Language (and Decomposition)

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Language (and Decomposition)
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Linguistics provides

• a highly articulated computational (generative)
  theory of the mental representations of language
  that are used to account for
• judgments of meaning and well-formedness
• linguistics productivity new sentences, new
  words
• language acquisition the ability of children to
  project beyond their linguistic experience

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Analysis of Invariance vs Analysis of Variance

• Linguist in a sentence like, John saw Mary,
  the subject is the one who sees and the object
  the one seen.
• Psychologist In a picture-matching task,
  position of the name in a sentence, initial vs.
  final, was significantly correlated with behavior
• i.e, explicitly contrast John saw Mary and
  Mary saw John and do an experiment

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Slides from Bobs Analogy lectureAnother
Example
John loves Mary
Mary loves John
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Yet Another Example
John loves Mary and Bill hates Sally.
John loves Mary and Bill hates Sally.
Without Role Bindings
With Role Bindings
And
Conjunct 1
Conjunct 2
Loves
Hates
Lover
Beloved
Hater
Hated
Relational structure has been lost!
John
Mary
Bill
Sally
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More Problems Representing Structure

• But role bindings alone dont solve the problem
  of multiple instances of a predicate.
• Example
• John bought the apples yesterday and the pears
  last week.
• John bought the pears yesterday and the apples
  last week.

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Representing Recursive Propositions in LTM

• A system with role bindings and instances of a
  predicate can represent recursively embedded
  propositions easily

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Recursive Embedding Example 1
Sam knows Mary loves John
Knows
Knower
Known
Sam
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Recursive Embedding Example 2
Mary kissing John caused John to hug Mary.
Cause
Cause
Effect
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Structured RepresentationsA Linguistic Example

• What does rebuild mean?
• (1) After the hurricane, John rebuilt his house.
• Did John build the house to begin with?
• Does(1) presuppose that anyone built the house
  before it was destroyed?
• I'm going to pass on the help with the donation
  to help rebuild the Old Man of the Mountain.

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The Old Man of the Mountain
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Representation of rebuild

• Involves a number of parts
• Building activity
• A caused creation as the result of building
• The presupposition end state of building
  existed before
• The linguist assumes that the complex structural
  representation of these parts would underlie any
  use or comprehension of the word

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Tension The Status of Linguistic Representations

• In linguistics, a syntactic representation
  mediates between sound (or letters, the hand
  movements of sign, etc.) and meaning (interface
  with other cognitive functions)
• The linguist operates under the assumption that
  language comprehension and production (as well as
  the generation of judgments of well-formedness)
  requires in every instance the creation of
  syntactic representations

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• The tradition in cognitive psychology is to
  suppose that the linguistic representations are
  abstract and either not necessarily or rarely
  constructed when people speak and understand
  language on a daily basis -- people can use
  strategies, statistics, analogy, etc. to map
  directly between sound and meaning.

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Example Morphological Decomposition

• amiability
• Linguistic representation
• n
• adj
• root adj n
• ami able ity
• able predicts category, meaning and
  potentiation of -ity

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Pinker in Words and Rules3 Theories of
Irregular Morphology

• full decomposition
• gave GIVE PST gt give ø
• dual route (Pinkers mediation between linguists
  and psychologists)
• gave the past tense of give
• walked WALK PST gt walk ed
• single route
• gave the past tense of give
• walked the past tense of walk

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From the linguists perspective, only the full
decomposition model makes any sense

• gave behaves as a complex form with respect to
  syntactic and morphological distribution
• the walkeding the gav(e)ing
• He walked/He didnt walk/He didnt walked
• He gave/He didnt give/He didnt gaved

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Evidence for Dual Route View

• Lack of surface frequency effects for regular
  inflection
• RT to walked correlates with stem frequency of
  walk rather than surface frequency of walked
• While RT to taught correlates with surface
  frequency of taught rather than stem frequency
  of teach

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• Lack of priming for irregulars
• walked primes walk but
• taught doesnt prime teach
• (darkly and darkness prime dark but
  darkly doesnt prime darkness)

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On surface frequency

• Consider the informativeness of the past tense
  ending with respect to the stem
• For most regulars, -ed does not predict stem
  (except for very high frequency regulars, and for
  those one gets surface frequency effects)
• For irregulars, form of past tense predicts past
  tense and vice versa

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On priming

• stripes primes lion (through tiger)
• Clearly, taught should semantically prime
  teach
• Lack of behavioral priming between taught and
  teach demands an explanation in terms of a
  theory of the task (e.g., Lexical Decision)

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• False equation of memorized with frequency
  with irregularity with whole vs. composed
• Irregularity within language is governed by
  principles of structural locality
• Frequency always matters, both for the minimal
  constituents of language and for composed
  constituents, regardless of regularity

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CNS 2008 Poster
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