1. Language Structure

2. What is Language? Perhaps all animals communicate with other members of their species, but is that “language?” 1.Semanticity and arbitrariness of units -- the connection between the sound (e.g., a spoken word) and meaning is arbitrary (e.g., “ball” = O). 2.Discreteness -- must utilize discrete units (e.g., words, hand positions). 3.Displacement -- controlling stimuli need not be present for use (e.g., a “mugger” need not be present to discuss precautions of walking alone at night). Linguists have identified several criteria for determining what constitutes language:

3. Criteria For Determining Language 4.Productivity (generativity) -- must be able to produce an infinite number of unique utterances. 5.Iteration and recursion -- “iteration” is the capacity to add on to a sentence in order to create a new sentence. For example, I like dogs. I like dogs very much. I like dogs very much and will get one. “recursion” is the capacity to embed one structure within the same kind of structure. For example, The girl smiled. The girl the boy kissed smiled. The girl the boy the father hated kissed smiled.

4. Criteria For Determining Language (con’t) 6.Regularity (a grammar) -- a set of rules for generating and understanding all acceptable utterances and rejecting all unacceptable utterances. Using those criteria, American Sign Language would be considered a “true” language. No other species, however, would meet all those criteria.

5. Grammar A grammar consists of rules for: 1.Syntax – deals with word order and inflection (e.g., The girls hits the boys. Did hit the girl the boys.) 2.Semantics – deals with the meaning of sentences (e.g., Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.) 3.Phonology – deals with the sound structure of words and sentences (e.g., Baseball has been bery bery good to me.)

6. Linguistic Intuitions A grammar must also be able to explain “linguistic intuitions” – our implicit knowledge about the nature of well- and ill- formed sentences and why. For example: Who’s on first? (a structural ambiguity – the entire sentence or phrase is ambiguous). I am going to the bank (a lexical ambiguity – meaning of “bank” is ambiguous).

7. Linguistic Intuitions (con’t) A further complication for the linguist is that linguistic intuitions are not always agreed upon. For example: Tell John where the concert’s this afternoon. Tell John that the concert’s this afternoon. Some consider the first sentence not acceptable, but the second is acceptable. Another intuition is that of understanding “paraphrases.” “Give me liberty or give me death” can be paraphrased as “Let me be free or kill me.”

8. Competence vs. Performance Our abstract understanding (i.e., competence) of language and our performance (i.e., actual use of the language) do not always match. For example, when speaking, we often stutter, use ill-formed sentences, repeat ourselves, use “um,” etc. It is the linguist’s task to develop a theory of competence and psychology to develop a theory of performance.

9. Syntactic Formalisms – Yuck! Most of the emphasis in understanding language has focused on syntax. Linguists have developed a means of analyzing sentences which has proved useful for psychologists. Sentence Noun Phrase Verb Phrase Article Noun Verb Noun Phrase The dog bit Article Noun the mailman. The dog bit the mailman. Noun Phrase (subject) Verb Phrase (predicate) Phrase structure analysis (or constituent analysis) is a hierarchical division of a sentence into its constituent components.

10. Syntactic Formalisms (con’t) Rewrite Rules The labels at the nodes (e.g., NP, Article, etc.) can serve to form “rewrite rules” for deriving sentence. Pause Structure in Speech One indication of the psychological reality of phrase structures is the manner in which people generate sentences. That is, people tend to generate sentences a phrase at a time, pausing at the boundaries between large phrase units.

11. Syntactic Formalisms (con’t) Speech Errors Speech errors people make also suggest the psychological reality of phrase structure. That is, when an error in speech is made and people repeat themselves to correct it, they tend to repeat or correct the whole phrase. For example: “Give me the hammer/the screwdriver.” “Give me the screwdriver/the phillips screwdriver.”

12. Syntactic Formalisms (con’t) Speech Errors “Spoonerisms” (the exchange of sounds between words) also suggest the existence of phrase structure. Most errors occur within a phrase (e.g., “toin coss” rather than “coin toss”). Word exchanges, in contrast, tend to occur across phrase boundaries (e.g., “Would you hurry and nail the hammer?”).

