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Language

Language. What ’ s special about human language?. universality every human community uses language (there are more than 5000 languages) every child with normal capacities learns to use language

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Language

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  1. Language

  2. What’s special about human language? • universality • every human community uses language(there are more than 5000 languages) • every child with normal capacities learns to use language • every human language is hierarchically organised: sounds > morphemes > words > phrases > sentences > text • creativity • we can understand sentences we’ve never heard before • we can produce new sentences

  3. What is language • a set of symbols • they categorise the world • arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning • a finite set • a set of rules • how to combine words into sentences • a finite set of rules • but they allow an infinite number of combinations

  4. The levels of language • Phonemes: speech sounds • 11 (Hawaian) to over 60 (Bantu) (47 in English) • Morphemes: smallest units with meaning or a grammatical function • time-table-s • mean-ing-ful • Lexical items: words or expressions with a set meaning • keep an eye on

  5. IPA consonants

  6. IPA vowels

  7. 19th century

  8. Phonemic restoration effect (Warren 1970) • Bottom-up versus top-down processing • People think they can hear the [s]

  9. Speech segmentation • We hear individual words in a sentence • If individual words are extracted from the sound wave of a sentence, they are difficult to identify (bottom-up processing)

  10. More levels of language • sentences • have a syntactic structure • parsing: sentence processing • texts • meaning is more than just words and syntax • we make inferences: use context and background knowledge to guess the message

  11. Syntax first or syntax and semantics together? • Tanenhaus et al 1995. Eye tracking:Put the apple on the towel in the box.

  12. Bransford & Johnson 1973 John was trying to fix the birdhouse. He was pounding the nail when his father came out to watch him and help him do the work.

  13. John was trying to fix the birdhouse. He was using a hammer when his father came out to watch him and help him do the work.

  14. Neurolinguistic evidence for the separation of functions

  15. Left hemispheric specialisation • fMRI scans with 3-month olds (Dehaene-Lambertz et al 2002) • forward and backward speech (rapidly changing acoustic stimulation without the prosodic features of speech) • both forward and backward: activation of speech processing areas of left hemisphere • only forward: activation of language processing areas – angular gyrus behind Wernicke’s

  16. fMRI scans of 2-month olds (Dehaene-Lambertz et al 2009) • sentences read by mother, sentences read by stranger, piano music • left planum temporale more sensitive to sentences than right planum temporale • no difference for music

  17. Right hemispheric specialisation for prosody • Near-infrared optical topography with 3-month olds (sleeping) (Homae et al 2006) • normal versus prosodically flattened speech • normal speech elicited greater activation in the temporal-parietal regions of the right hemisphere

  18. ERP • Osterhout, McLaughlin & Bersick, TICS 1(6), 1997 • ___ The cats won’t EAT. • … The cats won’t BAKE. • … The cats won’t EATING. • … The cats won’t BAKING. • N400: semantic incongruity • P600: syntactic error

  19. Appearance of N400 • ERP study of 1-year olds (Friedrich & Friederici 2010) • paring pictures with nonwords • N400 (semantic anomaly) effect for children with high word production skills only (measured by parental questionnaire) Genetic explanation for basic specialisation?

  20. Aphasia • Dysfunction in processing or producing language • Left-hemisphere damage • Common causes • neurovascular damage (stroke) • head injury • brain tumour or other structural abnormality • Worst immediately after injury, may improve with time. • Involves 0.6% of the population each year

  21. Paul Broca and Leborgne 1861 • Sudden loss of speech • Right side paralysis • Relatively normal comprehension

  22. Autopsy: lesion in left frontal lobe • Broca: the area of “the special ability of articulated langauge”

  23. Broca’s aphasia • Problems with grammar and fluency • Good comprehension • Good word skills

  24. Broca (expressive) aphasia: symptoms Hogy került a kórházba? Igen... hétfőn ... öö ... apa és Piri ... és apa ... kórházba. Két .. orvos, és ... harminc perc ... és ... igen ... és ... kórház. És ... ööö szerdán ekkor ... kilenc órakor ... és ... harminc perc ... csütörtök ... tíz óra, orvosok. Két orvos ... és fogak. Igen ... így. (Bánréti 2007)

