PowerPoint by Glenn E. Meyer, Trinity University
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 Communicate – languages permit communication between individuals
 Arbitrary – The relationship between the elements of the language and their meaning is arbitrary. This is a key feature of symbols.
 Structured – Language is structured, meaning that the pattern of symbols is not arbitrary
 Generative – The basic units of language (words) can be used to build a limitless number of meanings
 Dynamic – Language is not static. It is changing constantly with new words and changes in rules of grammar (slowly)
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Levels of Analysis
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Phonemes: Individual speech sounds o 200 Phonemes have been identified. Approximately 46 are used in English as seen in Table
12.1
o Difficulties in perceiving phonemes:
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Individuals produce phonemes quite differently
Phonemes differ with the speech of an individual – maybe different due to coarticulation
Language development leads to adults not be able to perceive certain phonemes that they did not hear in earlier childhood
 Words o o
English language has approximately 600,000 words
Utterances are strung together in the speech stream. Which is a term used to refer to spoken speech that emphasizes its continuous nature. Although we perceive speech to be composed of individual words (and therefore to have short breaks between the words), speech sounds are produced fairly continuously. This can lead to error as seen in Table
12.2
 Sentences o Word order is the heart of syntax and for determining meaning. Grammatical sentences however can be ambiguous.
 Ex: “Time flies like an arrow” has 5 possible interpretations such as:
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• Time moves quickly, as an arrow does
Asses the pace of flies as you would assess the pace of an arrow
 Text: A group of related sentences forming a paragraph or a group of related paragraphs. Most notable and studied phenomenon of text comprehension is that people make inferences when they read text.
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Definition: A set of rules that describes the legal sentences that can be constructed in a language
Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) Distinctions:
 Competence: People’s knowledge of grammar, that is, the rules that they use to construct sentences. Competence is contrasted with Performance, which refers to the way that people actually talk. Performance is influenced not only by the rules of grammar but by lapses of memory and other factors that make the sentences people utter less grammatical than their competence indicates
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Performance: The grammaticality of the sentences that people utter. Performance is influenced not only by the grammatical rules people know (competence) but by other factors such as lapses of memory and social considerations such as interruptions
Types of Grammars:
 Word Chain Grammars: A proposal that people construct sentences by chaining one word after another, according to a set of rules about what words would be admissible next in the chain or what words are highly associated with words already in the sentence. o Problems:
 Associative grammars have a difficult time dealing with the “weird” sentence, such as
“The boy took his baseball bat and hit the squid”. Another classic problematic sentence is “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
 Languages can have dependencies that span many words. As for example: “The little dogs, whose master was the nastiest, most foul-mouth monster who had simultaneously threatened me with litigation and tried to romance me, were nevertheless quite loving to me”
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Phrase Structure Grammars o Definition and example: A grammar that represents sentences hierarchically, with each node of the hierarchy corresponding to a phrase structure as seen in Fig.
12.1
Specifics a limited number of sentence parts and how they can combined.
o o Can allow for recursion: A process can be recursive if it calls on itself to get its job done. A definition of something is recursive if the definition contains the thing defined. For example, one definition of a sentence is “two sentences joined by the word ‘and’ ” o Chomsky (1957) feels they cannot give a complete account of how we interpret language. For example, they would have difficulty with the ambiguous sentence: :
“Visiting relatives can be a nuisance.”
Transformational Grammar :
Chomsky’s system that can handle ambiguity based on two levels of representation: o o
Deep Structure: In language, the deep structure is the representation of a sentence constructed according to a basic set of phrase structure rules, without any transformations applied to the resulting representation. If transformations are applied, the sentence might be turned into a question or be phrased in the passive voice, for example
Surface Structure: A level of representation in text processing. The surface code refers to the exact wording and syntax of sentences.
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 Phoneme restoration effect (Warren, 1970; Samuel, 1966):
Phonemes that are poorly produced are “restored” by higher-level processes so that the perceiver believes that the missing phoneme actually was present. The system can infer what the missing phoneme should have been based on the context.
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Assume you hear the following sentences. The “
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” represents a cough.
