lesson 9 language

Question 1

in english there is a rule for adjectives

Answer 1

opinion size age shape color origin material purpose noun

Question 2

how does language work

Answer 2

humans evolved another strategy of decoding sounds we have agreed have the same meaning

Question 3

other animals’ communication system

Answer 3

bee waggle dance as location for food
bird and whale songs
ants dancing with pheromones

Question 4

animal forms of communication

Answer 4

limited repotoire for limited services like location and threat

Question 5

language

Answer 5

a system for communicating with others using signals that are combined according to rules
of grammar and that convey meaning

idea needs to be encoded in words then made into sounds and listener goes backwards

Question 6

semantics

Answer 6

ideas to words

Question 7

syntax

Answer 7

rules about order and shape of words

Question 8

phonology

Answer 8

encoding of words into sounds

Question 9

word

Answer 9

arbitrary vocalization or hand gesture that refers to mental concept

-if i say apple you can visualize what i mean

Question 10

human semantics are arbitrary

Answer 10

different languages connect different concepts to different sounds/words (manzana, pomme)

-asl vs bsl

Question 11

how do we learn words

Answer 11

average hs grad knows 45-60k words
learn 6.5 words a day, very fast intake as kids

Question 12

reference problem

Answer 12

an unfamiliar word can refer to many concepts, how does a language figure out which one

Question 13

how do children tend to solve reference problems

Answer 13

reasoning the speaker’s mental states

Question 14

social referencing

Answer 14

who is the speaker paying attention to? what are they looking at because that has a cue toward what they’re talking about

Question 15

novelty matching

Answer 15

why is the speaker using this new word instead of the one we already have?

Question 16

intentionality

Answer 16

does the speech seem to match what the speaker is trying to convey?

Question 17

the parsing problem

Answer 17

identify word boundaries, like where there are breaks or pauses

Question 18

how we solve parsing problem

Answer 18

motherese- singsongy voice we use with kids: speak slowly, enunciate clearly, and use simpler sentences than they do when speaking with adults

-changing nature of acoustic signal and making it easier for kids to learn how words sound and end by elongating words and adding breaks and pauses

Question 19

solving parsing problem (older)

Answer 19

the statistics of the speech stream- kids use big data approach to figure out which words exist in their language

Question 20

phonology

Answer 20

motor cortex wilder penfield
ton of cortex in mouth/lips/face

1) taking a breath
2) voicing by moving vocal cords
3) resonance (mouth shape)
4) articulation (how words are pronounced)

Question 21

experiment with phonology

Answer 21

newborns can figure out the difference between two english sounds, b and d

babies can hear the difference in two hindi sounds but once thy grow to a certain age they cant hear the difference because it’s not maintained

Question 22

categorical perception

Answer 22

the phenomenon in which a continuous acoustic dimension, such as voice-onset time, is perceived as having distinct categories with sharp discontinuities at certain points

when items that range along a continuum are perceived as being either more or less similar to each other

Take for example the /l/ and /r/ sounds of the English language. While native English speakers easily distinguish these two sounds, Japanese speakers are generally unable to hear the difference. The English words ‘lag’ and ‘rag’ would sound the same to them

analogy: take continuous stream of audio and impose boundaries where it makes sense

Question 23

syntax aphasia

Answer 23

broca’s

individuals with damage to this
area, which results in Broca’s aphasia, understand language relatively well, but they have increasing comprehension difficulty as grammatical structures get more complex. Their real struggle, though, is with speech
production. Typically, they speak in short, staccato phrases that consist mostly of content morphemes (e.g., cat, dog). Function morphemes (e.g., and, but) are usually missing, and grammatical structure is impaired. A person with Broca’s aphasia might say something like “Ah, Monday, uh, Casey park. Two, uh, friends, and, uh, 30 minutes

Question 24

semantics aphasia

Answer 24

wernicke’s

They can produce
grammatical speech, but it tends to be meaningless, and they have considerable difficulty comprehending language. A person suffering from Wernicke’s aphasia might say something like “Feel very well. In other words, I used to be able to work cigarettes. I don’t know how. Things I couldn’t hear from are here

Question 25

syntax (grammar)

Answer 25

allows us to specify the relation among concepts

relations specified in special rules like word order, inflection (-ed equals past) or helper words (like i will do this)

Question 26

semantics

Answer 26

meanings of words, signs, symbols, and the phrases that represent them

Question 27

how do kids learn the rules of their language

Answer 27

-parents dont police kids grammar
-kids arent imitating their parents; they generate novel utterances
-kids dont need reward to learn language

instruction, imitation, reinforcement are wrong so behaviorism is wrong, language is modular

Question 28

noam chomsky

Answer 28

conditioning and reinforcement cannot get you to learn language (skinner behaviorism is not correct)

we already programmed to learn language, we have strong expectations about language

pinker says “language instinct”