  25. Carl Wernicke 1874 • lesion in left tempral lobe • serious comprehension deficit • production deficit:

  26. Wernicke’s aphasia • fluent but confused • nonsense words • word recall problems • grammar and morphology largely intact but there are semantic anomalies

  27. Wernicke (receptive) aphasia És milyen autókat szerelt? A zsigulikat, a legislegelső országokat mikor megvették a magyaroknak a magyaroktól, az úgy volt csinálva először, hogy első godás volt. De ez a kis krebekó Trabant az tizen volt vagy tizenegy rágerős, ahová a frajók a rág után jutottak. Eleltem mindent, vároztam országoltam, moszkat, kutást. Mentem hazafelé, azt leesett a lábam. Innen tarboltam le a lábam. De most nem vagyok jól, mert nem tudom észben tartani az eszemből az eszemnek. (Bánréti 2007)

  28. Language and thought

  29. Language - Thought • the same? • one makes the other possible? • can we think without language? • does our language influence our perception of the world? • does thinking come before language or the other way round?

  30. Political correctness„language use has an effect on the way we think” • euphemisms in politics • papacification = bombing • revenue inccrease = tax • labour force rationalisation = lay-offs • social movements: sexist/racist etc. language is responsible for sexist/racist etc. thinking • chairman → chairperson • negro → African American • retarded → with learning difficulties

  31. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis • We partition nature as dictated by our language • We categorise our environment, organise things into concepts according to the conventions of our linguistic community

  32. Does grammatical gender influence our thinking?(Boroditsky & Schmidt, 2003) • Spanish, German and English speakers (experiment run in English) • learning: 24 object—name dyads • test: object word presented – recall of name? Results • for Spanish and German speakers, better recall of names whose gender correponds to the grammatical gender of the object word • for English speakers, better recall of names whose gender corresponds to the gender subjects previously assigned to the object • apple – Paul / Paula • bench – Eric / Erica • clock – Karl / Karla • apple – ? • bench – ? • clock – ?

  33. Korean locatives(Bowerman & Choi 1994, 2001)

  34. Spatial prepositions • Preferential looking task: English speaking 9-14 months olds shown videos of loose-fit vs. tight-fit, and of containment vs. support (McDonough et al 2003) • familiarisation: pairs of scenes with same spatial category shown on screens • testing: pairs of scenes with same versus different spatial category • infants looked longer at the different-category scenes • adult controls could not learn the Korean contrast (oddity selection task)

  35. Spatial reference systems • Relative, egocentric: left, right, behind, in front • Intrinsic, object-centred: left/right side of the object, back/front of the object • Absolute, geocentric: North, South etc.

  36. Spatial reference frames • English: relative frame: left-right • Tzeltal: No words for left or right • Absolute reference frame: • alan: downhill ~north • ajk’ol: uphill ~south • also on level surface, outdoors and indoors

  37. Modern explanations • language may selectively direct attention • language can lead to a recoding of categories (Karmiloff-Smith) • language may invite comparisons, the finding of similarities (Gentner & Namy 2006)

  38. Experiments(Brown & Levinson 1993, Levinson 1996, 2003, Majid et al 2004) Behaviour in non-linguistic spatials tasks? • Dutch and Tzeltal speakers • Turning an arrangement of objects by 180 degrees • relative: egocentric • absolute: geocentric

  39. 1. Chips task

  40. Chips task - results

  41. Linguistic creativity of people

  42. The role of imitation and rote learning • Arbitrary phenomena specific to individual languages • phoneme inventory • lexical items • But more is needed for the acquisition of • word meaning, • morphological categorisation.

  43. Quine (1960) on word meaning gavagai

  44. The wug test (Gleason 1958) This is a wug. Now there are two ______ .

  45. Preferential looking paradigm

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