What do you think they mean:
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It was found that the *eel was on the axle.
It was found that the *eel was on the shoe
Vision aids if we can see the speakers mouth. This is the basis of the
McGurk effect: An effect showing that both visual and auditory information are used in phoneme perception o
Example: Watching a video of a speaker saying “pa pa pa” and hearing simultaneously “na na na” leads to a perception of the speaker saying “ma ma ma”
 Categorical Perception: Refers to the fact that people do not perceive slight variations in how phonemes are pronounced.
Phonemes can vary along certain dimensions with no cost in their perceivability
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o Ex. Liberman, et al. (1957) landmark study demonstrating that b and p differ in voice onset time with a sharp boundary between the two which leads to them being heard categorically
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Researchers believe that people recognize words through a matching process in which a spoken word is compared with a mental dictionary known as a lexicon: The mental dictionary which has information stored about all of the words a person knows. The lexicon stores the pronunciation, spelling and part of speech of each word and has a pointer to another location in which the meaning is stored
 Lexicon access is measured by crossmodal priming:
A method of measuring access to the lexicon. In the most frequently used version of cross-modal priming, the participant listens to words and periodically must make a lexical decision about a letter string that appears on a computer screen as quickly as possible. Response times are shorter if the spoken word matches the letter string. o o
Lexical Decision: Task in which the participant sees a letter string on a screen and must decide as quickly as possible whether or not the letter string forms a word
Mispronunciation can block lexical access (Marslen-Wilson, et al., 1996) esp. when the changed phoneme is unnatural as seen in Table 12.3 (Gaskel and
Marslen-Wilson, 1966). Maybe explain by models such as the TRACE connectionist network of McClelland and Elman (1986) as seen in Fig. 12.3
Reading Words:
 Dual Route Model: Models that posit two mechanisms for reading. One route uses a direct match up of the spelling and entries in the lexicon, and the other translates the letters into sounds and then matches the sound to the auditory entry in the lexicon. o
Accounts for our ability to read nonwords such as “papperine”, irregular words like
“pint”, regular words like “cake”
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o Dyslexia:
 Acquired dyslexia: A reading problem caused by brain damage in adults who were normal readers before the injury
 Surface dyslexia: A pattern of reading difficulty in which the person has difficulty reading irregular words (e.g., yacht) but can read nonwords (e.g., slint)
 Phonological dyslexia: A pattern of reading difficulty in which the person has difficulty reading nonwords (e.g., slint) but can read irregular words (e.g., yacht
 Development dyslexia: An abnormal development of reading processes in children. o Normal Readers
 Response times to some nonwords (“koat”) should be slower than to nonwords whose pronunciation does not match real words (“wolt”) because the two routes will conflict (Rubenstein, et al., 1971)
 Normal readers when reading aloud should be slower with expects words such as
yacht vs. regular words such as round o Single Word Processing: Petersen, et al. (1988)
 meaning of words correlated with activation in left frontal cortex, anterior cingulate and right cerebellum. Later studies observed activation in temporal lobe
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• How is the lexicon accessed in the context of sentences?
 Important studies/terms: o o
Swinney (1979) on ambiguous sentences – alternative meanings are accessed by context makes all but one meaning inappropriate and they are suppressed
Simpson & Kreuger (1991) –biasing context could affect access to the lexicon resulting only in the appropriate meaning being retrieved as seen in Fig. 12.4
o Garden path sentence: A sentence in which the cognitive system initially builds one structure as the sentence is perceived, but later in the sentence it becomes clear that this in progress phrase structure is incorrect
Broca’s Area: o Sentence Parser: mechanism that derives phrase structures from sentences
 Questions about the parser:
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An area in the lateral frontal lobe, just anterior to the primary motor strip. As seen in
Box 12-2. Damage there produces Broca’s aphasia – a set of grammar related deficits
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What cues does the parser use to derive an interpretation?
► Key Words (Fodor and Garrett, 1967)
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Word Order (Slobin, 1966)
Principal of Minimal Attachment
Recency (Phillips and Gibson, 1997)
Working Memory (King and Just, 1991)
The principle that as the cognitive system parses sentences it is biased to build phrase structures in such a way that it adds new words to existing nodes in the phrase structure hierarchy rather than creating new nodes
When does the parser commit to an interpretation?
