18. Semanticity Language signals have meaning Four legged animal
Common pet
Fur
Chases cats
Barks
Etc.
“dog”
The meaning of linguistic elements aren’t always apparent. Some may serve syntax or functional roles (e.g. AND)

19. 2. Arbitrariness no necessary or natural relationship
between the words of a given
language and the concepts that
they represent. For example,
there is nothing in the word "tree"
that connects it to the concept of a tree; which is why Spanish can use a totally different sign for the same concept: "árbol"; and so on with other languages.

20. Arbitrariness
No resemblance between the language signal and the thing that it represents
“dog”
“hund”
There are exceptions to this. “the hissing of a snake” hiss sounds like the actual sound made by the snake. This is called Onomatopoeia
“chien”
“perro”

21. Combination of signs (words) to produce complete thoughts are different from one language to the other. No set of rules can claim to be the "right" one.
For example, in English you say "I like beer", whereas in Spanish you would say "Me gusta la cerveza". The literal translation of the latter would be something like: "Beer is agreeable to me", which sounds strange in English.
Neither of these formulations has a better claim to accuracy, correctness or truth than the other.

22. 3. Flexibility
Because the connection between the word and the meaning are arbitrary – we can change them and invent new ones.
Symbols can be combined
to make endless new
meaningful words
(e.g., nonmicrowavable or
anitdisestablishmentarianism)

23. 4. Naming
We assign names to everything we see, feel and can conceive of. When there is a need for a name – we produce one.
How many English words have you witnessed the birth of???

24. 5. Displacement
We can communicate about things that are not currently present.
~ other locations, times, realities.

25. 6. Productivity
Infinite number of (meaningful statements) that can be produced.
We can say things we have never said before, never heard before. We generate language (on line) rather than repeat it.
We learn patterns and rules of producing meaning and then are free to use these rules to produce a way of conveying thoughts to other people.

26. Productivity Our use of language is extremely creative.
We have a limited amount of linguistic elements (e.g., sounds and words), but can combine those elements in novel ways.
“I was tired of cleaning up after my dog in my backyard so I taught him to pole vault.”
Even though you’ve never heard this sentence before you can understand it effortlessly

27. Language Form: Phonology and Orthography
A phoneme is a sound, or set of similar speech sounds, which are perceived as a single distinctive sound by speakers of the language or dialect in question. For example, the "c/k" sounds in cat and kitten represent the English phoneme /k/.

28. There are 44 phonemes in English (in the standard British model and 40 in American English). Since there are only 26 letters in the alphabet (Orthography), sometimes letter combinations need to be used to make a phoneme. A letter (or combination of letters) can represent different phonemes. “Ch” is a good example: chef = /ʃef/ choir = /kwaɪə/ cheese = /tʃi:z/

29. Phonemic Rules
Each language also has a set of rules for combining phonemes (what can and cannot go together).

30. English Spelling
English’s history as a creole shows especially in spelling - numerous irregular or exception words. Comb Yacht Paradigm Though Danger, Anger, Hanger

31. Morphology
Morphemes – smallest units that convey meaning (words and prefixes and suffixes). Free Morphemes – can stand alone (e.g., words)

32. Bounded Morphemes – must be attached to other morphemes (e. g
Bounded Morphemes – must be attached to other morphemes (e.g., the plural “s”). Can add grammatical features (e.g., plural, past tense, etc.). Change meaning (e.g., “un”, “dis” or “ultra”

33. Syntax (Grammar)
Rule that specify ordering of words by grammatical properties (e.g., nouns and verbs). Word order makes a difference! Dog bites man. Man bites dog. Bites man dog.

34. Phrase Structure
- organization of sentence constituents
Hierarchical
Sentences
Phrases -words with grammatical roles
(e.g., verbs, nouns, adjectives etc.)

35. Phrase-structure rules are a way to describe a given language's syntax
Phrase-structure rules are a way to describe a given language's syntax. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts.
What is a constituent? A word or group of words that function as a unit and can make up larger grammatical units.

36. Tree diagram - levels of constituents
Sentence
Noun Phrase Verb Phrase
Article Adj Noun Verb Noun Phrase
Article adj Noun
The red squirrel buried the large nut.

37. Sentences can be rearranged as long as the constitutes are intact.
E.g.,
George/ ran /up the mountain.
Up the mountain/George/ran.
Martha/ stood up /her blind date.
Up her blind date Martha stood.