Question 29

language instinct

Answer 29

children invent grammatical structure

“i runned”, my teacher “holded”

untilt they learn the rule about modifying verbs and how it’s applied properly

The nativist theory also explains why deaf infants babble speech sounds they have never heard and why the pattern of language development is similar in children throughout the world

Question 30

nicaraguan sign language section read

Answer 30

At first, the school did not teach a formal sign language, and none of the children had learned to sign at home, but the children gradually began to communicate using hand signals they themselves invented.
Over the past 30 years, their sign language has developed considerably and researchers have studied this new language for the telltale characteristics of languages that have evolved over much longer periods. For instance, mature languages typically break down experience into separate
components. When we describe something in motion, such as a rock rolling down a hill, our language separates the type of movement (rolling) and the direction of movement (down). If we simply made a gesture, however, we would use a single continuous downward movement to indicate this motion. This is exactly what the first children to develop the Nicaraguan sign language did. But younger groups of children, who have developed the sign language further, use separate signs to describe the direction and
the type of movement—a defining characteristic of mature languages. That the younger children did not
merely copy the signs from the older users suggests that a predisposition exists to use language to dissect
our experiences. Thus, their acts of creation nicely illustrate the interplay of nativism (the predisposition to
use language) and experience (growing up in an insulated deaf culture)

Question 31

enculturated apes

Answer 31

what happens if you treat apes like human kids?

nothing ever “clicks” for them- you have to teach them the 100th time like you taught them the 1st time

they dont have any word order, every utterance is an imperative, asking for something or directing something

can learn semantics but not syntax

Question 32

universal grammar

Answer 32

theory that humans have genetically determined language faculty- we are born knowing the rules of syntax

rules have certain free parameters that are fixed by certain languages

all languages have verbs and two types of nouns

order of words varies with limits (most languages are subject object verb)

Question 33

critical period for syntax
genie

Answer 33

parents chained her to basement and never spoke with her but she was never able to learn syntax (linguistic too late, modules hungry for rules to grammar were rededicated to other things)

grammatical knowledge poor “mike paint” or “applesauce buy store”

Question 34

left and right hemispheres processing

Answer 34

people who moved to us at various stages of life

lots of left activity, but those who learned second language late in childhood had a lot of input from right hemisphere

earlier you start speaking the language, closer it is to sounding native

Question 35

prosody

Answer 35

modulating tone to understand what is being said (speaker)

Question 36

implicature

Answer 36

a lot of what we say is implied, we fill in what the person is saying (listener)

*if i say he ate some cookies, i assume he only ate some but not all

*i slept on a boat means it wasnt their boat, or they would have said that

Question 37

noam chomsky and liz spelke experiment

Answer 37

put you in a room and in front of a table with 4 buckets and you have to keep track of the prize under the bucket (diagonal)

now if i paint one side of the table, it’s easier to keep track

little kids werent able to keep track even with blue wall

Question 38

linguistic determinism (sapir whorf hypothesis)

Answer 38

the language you speak has influence on the thoughts you have (feminine or masculine)

The most frequently cited example of linguistic relativity comes from the Inuit in Canada.
Their language has many different terms for frozen white flakes of precipitation, for which we use the word snow. Whorf believed that because they have so many terms for snow, the Inuit perceive and think about snow differently than do English speakers

like hebrew and russian have separate words for light blue and dark blue so they have greater capacity to identify different blues

*some say worf was too simplistic and should be more specific about how language influences thought

Question 39

what is language for

Answer 39

cognitive psych

primarily for communication and thinking

Question 40

Grammar

Answer 40

a set of rules that specify how the units of language
can be combined to produce meaningful messages

Question 41

genetic dysphasia

Answer 41

a syndrome characterized by an inability to learn the
grammatical structure of language despite having otherwise normal intelligence

Question 42

bilingualism

Answer 42

Learning a second language early in life increases the density of gray matter in the
brain. Panel (a) shows a view of the lower left parietal region, which has denser gray matter in bilingual individuals
relative to monolingual individuals. (b) As proficiency in a second language increases, so does the density of gray matter
in the lower parietal region. People who acquired a second language earlier in life were also found to have denser gray
matter in this region. Interestingly, this area corresponds to the same area that is activated during verbal fluency tasks

Question 43

the language instinct

Answer 43

Pinker sees language as an ability unique to humans, produced by evolution to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He compares language to other species’ specialized adaptations such as spiders’ web-weaving or beavers’ dam-building behavior, calling all three “instincts”.

nativist

Pinker argues that all languages are built on the same universal grammar and that the language mechanism is built into the human brain

Question 44

phonemic difference

Answer 44

difference in sound leads to difference in meaning

Question 45

phonemic restoration effect

Answer 45

sounds missing from a speech signal can be restored by the brain and appear to be heard

Question 46

syntantic processing

Answer 46

Syntactic processing is usually taken to be the most basic analysis step, which feeds into semantic processing and the inclusion of other information. A separate mental module parses sentences and lexical access happens first. Then, one syntactic hypothesis is considered at a time.