LANGUAGE

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LANGUAGE
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Is Language Innate?

• The linguist Chomsky has argued that language is
  a uniquely human faculty which is innate. Humans
  are born with a blueprint for acquiring language
• A crucial test of this theory is whether any
  other animal has language or whether any other
  animal can learn human language

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Is Language Innate?

• Hocketts design features of human language
• Vocal-auditory channel (communication occurs by
  the producer speaking and the receiver hearing)
• Broadcast transmission and directional reception
  (a signal travels out in all directions from the
  speaker but can be localised in space by the
  hearer)
• Rapid fading (once spoken, the signal disappears
  rapidly and is no longer available for
  inspection)
• Interchangeability (adults can access everything
  about their productions)
• Complete feedback (speakers can access everything
  about their productions)
• Specialisation (the amount of energy in the
  signal is unimportant a word means the same
  whether it is whispered or shouted)
• Semanticity (signals mean something they relate
  to the features of the world)

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• Hocketts design features of human language
  (contd)
• Arbitrariness (these symbols are abstract except
  with a few onomatopoeic exceptions, they do not
  resemble what they stand for)
• Discreteness (the vocabulary is made up of
  discrete units)
• Displacement (the communication system can be
  used to refer to things remote in time and space)
• Openness (the ability to invent new messages)
• Tradition (the language can be taught and
  learned)
• Duality of patterning (only combinations of
  otherwise meaningless units are meaningful this
  can be seen as applying both at the level of
  sounds and words, and words and sentences)
• Prevarication (language provides us with the
  ability to lie and deceive)
• Reflectiveness (we can communicate about the
  communication system itself)
• Learnability (the speaker of one language can
  learn another)

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Is Language Innate?

• Aitchison (1989) argues that we can usually find
  at least one animal which exhibits each design
  feature
• But, some do seem to be uniquely human. These
  are
• displacement, duality, semanticity, structure
  dependence and creativity

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Is Language Innate?

• APES
• Mainly references to the here-and-now
• Lack of syntactic structure (rules of word order)
• Need explicit training
• Rarely ask questions
• Little spontaneous use of symbols

• CHILDREN
• Utterances can refer to other times
• Clear syntactic structure and consistency
• Do not need explicit training
• Frequently ask questions
• Spontaneous use of symbols

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Is Language Innate?

• Most commentators on the status of chimp language
  conclude that the evidence for semanticity as
  well as for structured and creative utterances is
  flimsy and that, at best, the case for chimps
  having language is not proven

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Sentence Comprehension

• The linguist Noam Chomsky has argued that the
  word order of English sentences is rule-governed
• Each speaker of a language has an internalised
  grammar or set of rules which enables the meaning
  of a sentence to be extracted from its
  constituents and word order

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Sentence Comprehension

• Psychologists ask whether listeners break
  sentences up into constituents in order to
  understand them
• The herd of elephants trampled the trees in
  the forest
• Aaronson Scarborough (1977) showed that pauses
  during reading occurred at constituent boundaries

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Language Production

• Levelt (1989) three processes in speech
  production
• Conceptualisation, the speaker has to work out
  what, in broad terms, s/he wants to say
• Formulation, the conceptual message must be
  translated into a linguistic form ready to be
  spoken
• Articulation, the speaker has to produce the
  correct sounds in the correct order

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Language Production

• Formulation consists of
• Lexicalisation
• Process by which a word meaning animal, four
  legs, barks, mans best friend is turned into a
  blueprint for the sound /dog/
• Evidence from speech errors such as malapropisms
  e.g. incinerator for incubator
• Evidence from the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

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Language Production

• Formulation consists of
• Syntactic planning putting the words into the
  correct order
• Evidence from exchange errors, e.g. Dont buy a
  car with its tail in the engine
• Phonological specification putting the
  component sounds of words into the correct order
• Evidence from Spoonerisms, e.g. you have hissed
  all my mystery lectures

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Speech Comprehension

• Cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1984)
• Spoken words are processed serially, sound by
  sound
• e.g. when we hear the spoken word trap we hear
  the /t/ first, then the /r/, then the /ae/ and
  then the /p/

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Speech Comprehension

• When first phoneme enters, all words beginning
  with that phoneme are lined up as possible
  candidates the cohort
• When second phoneme comes, the number in the
  cohort is automatically reduced (there are fewer
  words beginning /tr/ than beginning /t/)
• Further reduction when the third phoneme comes in
• Continues until there is only one candidate left.
  This is the recognised word

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Reading

• Dual route model of reading
• Words read in two ways
• The first makes use of the regularity of English
  spelling by converting spelling to sound. This is
  the phonological or indirect route to reading.
  Will work for regular frequent and regular
  infrequent words (and, milk, crift, gond)

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Reading

• The second uses the visual characteristics of the
  word to look it up in the mental dictionary which
  also stores its pronunciation. The word can then
  be read out loud. This is the visual or direct
  route. Will work for frequent words (and, milk,
  said, people) and only those infrequent words
  which are known, e.g. myrrh, pyorrhoea

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Word Recognition

• The logogen model (Morton, 1964)
• Every word is represented in a mental lexicon or
  dictionary by a logogen
• Device which collects evidence that the word is
  present in the input
• Evidence from two sources
• The perceptual input of the spoken or written
  word
• The context in which it occurs

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Word Recognition

• This evidence increases the activation of the
  logogen and if it is strong enough the activation
  rises above the logogen threshold and it fires
• The word is recognised