13. Syntactic Formalisms (con’t) Transformations Moving an element from one part of a sentence to another is called a transformation and seems to violate the strict hierarchical nature of phrase structure. The sentence, “The dog is chasing whom down the street?” sounds awkward. We would more likely ask, “Whom is the dog chasing down the street?” However, moving “whom” to the beginning of the sentence removes it from the verb phrase to which it belongs (i.e., “chasing… “). It is not clear how people construct or understand transformations.

14. Relationship Between Language and Thought What effect does the structure of language have on cognition? The Behaviorist Proposal Watson argued there was no such thing as “thinking” and that which we consider thought is nothing more than subvocal speech. Therefore, for the Behaviorists, language was thought. A study in which curare was used to paralyze a subject revealed “thinking” was still possible, thereby rejecting the behaviorist position.

15. Language and Thought (con’t) Whorfian Hypothesis of Linguistic Determinism Whorf proposed that a culture’s language determines or strongly influences the way a person thinks or perceives the world above and beyond their experience of the world. In a series of studies with the Dani of Indonesian New Guinea, we are led to reject the idea of linguistic determinism. The Dani have only two words for color: mili for dark, cool hues and mola for bright, warm hues. Despite their use of just two words, the Dani are able to remember “focal colors” when viewed for only a short time and then placed among 160 color chips as well as English-speaking subjects.

16. Does Language Depend on Thought? Given the above, we might speculate that language is determined by thought. Aristotle believed the categories of thought determined the categories of language 2500 years ago. Was he correct? -It is a reasonable assumption that thought developed before language from an evolutionary standpoint. -Many species without language appear capable of thinking (e.g., Kohler’s chimp, Sultan). It also seems an absurdity that prehistoric man would be running around speaking without being able to think. -It is also apparent that young children have considerable thinking capacity before they have effective language abilities.

17. Language Depends on Thought? (con’t) It seems more reasonable that language is a tool which emerges as a means of communicating the ideas and thoughts prehistoric man (or young children) had. Furthermore, we develop new language to express new ideas (e.g., gigabyte), not the other way around.

18. Language and Thought Unrelated? A hypothesis called “modularity” proposes language is a separate component of cognition and functions separately from the rest of general cognition. It is unaffected by thought, but can communicate with thought by passing its analysis of incoming speech (or written text) to general cognition or receive the intentions/ideas from general cognition and produce speech to reflect those intentions.

19. Language and Thought Unrelated? (con’t) While a seemingly odd proposition, there is considerable debate regarding its validity. If it is possible to demonstrate that language is learned in unique ways compared with other cognitive skills, we would have to seriously consider the hypothesis. Likewise, if we can demonstrate language comprehension processing occurs without the use of more general cognitive processes, we would have to seriously consider the hypothesis.

20. Language Acquisition The manner in which we acquire language shows some similarities regardless of the native language ultimately acquired. -infants begin with few speech sounds (e.g., “ah”), but shortly begin making a variety of sounds, some of which will not be part of their native language -at 6 months, babies begin “babbling” -at one year, the child utters his or her first words; they are concrete and refer to the here and now (e.g., Mommy, Daddy, no, hi, etc.) and may overextend them (e.g., any four legged animal is “dog”)

21. Language Acquisition (con’t) -by one-and-a-half years, the child begins to utter two-word sentences and typically have the same order as appropriate for their native language (e.g., more milk, Mommy here, no juice) -there is no “three-word” stage, but the child begins speaking in 3-8 word sentences called “telegraphic speech” (e.g., Bubba sit me, Mommy no baff) -by the age of six, children have mastered most of their language, although they continue to refine it until 10 years and continuously increase their vocabulary throughout life.

22. Is Language Learning Different? Is the way we learn language different from the way we learn other general cognitive skills? 1.quality of input – children typically receive little formal instruction in acquiring their first language and, therefore, must induce the structure by listening to others. 2.critical period – is a range of time during which a skill is readily learned. It has been argued children can learn a second language much faster than adults between the ages of two to eleven years. 3.language universals – constraints on the possible forms a natural language can have.