Language 5 Flashcards
(12 cards)
Properties of language
- Communicative (meaning)
- Symbolic
- Principle of conventionality (meaning of words determined by conventions)
- Principle of contrast (Different words have different meanings - Generative
- Productive (using rules can create unlimited number of new utterances
- Creative (create new sentences) - Dynamic
- Creation of new words and ideas
Structure of Language
- Phonology
- Smallest unit of speech, sounds of a language - Morphology
- Word structure
Content Morphemes: Word that conveys meaning
Function Morphemes: Adds nuances to core meaning - Syntax
- Sentence Structure
Noun and verbs - Semantics
- Meaning of language in context
Denotation: Definition of a word
Connotation: Nuances to meaning
Why animals don’t have language
Use signs and signals to communicate
-> not language: no use of grammar, new meanings
understand meaning, but do not use syntax
Language Acquisition Stages
Cooing stage - first 6 months
Babbling stage - after 6 months
One-word stage - around 1 year
Two-word stage
Past Tense learning
Critical period
Early years when people become proficient in a language.
- Influences Phonology (mastery of sounds)
- does NOT influence vocabulary
Bilingualism
Two or more languages
- Social psychological factors of second language:
(good) - motivation and attitude
- good with selective attention
- following complicated instructions
- creativity
- sensitive to pragmatic aspects of language
(bad) - subtly alter pronunciation
- process language slower
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
Structure and vocabulary of a language influences the way individuals perceive and think about the world around them
Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar
Framework to describe structure and syntactical relations
- Deep Structure
essential meaning
connection between sentences
-Surface Structure
arrangement of words
results from transformations on deep structure
Factors affecting sentence comprehension
- Negatives
- Negative statements require more processing time, compared to affirmative ones - The Passive Voice
active form of a sentence is easier to understand then passive form - Nested Structures
- increase syntactic complexity and therefore is harder - Incremental Interpretation
- processing information as it becomes available, rather then waiting until the end of the sentence.
- leads to memory overload - Lexical Ambiguity
- Phrase or word has multiple meanings
- Pause longer when processing ambiguous word
Aphasia
Broca’s Aphasia:
- expressive language and speech production
- difficulty in forming words and sentences
Wernicke’s Aphasia:
- receptive language and comprehension
- impaired comprehension and production of meaningful speech
Hemispheric Specialisation
Left Hemisphere: Highest neural activity, in perception and interpretation
Right Hemisphere: Abstract processes, emotional tone, etc
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Speech Recognition
- recognise words from acoustic speech
- using speech spectogram (top down processing and context) - Syntactic Analysis
- get sentence structure based on rules of grammar - Semantic Analysis
- partial representation of meaning
- noun,verb,adjectives,structure of sentences - Pragmatic analysis
- take contextual information into account to get full meaning
- different statement types:
assertives, directives,commissives, expressives, declaratives
struggles with ambiguity and understanding context (requires background knowledge, and social context and pragmatics)
