Transcript Language Use and Understanding

Major issues in
Psycholinguistics
Language Use and Understanding
Class 3
Announcements
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Back to the regular classroom… Gavet
310
Please send questions in email, not as
attachment
Supplementary reading will be posted
tomorrow morning (background about
visual word recognition). Also required,
but there aren’t any reading questions for
it. Discussion questions optional.
Outline
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Discussion of Lenneberg and Miller framework for the course
Major issues in Psycholinguistics
Discussion of transcripts
Preparation for next week
Historical Perspective
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Linguistics
Historical linguistics
 description of grammar
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Psychology
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Behaviorism
Cognitive Revolution
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Focus on mental representations
Language as the study of the mind
Chomsky (1928- )
deep vs. surface structure
 Competence vs. performance
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Miller
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1960 founded Harvard Center for
Cognitive Studies with Bruner
Lenneberg’s biological
(cognitive) approach
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People from all cultures speak language.
Speech onset is age-related
Same acquisition strategy for all babies.
All languages based on same formal
underlying system.
Operating characterstics don’t change
over time.
Can be impaired by brain legions.
Miller
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“Is linguistics a branch of cognitive
psychology?” -- I.e., should it be studied in
terms of how it is mentally represented?
Language is generative, knowledge is
structured
 Syntactic knowledge seems to go beyond the
input (poverty of the stimulus argument)
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Discussion
Language as species-specific
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Do you agree with Lenneberg that there is no
relationship between communication systems of different
species?
If animals have elaborate means of communication, do
they maybe have an infinite amount of things they can
“say,” much like the way humans can create an unlimited
amount of unique sentences?
The article claims that human beings are the only
animals in which a single system serves both
communication and a complex representational
intelligence. What about chimpanzees using sign
language or vervet monkeys signaling different predators
with different calls?
If language is species specific then how are we able to
explain the expressions of KoKo and Nim Chimpsky?
What would Lenneberg say if a human culture were
discovered today in which the people did not use
language? To what extent would that invalidate his
theories?
Critical period
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If childrens' brains can recover from brain
regions, why can't adults'? Is there any research
into how plasticity could be
helped/forced/simulated in adult brains? If the
right hemisphere can take over language in
children, why can't it be taught to do this in
adults?
Is it possible for one to acquire a new language
after critical age?
Do bilingual children learn additional languages
more easily than uni-lingual children, even after
the critical period has passed?
The Role of Input in
Acquisition
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How do linguistic experts know that children do not
somehow learn through hearing varied examples of
different types of sentences that the rules are structuredependent?
How important of a factor is family to one's speech
development?
With an innate grammar and understanding of how
languages should work, what would happen if a child
was raised learning a non-grammatical language that
didn’t follow many of the common assumptions in the
proposed universal grammar.
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Closest natural examples: pidgins, home sign
Some children have the capacity for language but do not
use it…such as congenital deafness.” Is this really true?
Is Language “Special”?
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How is human language fundamentally similar or
different to other human cognitive abilities?
Is the principle of structure-dependence something that
humans apply naturally to other areas or is it specific to
language?
If human’s brains are specifically designed for language
and animals’ brains are not, than what makes language
special and animal communication not?
Is language also dependent on memory? Miller
mentions that not only do we need to produce a literal
semantic interpretation of a sentence heard, but we also
depend on context and knowledge of the other speaker
to decide between different interpretations (for example,
of the phrase “David drinks.”).
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The relation of computer
science and
psycholinguistics
Why is it so important that we figure out how to make
computers talk?
Why do computers have trouble carrying on a
meaningful conversation even ifit has access to semantic
representations of sentences?
Miller points out that the kind of computers available to
us today could never be made to combine
representational and communicative functions the way
humans beings do, and that he doubts that this will ever
occur. Do you think it could be possible in the future to
make a computer capable of such complex functions?
The elephant’s trunk
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Is it fair to assume, as Sperber and Wilson do, that “it is
as strange for humans to conclude that the essential
purpose of language is for communication as it would be
for elephants to conclude that the essential purpose of
noses is for picking things up”?
. . . If the essential purpose of language isn't for
communication, what is it?
. . . Does the interpretation of the elephant’s trunk hold
primarily because we have alternate evidence that the
elephant's trunk's primary purpose is for something other
than picking things up? If we only observed it engaged in
"picking-up" behavior, would it be reasonable to
conclude that such behavior is its primary purpose after
all? And how much value is there in differentiating
between what something "evolved to do" versus what we
see it actually doing?
Looking ahead…
Major Issues in Psycholinguistics
Goal of Psycholinguistics
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How do we extract meaning from the
linguistic signal?
How do we turn thought into words in
language production?
General Issues
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Cognitive architecture - encapsulated or not?
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Interaction of different levels
Linguistic vs. nonlinguistic sources of information
Audience design / Theory of Mind
How does this architecture develop in
children? (role of input, constraints of
architecture itself)
Individual differences
Neural architecture
Language and Thought
Levels of Processing
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Comprehension
Sound / speech perception
 Visual and Spoken Word recognition
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Representations of words
 Matching of signal with words
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Word segmentation
Ambiguity
Sentence Processing
 Discourse Processing
 Role of Prosody
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Levels of Processing
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Production
How do we access words?
 How do we construct syntax?
 How do we construct sounds?
 How is prosody generated?
 How do we choose referring expressions?
 How do we encode discourse status?
 What leads to production difficulty and how
does this impact production?
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Transcripts
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What phenomena did you notice?
Next class: visual word
recognition
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Van Orden
Reading about interactive activation model
Why start with reading?
Main research question: does reading
acess phonological information?
Models of reading
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Direct access mode of reading:
orthography
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Phonolgical mediation
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Red --> sequence of letters is linked to a
stored memory of lexical item
Red --> /rEd/ --> sounds linked to a stored
memory of lexical item
Dual-access theories - both used, but what
is relation between them?
Word Superiority Effect
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Reicher, 1969, Wheeler, 1970
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Time course of processing
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Issue of general interest in processing
Which processes are “early” or “late”?
Which precede which?
Are there techniques to tap only the early
processes?
Emphasis on early processes as most
important
WORD
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What to look for
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What is the main research question?
What are the manipulated variables?
What are the controls (and why are they
used - I.e., what alternate theory do they
control for)?
What are the main results? (E.g., what
condition produced more errors?)
What are conclusions?
Remember!
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Next week we’re back to the regular
classroom… Gavet 310