38. the red squirrel buried the large nut
the red squirrel the large nut buried
the large nut the red squirrel buried
the large nut buried by the red squirrel
buried the large nut the red squirrel
buried the red squirrel the large nut
Rearrangement of Constituents follow rules.

39. Phrase structure rules
Rules that determine…
what goes into a phrase (‘constituents’)
how the constituents are ordered

40. Transformational Grammar (Chomsky)
1. Surface Structure
- actual words used
2. Deep structure
- underlying meaning
- abstract

41. The same deep structure can by conveyed
using several different surface structures.
The cat has a big bushy tail.
The feline has a big fluffy tail.
The cat’s tail is big and bushy.
The big bushy tail is the cat’s.

42. Similar surface structures can have very
different deep structure.
The lady hit the man with the umbrella.

43. Transformational Grammar rules translates
Kernels to other surface structures.
E.g.,
John smelled the cookies (KERNAL, active)
The cookies were smelled by John (passive)
Did John smell the cookies? (interrogative)
Were the cookies smelled by John? (passive,
interrogative)
Were the cookies not smelled by John?
(passive, interrogative, negation)

44. In general, more transformations, the
longer comprehension takes.
Take home lesson: – when possible, speak and write in the active voice.

45. Semantics
The relationship between linguistic elements (e.g., words and phrases) and their underlying meaning. Meaning can often be expressed with different words (phrases). Words (phrases) often can refer to different meanings. Mary stood up tall vs. Mary stood up Tom.

46. Pragmatics
Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implications, and interactions. Views language as a social exchange.

47. Principles of Communication: Grice’s Maxims
Cooperative Principle
A basic underlying assumption we make when we speak to one another is that we are trying to cooperate with one another to construct meaningful conversations.
Violations of these maxims can be indicators of sarcasm or non-literal meaning.

48. Maxims
Quantity : Make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more, or less, than is required.
Quality: Do not say that which you believe to be false or for which you lack evidence.
Relation: Be relevant
Manner: Be clear, brief and orderly

49. Turn Taking
The process by which people alternate between speaking and listening. Overlap of turns (when two or more participants talk at the same time) occurs in about 5% of cases and this suggests that speakers know how, when and where to enter. They signal that one turn has come to an end and another should begin.

50. Turn Taking Cues Intonation Eye Gaze Gestures
In general the current speaker chooses the next speaker
Ways of hanging on to ones turn.
Hedges (meaningless sounds or repetitions)

51. OVERLAPPING RULES
Where, despite the rules, overlapping talk occurs (5%), studies revealed the operation of a system:
one speaker drops out rapidly
as soon as one speaker thus ‘gets into the clear’, he typically recycles precisely the part of the turn obscured by the overlap.
If one speaker does not immediately drop out, there is available a competitive allocation system, whereby the speaker who ‘upgrades’ most, wins the floor. (upgrading = increased amplitude, slowing tempo, lengthened vowels, etc.)

52. Maxim of Quantity : Make your contribution as informative as is required, but not more, or less, than is required.
Often violated (33% of time) Perhaps figuring out what is needed is cognitively difficult – leading to errors.

53. Enhancing Communication
Gestures More Gestures used when people think they are communicating with others rather than to a machine (Mol et al., 2009). Speakers adjust their gestures to adjust to the listener’s needs

54. Speakers underestimate the value of Gestures to the listener (Gerwing & Allison, 2009).
Speakers used words and gestures to describe the layout of an apartment. Speakers judged only 25% of their gestures as providing essential information that was missing from the speech Actual analysis indicated that almost all gestures (97%) contributed information that was not in the words.

55. Figure 9.2 The number of times participants conveyed information about location, relative location, size, and shape by gestures and by words. From Gerwing and Allison (2009). Copyright © 2009 John Benjamins Publishing Company.

56. Gestures commonly used to convey spatial information (Bevelas, 2008)

57. (Bevelas, 2008)
Speakers also use gestures on the phone (not for communication). Gestures on phone are fewer and smaller than face-to-face.
Speaker describing the top of the skirt (telephone condition). Arrows indicate the size and direction of the gestures.

58. Restricting gestures reduced number of descriptions participants were able to give a name to (Frick-Horbury & Guttentag, 1998)
Example: A thin oval tablet with a hole for the thumb at one end by which a painter holds it and mixes different shades of pigment on it. (Pallette)

59. Discourse Markers a word or phrase that is relatively syntax-independent and does not change the meaning of the sentence, and has a somewhat empty meaning.

