November 3 Language The language instinct Man has an instinctive tendency to speak as we see in the babble of our young children while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake brew or write Charles Darwin Phonology the study of how sounds and signs are organized and used in natural languages Why is automated voice recognition difficult Lack of Invariance problem there is no consistent relation between the physical features of the sounds and how sounds are perceived Differences across speakers bug pronounced slightly differently by each person Differences due to context coarticulation same sound is pronounced differently depending on what comes before after Phonemes the smallest unit of sound that are recognizable as speech and that has an impact on meaning Allophone one of a set of possible spoken sounds to pronounce a simple phoneme Cape Cod Speech segmentation problem there are no reliable physical cues to the boundaries between words Morphology the study of words the rules for how they are formed and the relationship between words in the same language Arbitrariness of the Sign Onomatopoeia a word that phonetically resembles the sound it describes zap splash etc Phonesthesia clusters of words that share both sound and meaning elements glow glare glitter etc Sound symbolism sounds may actually carry some meaning with them kiki as sharp shape gouba as soft shape Morphemes essentially words the smallest meaningful units of language Free morphemes words that can function independently dog table happy Bound morphemes parts of words that carry meaning the addition of an s changes the meaning so s is a morpheme Fast Mapping the process whereby children can map a word onto its referent after only a single exposure kids can learn new words very quickly and easily Morphological rules the rules that govern how morphemes can be combined to form words how to add ed or s Syntax the set of rules principles and processes that govern the structure of sentences and how words can be combined into phrases and phrases into sentences Comsky s contribution to Syntax Highlighting creativity Recursion a procedure that invokes an instance of itself Ex Fred thinks Wilma thinks John thinks Sarah likes Barney Syntax exists independent of meaning Syntax is not a series of linear associations Surface structure how a sentence is worded Deep Structure the meaning of a sentence Pragmatics The study of how language is used and understood in context Twin Babies Conversing Knowledge of how language is used in day to day conversation can be separated from knowledge of the formal properties of language phonology morphology syntax Our language has an intended indirect meaning and a literal meaning Illocutionary Act intended indirect meaning what the speaker is trying to do with their words Locutionary Act literal meaning What is actually said November 8 2021 Language Cont Chomsky s idea of how children acquire language Language acquisition cannot be explained by Behaviorist theories of learning Parents do not teach grammatical rules and do not correct children s errors Parents respond to the meaning of the message not the grammaticality of the utterance What children say is not simply imitation of what they ve heard Overgeneralization Errors I holded the baby rabbit Telegraphic Speech Throw ball missing I the or it Nativist theory language acquisition is best explained as an inanimate biological capacity Criticisms of Nativism Nativist theories do not explain how language develops they merely explain why The findings that a biological underpinning for language development does not mean that experience environment does not matter Interactionist Theory of Language acquisition A lot of evidence suggests that the amount and type of early experiences matters a lot More supported by researchers now than Nativist theory Language similarities for adopted children supports the Interactionist Theory because it shows that it s not just genetics Human brain equipped with a Language Acquisition Device LAD a collection of processes that facilitate language learning Genetic Dysphasia a syndrome characterized by an inability to learn the grammatical structure of language despite otherwise normal intelligence Most Specific Language Impairment SLI have a strong genetic component to them Critical Period a period during which receptivity to learning is optimal and outside of which learning is less optimal Does the language we speak shape the way we think Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis Language shapes the nature of thought Language in Animals words Limited Vocabularies compared to a 4 year old human child who already knows 10 000 Limited Conceptual Repertoire No learning of the abstract concepts children eventually learn ie idea justice economics Limited Understanding of Grammar Multi sign constructions are simple highly repetitive and don t have the grammatical fluency of children s speech Nov 11 2021 Cognition Concepts are at the core of intelligent behavior Concepts allow us to make generalizations based on limited experiences Classical Theory Categories are well defined In having the concept of a category we know both the necessary and sufficient rules for membership Necessary Conditions something that must be true of a category member Ie Dogs must be mammals being a mammal is a necessary condition Sufficient Conditions something that if true of an object proves that it belongs in of doghood the category Ie Some dogs are German Shepherds being a German Shepherd is a sufficient condition for being a dog Family Resemblance Theory category members need not all share a definition feature but they tend to have several features in common ie not all dogs have four legs Prototype Theory We classify new objects by comparing to the best or most typical member prototype of a category Exemplar Theory We classify new objects by comparing to all stored members of the category So which is it Division of Labor across the Hemispheres Left Hemisphere Prototype representations Right Hemisphere Exemplar representations Division of Labor across Cortex Prefrontal Cortex Exemplar based category formation Visual Cortex Prototype based category formation Functional Specificity applies to individual concepts as well ie chair airplane truck Different people show similar patterns of brain activity when thinking about the same etc concepts Insight from neuroimaging Medial to lateral inner to outer organization for inanimate to animate objects Medial