Week 9 Language - Lecture notes 9 PDF

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Lecture notes for Grade 12 experimental psychology (Mr. Edwards). I have posted the notes from every lecture, which should cover everything....

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Chapter 10: Language ● Aphasia = loss of the ability to produce and understand ordinary language ○ Think normally but complain that they are "trapped" in their own heads, unable to express what they are thinking The organization of language ● Language use involves a special type of translations ● Language relies on well-defined patterns ○ Patterns in how individuals words are used, patterns in how individual words are used, patterns in how words are put together into phrases ● What are the patterns of English that we all apparently all know and use ● Language has a structure

○ ○ At the highest level of the structure are the ideas intended by the speakers, or the ideas that the listener derives from the input ■ Ideas are typically expressed in sentences ■ Sentences = coherent sequences of words that express the intended meaning of a speaker ○ Sentences in turn are composed of phrases, in turn composed of words ■ Words composed of morphemes = smallest language units that carry meaning ■ Bound morphemes and free morphemes ■ Bound add information crucial for interpretation ○ In spoken language, morphemes are conveyed by sounds = phonemes = defined as the smallest unit of sound that can serve to distinguish ● Language is organized in another ○ Within each of these levels, people can combine and recombine the units to produce novel utterances ■ Assembling phonemes into brand-new morphemes or assembling words into brand-new phases ○ Crucially not all combinations are possible Phonology ● Production of speech

○ ○ Noise is produced ■ If air flow is interrupted or altered, capability enables humans to produce a wide range of different sounds ○ Within the larynx there are two flaps of muscular tissue = vocal folds ■ Can be rapidly opened and closed producing a buzzing sort of vibration = voicing ○ Can produce sound by narrowing the air passageway within the mouth itself ○ Various aspects of speech production provide a basis for categorizing speech sounds ■ We can distinguish sounds according to how the airflow is restricted = manner of production ■ Air flow is allowed to move through the nose for speech but not others ○ For some speech sounds, the flow of air fully stopped for a moment ○ We can distinguish between sounds that are voiced and those that are not ○ Sounds can be categorized according to where the airflow is restricted = articulation ■ Bilabial sounds like p and b ■ Close your lips ■ Labiodental sounds like f and v ■ Place your top teeth close to your bottom lip ■ Alveolar sounds like t and d ■ Place tongue just behind your upper teeth ○ Categorization scheme enables us to describe any speech sound in terms of a few simple features ■ Specify manner of production ■ Sound is produced with air moving the mouth and with a full interruption to the flow of air ■ Voicing ■ Sound happens to be unvoiced ■ Place of articulation ■ Features are all we need to identify ■ If any of these features changes so does the sound's identity

○ Features of sound production in English are combined and recombined to produce 40 or so different phonemes ● Complexity of speech production ○ Description of speech sounds invites a simple proposal about speech perception ○ Speech perception is more complicated than this

○ ■ Moment by moment sound amplitudes produced by a speaker uttering a brief greeting ■ These amplitudes (in form of air pressure changes) reach the ear ■ Within this stream of speech there are no markers to indicate where one phenome ends and the next begins ■ For the most part there are no gaps to indicate boundaries between successive syllables or successive words ■ First step to phenome identification = 'slice' stream into the appropriate segments = speech segmentation ○ Lack skill needed to segment the stream ■ Unable to supply the word boundaries ■ Consequence = hear what is really there = uninterrupted flow of sound ■ Often why speech in a foreign language sounds so fast ○ Coarticulation = refers to the fact that in producing speech, you don’t utter one phenome at a time ■ Overlap ■ Helps to make speech production faster and considerably more fluent ■ Has consequences for sounds produced ■ Can't point to a specific acoustical pattern and say "this is the pattern of an s sound" ■ Acoustical pattern is different contexts ■ Speech perception therefore has to "read past" these context differences in order to identify the phenomes produced ○ Aids to speech perception ■ Need for segmentation in a continuous speech stream, variations caused by coarticulation, variation from speaker to speaker = make speech perception rather complex ■ The speech you encounter is surprisingly limited in its range