60. Discourse Markers
Analysis shows these seemingly meaningless utterances serve roles in conversation. “um” – indicate problems deciding what to say next. “you know” – check for understanding. “like” – mark of sarcasm (avoid in job interviews) “oh and so” – change of topic Oh - change is relevant to speaker So – change is relevant to listener

61. Prosodic Cues Rhythm, stress and intonation
Used to disambiguate the meaning of sentences.

62. Psychopaths produce more beats
Hare made another intriguing discovery by observing the hand gestures (called beats) people make while speaking. Research has shown that such gestures do more than add visual emphasis to our words (many people gesture while they're on the telephone, for example); it seems they actually help our brains find words. That's why the frequency of beats increases when someone is having trouble finding words, or is speaking a second language instead of his or her mother tongue. In a 1991 paper, Hare and his colleagues reported that psychopaths, especially when talking about things they should find emotional, such as their families, produce a higher frequency of beats than normal people. It's as if emotional language is a second language -- a foreign language, in effect -- to the psychopath.

63. Common Ground Mutual beliefs, expectations and knowledge
Speakers more likely to make incorrect local assumptions (what the listener knows or is attending to) than to make incorrect global (preferred language, general knowledge, shared personal experiences).

64. Judging Common Ground takes Cognitive Resources
Horton and Keysar (1996) speakers describe objects for listeners. When descriptions made under no time constraints incorporated common ground with the listener, common ground was not used when the speakers were under time pressure.

65. Clark & Krych (2004)
Pairs of participants were videotaped as a director instructed a builder in assembling 10 Lego models.
Three conditions:
directors could see the builders’ workspace;
they could not see workspace
gave instructions by audiotape.
Partners were much slower when directors could not see the builders workspace, and they made many more errors when the instructions were audiotaped (5% vs. 39%).

66. In condition one, directors often rapidly altered what they said to maximize common ground. Monitoring and Adjustment model assumes that common ground does not play a role in the initial plan of utterances. Initial plan is not designed for the specific knowledge of the addressee. Speakers plan their utterances using information which is available to them regardless of whether or not the information they use is part of the common ground with the addressee.

67. When their workspace was visible, builders communicated with directors by exhibiting, poising, pointing at, placing, and orienting blocks, and by eye gaze, head nods, and head shakes, all timed with precision. Directors often responded by altering their utterances midcourse.

68. Speech Perception
Speech is difficult to decode because: Language is spoken very quickly (10 phonemes per sec). Energy breaks do not correspond to breaks between words.
Ch 8 pt 2

69. Coarticulation
In spoken language, producing a word requires a speaker to coordinate five to six different parts of your vocal tract (tongue, lips, larynx, etc.) with millisecond precision.

70. Coarticulation
The overlap of articulation in space and time. Production of one speech sound overlaps the production of the next. The speaker adjusts the shape of their articulatory apparatus (tongue, lips, mouth) in different ways depending on what sounds come next. (e.g., H is Happy vs. Home). They do this in anticipation of the next sound.

71. Invariance Problem
Difficult to identify core features that correspond to particular phonemes.

72. Categorical Perception
Differences can be perceived as gradual and quantitative, as with different shades of gray, or they can be perceived as more abrupt and qualitative, as with different colors. The first is called continuous perception and the second categorical perception.

73. Phonetic Boundary

74. Despite differences in speakers voice, pitch, accent, and or enunciation, we perceive phonemes within a category as all the same. Due to specialized neurons (Wernicke's area in the left Temporal lobe) that act like feature detectors and respond to specific phonemes.

75. How do these phoneme specialized detectors develop? They are learned.
Habituation studies on young infants show that they can distinguish between phonemes that are not used in their native language, but by two years old they are specialized in detecting differences in phonemes of their own language.

76. E.g., People exposed to English can easily distinguish between /r/ and /l/ but many Japanese speakers cannot. In English, phoneme separate phoneme detectors respond to /r/ than do to /l/. In Asian languages these two sounds are perceived as the same.

77. More on Development
By the time a child is 10, they lose the ability to detect differences between phonemes that are not used in languages that they have been exposed to. This is one reason why it is difficult for older children and adults to pick up new languages.

78. Speech Perception Involves both Bottom-up and Top-down processes.
Degraded auditory input impairs speech perception (bottom-up)
Using knowledge about words and context, we fill-in unclear auditory information (Top-down)
Ch 8 pt 2

79. Word Superiority Effect
People have better recognition of letters presented within words as compared to isolated letters and to letters presented within non-words. Why, processing occurs simultaneously at the feature, letter and word level. Processing is added (sped-up) by top-down information (words) when they can be used to help disambiguate information at lower levels.

