Introduction to Cognitive Science
Summary of the
linguistics segment
Lecturer: Dr A. Bodomo
Date: 5th December 2000
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Phonology and Morphology
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Phonology:
– the study of how sets of sounds produced by the vocal tract are
organized into meaningful sound units in each language
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Morphology:
– the field of cognitive science which studies how knowledge
about the form or internal structure of words is represented and
processed in the minds of speakers.
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Phonology and Morphology are:
– two of the salient aspects of the tacit knowledge of speakers of
a language
– the levels of representations at which speakers capture the
sounds and structure of words
Key concepts/terms in Phonology
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Phoneme: a minimal meaningful sound unit
Allophone:variant of a phoneme
Minimal pair: a pair of words that are
identical except for a contrast in one sound.
E.g. /pit/ and /bit/
Tone and Stress: can indicate differences in
meaning among pairs of words
Phonological rules
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Key concepts in Morphology
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Morpheme: basic unit of morphology, can be
captured by the morph, discrete speech unit.
Inflectional morphology:
– deals with the knowledge through which speakers
can create paradigms of the same word to express
various grammatical categories like number, person,
tense, aspect, case, and gender
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Derivational morphology
– is concerned with speaker’s knowledge of the
processes of forming words out of existing ones by
adding various affixes, which are pieces of words
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An interface approach
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There is an interrelationship between phonology and
morphology.
This interrelationship is explored in the cognitive area
of morphophonology.
Morphophonology:
– the aspect of cognitive science that studies the
classification of phonological aspects of knowledge
representation based on knowledge about grammatical
environments.
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Morphophoneme:
– a minimal meaningful unit of morphophonology, usually
surrounded by braces {}
– can be seen as parallel with a phoneme
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Syntax and Semantics/Pragmatics
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Syntax:
– the scientific study of the combination of words
to form phrases
– Rules and constraints are posited to capture
the knowledge for determining whether or not a
particular string of words in a language
constitutes a well-formed sentence.
Reference:
Brown, Keith and Jim Miller. 1991.Syntax: A Linguistic Introduction
to Sentence Structure. London and New York: Routledge.
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Key concepts in Syntax
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The mental lexicon
Phrase structure rules
Sentence structure
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Key concepts in
Semantics/Pragmatics
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Semantics
– the study of meaning in language
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Pragmatics
– the study of how language is used in different
social contexts, cultures, etc.
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An Interface approach
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Morphosyntax
– the interface between morphology and syntax
– applying the definitional criteria of morphology and
syntax e.g. Number in English nouns - plural subject
requires a plural verb The syntax-semantics
interface
– syntactic ambiguity creates semantic ambiguity in a
sentence like
Chan loves you more than Yan.
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Formal Grammars
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Linguistic knowledge representations can be
formalized into an algorithm
Two main aspects of grammatical
information processing: Generating and
Parsing sentences
Generation and parsing are important in
computer applications of natural languages
which has become an important aspect of the
computer or information processing industry
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Sentence Generation
(Bottom-up parsing)
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Starts with an initial string and ends with
terminal strings with lexical items as their
daughters.
A sentence (S) has thus been generated,
telling us how a sentence is built up
(bottom-up parsing).
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Sentence Parsing
(Top-down parsing)
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To parse a sentence means to analyse it into
its constituent parts by the systematic
application of lexical insertion rules and some
phrase structure rules.
In top-down parsing, we begin with an
existing sentence (S) and break it down into
its component parts by applying rules.
It is like the reverse process of
generation(bottom-up parsing).
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Language and Literacy
Acquisition
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Language acquisition
– innateness hypothesis
– innate language faculty (also called Language
Acquisition Device (LAD)).
– Those aspects of language innately determined are
universal (Universal Grammar)
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Literacy acquisition
– literacy as part of our mental, cognitive faculty
– 6 stages of reading (Daswani 1999)
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An interface approach to Language
and literacy acquisition
They are both part of learning to USE
language.
 Both need input from the environment.
 Literacy acquisition is like language
acquisition
 Literacy is best acquired in a language
one has acquired i.e. one’s mother tongue.
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What to expect in the exam...
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You will be asked to identify the
difference between basic terms in
all the areas covered.
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Conclusion
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What next?
– Students interested in the linguistic aspects of cognitive
science can do more advanced courses such as…
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LING1002 - Language.com: Language in the Contemporary World
(1st year undergraduate, co-taught with other staff members)
LING2001 - Computational Linguistics (intermediate undergraduate)
LING2011 - Language and Literacy (intermediate undergraduate)
LING2016 - Syntax II: The Theory of Grammar (advanced
undergraduate/graduate)
LING2018 - Lexical-Functional Grammar (advanced
undergraduate/graduate)
LINGXXXX - Language and Cognition
LINGXXXX - Language and Information Technology