■ Estimated that the 50 most commonly used words in English make up more than half of the words you actually hear ■ Perception of speech shares a crucial attribute with all other types of perception ■ Don’t rely on the stimuli you receive, instead, you supplement this input with other knowledge, guided by the context in which a word appears ■ Evident in the phonemic restoration effect ■ Researchers start by recording a bit of speech and then they modify what they've recorded ■ How much does the context in which we hear a word help us? ■ Pollack and Pickett recorded a number of naturally occurring conversations ■ From the recordings they spliced out individual words and presented them in isolation to their research participants ■ With no context to guide them participants were able to identify only half of the words ■ If restored to the original context the same stimuli were easy to identify ■ Benefits of context are considerable ○ Categorical perception ■ Speech perception also benefits from a pattern called categorical perception ■ People are much better at hearing the differences between categories of sounds than they are at hearing the variations within a category of sounds ■ Surprisingly insensitive to differences within each of these categories ■ This pattern is precisely what you want because it enables you to hear the differences that matter without hearing inconsequential variations within the category ■ Demonstrations of categorical perception generally rely on a series of stimuli, created by a computer ■ Create a series of stimuli, each slightly different from the one before, ranging from a clear sound at one extreme, through a series of "compromise" sounds, until we reach at the other extreme a clear sound ■ How do people perceive these various sounds? ■ As we move through the series, we might expect people to be less and less likely to identify each stimulus as ___ and correspondingly more and more likely to identify each as __ ■ As we move away from this prototype, cases should be harder and harder to categorize ■ Even though the stimuli are gradually changing from one extreme to another, participants "hear" an abrupt shift, so that roughly half the stimuli are reliably categorized as ___ and the other half as ___ ■ Participants seem indifferent to the differences within each category ■ Perceptual apparatus is tuned to provide you just the information you need ■ Perception serves you well by largely ignoring these "sub phonemic" variations

● Combining phonemes ○ English relies on just a few dozen phonemes ■ These sounds can be combined and recombined to produce thousands of different morphemes (can be combined themselves to create word after word) ○ There are rules governing these combinations, and users of the language reliably respect these rules ○ In English certain sounds can occur at the end of a word but not at the beginning ○ Other combinations seem prohibited outright ○ Limits are simply facts about English ■ Not at all a limit on what human ears can hear or human tongues can produce, and other languages routinely use combinations that for English speakers seem unspeakable ○ Rules governing the adjustments that occur when certain phonemes are uttered one after another ○ English speakers all seem to know the rule that governs this distinction ■ Rule hinges on whether the base noun ends with a voiced or unvoiced sound ■ Obey this rule even with novel, made-up cases Morphemes and words ● For each word, the speaker knows the word's sound (sequence of phenomes that make up the word) and its orthography (sequence of letters that spell the word) ● Speaker also knows how to use the word within various phrases, governed by the rules of syntax ● Speaker knows the meaning of a word ○ Must have a semantic representation for the word to go with the phonological representation ● Building new words ○ Estimates of someone's vocabulary size need to be interpreted with caution ■ Size of an individual's vocabulary is actually quite fluid ○ New words don't arrive in the language as isolated entries, because language users immediately know how to create variations on each by adding the appropriate morphemes ○ Generativity of language = capacity to create an endless series of new combinations, all built from the same set of fundamental units ○ Someone who "knows English" knows how to create new forms within the language ■ Knows how to combine morphemes to create new words, knows how to adjust phenomes when they're put together into novel combinations ■ This knowledge is not conscious ○ Speakers honour these principles with remarkable consistency in their day-to-day creation of novel words Syntax ● Incredible potential for producing new forms is even more salient when we consider the upper levels in the language hierarchy = level of phrases and sentences ● You can combine production features to create a few dozen phenomes and you can combine these to produce thousands of morphemes and words ● Sentences range in length from the very brief to the absurdly long ● Most sentences contain 20 words or less

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○ With this length limit it has been estimated that there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible sentences in English Limits on which combinations are acceptable and which ones are not Virtually any speaker of the language would agree that these sequences have something wrong in them, suggesting that speakers somehow respect the rules of syntax ○ Rules governing the sequence of words in a phrase or sentence One may think that the rules of syntax depend on meaning, so that meaningful sequences are accepted as "sentences" while meaningless sequences are rejected as non-sentences It seems therefore that we need principles of syntax that are separate from consideration of semantics or sensibility...