80. Word Superiority Effect

81. Phoneme Restoration Effect
The brain's way of resolving those imperfections in our speech. Sounds actually missing from a speech signal can be restored by the brain and may appear to be heard. Demo audio clip 1 and 2

82. Context Effects Top Down Processes
Lexical Identification Shift Ganong (1980) demonstrated a bias to perceive phonemes so they form words. For example sounds that could be either /d/ or /t/ tend to be heard as /t/ when followed by "ask" (to make the word "task") and as /d/ when followed by "ash" (to make the word "dash"). 
Ch 8 pt 2

83. Try this example: identify the phoneme at the end of each utterance, is it /s/ (as in "lease") or /S/ (as in "leash")? 
Ch 8 pt 2

84. Lexicon Recognition and Access
Lexicon – mental dictionary Most people know more than 60,000 different words, and well-educated people know more than 100,000.

85. Factors that Effect Word Recognition
Lexical frequency Size of lexical neighborhood Morphological complexity Context (i.e., semantic priming effects)

86. Sweeney (1979)
Ambiguous sentences containing words
with multiple meanings.
“He measured the floor with his ruler.”

87. Followed by letter string
A) a word related to the implied meaning
“inch” was presentd
B) a word related to alternative meaning
“king” was presented
C) an unrelated word “Pill”
D) a non-word “jokt”
Lexical decision task
If both meanings activated A and B should
be equally fast (primed)

88. Varied the delay between the sentence and
the letter string.
400 millisecond delay responses to A and B facilitated.
Over 700 milliseconds, only the A was facilitated.
So both are activated, but one fades quickly.

89. Disambiguation and telling a joke. Why timing is important
Disambiguation and telling a joke. Why timing is important. Humor is an emotional reaction to violation of schema. Some jokes rely on setting the listener up for one interpretation, and then providing more information that negates the original interpretation.
Timing - If both meanings are activated,
schema is not violated.
Need to pause to allow alternate meaning
to fade.

90. Reading – Eye Tracking Studies
Gaze Duration
Eye Movement
Fixations
Saccades
Regression
Video
Ch 8 pt 2

91. Readers typically fixate about 80% of content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives). Only 20% of function words (pronouns, conjunctions, articles) are fixated. Words not fixated are short, common or predictable. Longer fixations occur on longer, unusual or unpredictable words.
Ch 8 pt 2

92. Understanding Sentences
Grammar – Rules of combining words within a sentence. Parsing - analyzing a sentence into its component categories and functions.
Ch 8 pt 2

93. Syntax/Grammar – word order and combination critical to meaning:
“He showed her the boys pants.”
“He showed her boys the pants.”
Same words, different order produces different meaning.
Ch 8 pt 2

94. When making sense of sentences we use both semantic and syntactic (grammatical) information. Sentence meaning can however be ambiguous … sometimes because of the grammatical structure.
Ch 8 pt 2

95. Garden Path (Structurally Ambiguous) Sentences
Grammatically correct sentences that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end. e.g., The horse raced by the barn fell
Ch 8 pt 2

96. Garden Path Sentence Examples
The raft floated down the river sank.
The florist sent the flowers was pleased.
The cotton clothing is made from grows in Mississippi.
They told the boy that the girl met the story.
The daughter of the king's son admires himself.

97. Parsing Four major possibilities:
Syntactic analysis generally precedes (and influences) semantic analysis
Semantic analysis usually occurs prior to syntactic analysis
Syntactic and semantic analysis occur at the same time, in parallel.

98. Sytax-first model
Pick one syntactical structure early on, later have to revise if it isn’t the right one.
Simpler More Complex

99. Activation Strength creates Syntactic Heuristics (rules of thumb) Principles Simple structure preferred over more complex structures.
Ch 8 pt 2

100. Newer Research
Semantics can override the syntax-first approach. e.g., The police arrested the mastermind behind the hideout, but they forgot to read him his rights. (simpler structure – but leads to ambiguity).

101. Changing one word changes the ambiguity, but the simpler structure does not make sense. e.g., The police arrested the mastermind behind the crime, but they forgot to read him his rights.

102. Results
If choosing syntax first, the “crime” sentence should be difficult because it requires a more complex sentence structure, but reading times were faster for the “crime” sentence than for the “hideout” sentence.

103. Conclusion
Both semantics and syntax are interpreted as the sentence is processed. When the semantics is ambiguous, simpler structures are first considered, then abandoned for more complex ones, slowing down the process.