Is the parser influenced by surrounding context?
► First thought to be NO – Ferreira and Clifton (1986)
► Recent work suggests YES – Altman and Steedman (1988)
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Three levels of text representation (as seen in Figure 12.6):
• Surface code: A level of representation in text processing. The surface code refers to the exact wording and syntax of sentences
• Textbase: A level of representation in text processing. The textbase represents the ideas of the text but does not preserve the particular wording and syntax
• Situation Model: A level of representation in text processing. The situation model refers to deep knowledge of a text that represents an integration of information from the text and knowledge the reader had before reading the text
• Related Concepts:
 Basic unit of textbase and situational models is the proposition
 Evidence suggests the three representation are separate in the mind as seen in
Fig. 12.7 (Reder, 1982), work indicating people remember different aspects of text depending on perspective they are encourage to take when reading it or their goals in reading it
 Textbase and situation model thought to be built in parallel as people comprehend the surface code (Just and Carpenter, 1982; Kintsch, 1988)
• Inferences: drawn to enhance the coherence of the text:
 McKoon and Ratcliff (1992): Only inferences people make are those necessary to maintain coherence within a sentence or across two sentences
 Other suggest higher level memory representation allowing inferences over broader segments. For ex. O’brien and Albrecht (1992) as seen in Fig. 12.8
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When evaluating claims, we must keep the definitions of language clear – communicative, arbitrary, structured, generative and dynamic
Most animal communication in the wild has only the first property – communicative.
Ex: chimps and bees in the wild
Use grammar is the crucial test
Early attempts to teach nonhuman primates vocalized speech failed due their lack of proper physical speech apparatus
Attempts at chimp language were made with various methodologies:
 American Sign Language – Washoe, chimp (Gardner and Gardner, 1967); Koko – gorilla
(Patterson, 1978); Nim Chimpsky (haha), chimp – Terrace, et al., (1979)
 Metal chips (symbolizing nouns, verbs, concepts, adjectives) on a magnetic board – Sarah, chimp (Premack, 1917)
 Computer Keyboard with an artificial language called Yerkish – Lana, chimp; Kanzi, bonobo
(Savage-Rumbaugh, et al. 1998)
Results have not been impressive:
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Washoe learned about 132 signs, Nim about 125 – others were similar
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Many of the manual signs may not have been taught to the apes but ones naturally used by them
– Jane Goddal
Analysis of the chimp utterances don’t seem to show the necessary criterion of arbitrariness
(Epstein, et al. 1980; Terrace, et al,. 1979)
 Some indications of word order knowledge may be imitation of the trainer (Terrace, et al., 1979)
 Bonobos seem to have some greater linguistic competence and more ready to spontaneously learn (Savage- Rumbaugh, 1986)
 Pinker (1994) argues the very attempt to compare our abilities is flawed and scientifically empty
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Saphir-Whorf or Whorfian Hypothesis (Whorf, 1956): The idea that language influences thought. The strong version of the hypothesis holds that certain thoughts are impossible to entertain in certain languages.
The weaker version holds that it may be easier to entertain certain thoughts in certain languages
 Early Data: Language Does Not Influence Thought o o o
Naming had little effect on color perception (Brown and Lenneberg, 1954)
Later experiments suggest that color memory was impacted by language
(Heider, 1972; Roberson, Davies and Davidoff, 2000)
Debate over whether native Chinese speakers would have difficulty understanding counterfactual reasoning as Chinese does not have a subjunctive tense. Bloom (1981) reported difficulties but Au (1983, 1984) suggested the results were due to bad translations. Chinese speakers could understand them.
 Recent Data: Language Does Influence Thought:
 o Classification of objects follows language patterns – Lucy with English vs.
Maya; Zhang and Schmitt (1998) with Chinese as seen in Table 12.4 with the use of perceptual vs. material classifiers
Conclusion: - There is reasonable support for a modest version of the
Whorfian hypothesis
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