1 / 29

Psycholinguistics I

Psycholinguistics I. LING 640. Today. Goals of the course Integrative overview of psycholinguistics Recurring themes Practical skills Practical information Specialization & Abstraction Introducing Lab #1A. Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity

ketan
Download Presentation

Psycholinguistics I

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Psycholinguistics I LING 640

  2. Today • Goals of the course • Integrative overview of psycholinguistics • Recurring themes • Practical skills • Practical information • Specialization & Abstraction • Introducing Lab #1A

  3. Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity National Science FoundationIntegrative Graduate Education & Research Training (IGERT) awardDGE-0801465 (2008-2013) 25+ faculty, 7 departments, local, national, & international partnerscourses, talks, integrative research, outreach, …

  4. Franz Boas (1858-1942) Ken Hale (1934-2001) Language Diversity

  5. security technology clinical/educational

  6. What is psycholinguistics about?

  7. From Cellsto Syntax

  8. Sensory Maps Internal representations of the outside world. Cellular neuroscience has discovered a great deal in this area.

  9. The mind/brain’s view of the body body parts scaled to area in brain: somatosensory homunculus

  10. Guiding Questions • What do speakers of a language mentally represent? • How did those representations get there? • How are those representations constructed? • How are those representations encoded?

  11. Language is a Human Specialization • Species specificity • Within-species invariance • Spontanous development, insensitivity to input • Independence of general intelligence • Selective brain damage • The ‘Language Instinct’ [Pinker 1994]; see Gleitman & Newport 1995 chapter [readings] for nice summary • These arguments suggest that there’s a coherent object of study, but tell us very little about its form

  12. We need explicit answers… • What do speakers of a language mentally represent? • How did those representations get there? • How are those representations constructed? • How are those representations encoded?

  13. Explicit models quickly reveal surprising complexity

  14. Simple(-ish) Example I • Vowel pronunciation (Canada, some midwest, Maryland, …) • light l^jt • lied lajt • bright br^jt • bride brajd • aj --> ^j / ___ [-voice] • ‘Derived’ word forms • bitter, sitter, grater • lighter, brighter, writer • Abstract solution: rule ordering

  15. Simple(-ish) Example II • Distribution of pronouns/reflexives • John likes him/himself. • John thinks that Mary likes him/himself. • Infinitival clauses • John appeared to Bill to like himself. • John appeared to Bill to like him. • But… • John appealed to Bill to like himself. • John appealed to Bill to like him. • Abstract solution… • Johni appealed to Billj [PROj to like himselfj ]

  16. Abstraction is a double-edged sword

  17. ‘the dog was big and hairy’

  18. Abstraction • Abstraction is valuable • Provides representational power • Provides representational freedom • Provides an efficient code • Abstraction is costly • Linguistic representations are more distant from experience • This places a burden on the learner - motivation for innate knowl. • This places a burden on comprehension/production systems • … and it makes it harder to know what to look for in the brain

  19. Abstraction and Learning

  20. Abstraction and Learning • Must ensure easy learning of any human language • Learner must project from finite input to a system with infinite expressive power

  21. typology problem =learning problem N. Chomsky Principles & Parameters program (1980s)

  22. Who do you think John likes __? Who do you think that John likes __? Who do you think __ likes John? Who do you think that __ likes John? that-trace effect English * French * Spanish ok Italian ok Levantine Ar. * Beni-Hassan Ar. ok Post-verbal subject position ‘Telephoned John.’ Who do you think that likes John __?

  23. typology problem =learning problem Challenges… Link all hard-to-observe facts to easy-to-observe phenomena Find reliable parameters of variation in the face of microvariation Find a reliable learning procedure Show evidence of abstract inference in learning Principles & Parameters program (1980s)

  24. statistical learning! Elissa Newport Challenges… Learning is closely tied to experience Robust learning procedures available, noise sensitive Evidence of learning available Almost nothing to say about hard-to-observe phenomena Little to say about typological consistency

  25. Abstraction, Sounds, and Concepts

  26. “It has sometimes been argued that linguistic theory must meet the empirical condition that it account for the ease and rapidity of parsing. But parsing does not, in fact, have these properties. […] In general, it is not the case that language is readily usable or ‘designed for use.’” (Chomsky & Lasnik, 1993, p. 18)

  27. Translating Representations • We can show that comprehension and production are, in fact, rapid and accurate • Entails a need to quickly translate between codes • Sounds abstract stuff Concepts • Similar arguments apply as in learning: abstraction carries a cost

More Related