Name : Liyyanan Nadhira Zaka

Class : K5-2019

NIM : 19018088

Introduction to Linguistics

Psycholinguistics

 In Language and Mind, Noam Chomsky (1968) proposed that linguistics might best be considered a
branch of cognitive psychology. This suggestion might seem rather startling at first; linguists and
psychologists, after all, have worked together closely for only the past twenty ycars.
 Linguistics is ultimately dependent on psychology. Language is a learned ability, and only through a
study of psy- cholinguistcs can we ever hope to understand it.
 As a preliminary oversimplification, we may say that psycholinguistics is concerned with the
acquisition, perception, and production of language. Although psycholinguistic research has been
increasing at a rapid pace, many language processes are still not understood well, if at all.
 If we are to have a thorough understanding of language, psycholinguists must develop
(1) a verifiable theory of the mental pro- cesses and strategies involved in understanding speech.
(2) a specification of how these processes and strategies relate to the formal theory of grammar.
(3) a theory of language acquisition -- One that will be consistent with what we know about the
universal aspects of language.
 transformational-generative model in explaining the data on language acquisition is still being
explored. But the transformational-generative model is superior to the behavioristic model as a
theory of both competence and language learning.

The Psychological Reality of Transformations and Constituent Structure

 For the purposes of this section, a revicw of the standard interpretive theory of transformational-
generative grammar, as schematized in Figure 13-1, will be helpful. The phrase structure rules of
thee sunt tic component generate a set of structures that identify grammatical relations and provide
a syntax for the sentence.
 The lexicon, which resembles a dictionary, provides specific formatives, or lexical items, for these
structures. This set of syntactic structures enriched with lexical items defines the level of deep
structure, to which the set of transformational rules applies to yield the surfaçe structure.
 The semantic component acts on the deep structure to supply a meaning for the sentence, and the
phonological component acts on the surface structure to supply a phonetic representation. It is
tempting to assume that this model of a grammar.
 The Psychological Reality of Transformations and Constituent Structure.
 Transformations

 In the early days of transformational-generative grammar, a great deal of emphasis was placed
on the notion of a kernel sentence --- a sentence that is simple, affirmative, active, and
declarative.
 Early psycholinguistic experiments, however, employed the concept that kernel sentences are
basic. The results of the earliest psycholinguistic experiments' on the relationships between
sentence types seemed to indicate that the transformational operations involved in deriving
negatives, questions, and passives from kernel sentences corresponded to psychological reality.
 To illustrate, consider the following examples of a kernel Sentence (sentence 1) and its negative
(2), passive (3), and negative- passive (4) transforms:
1. John hits the ball.
2. John does not hit the ball.
3. The ball is hit by John.
4. The ball is not hit by John.

Constituents

 The issue of the reality of constituent structure --- the grammatical relationships of words that fit
together in a unit --- deserves a closer look.
 The most famous experiments designed to test the psychological reallity of constituent structure
are the click experiments.
 A simpler experiment showing the psychological reality of constitu- ents consists of asking a
linguistically naive speaker to group isolated words of a sentence according to their relatedness.
Thus, given the sentence Ballplayers require quick instincts, and the array

INSTINCTS REQUIRE

QUICK
 virtually everyone will group quick and instincts as a constituent, rather than require and quick.
Although such an experiment does not explain how speakers use constituent structure in processing lan-
guage, it indicates that speakers conceptually organize language into constituents.

The Psychological Reality of Phonological and Semantic Representations

 Psycholinguistic studies of grammar also have dealt with the psycho- logical reality of
phonological and semantic representations.
 In fact, the Psychological (that is, perceptual) reality of the phoneme was assumed by man y
linguists even before the birth of psycholinguistics and transformatiònal-generative grammar.

Distinctive Features and Markedness

 In an experiment designed to explore the perception of distinctive features, Greenberg and

Jenkins (1964) asked subjects to judge the similarity of paired comparisons involving the
following English segments: /p/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /d/ and /g/. For instance, a subject was asked to
assign a rating to the "distance" between the initial segments of the pairs [pa] and [ba], [ga] and
[pa], and so on.
 The marked/unmarked distinction an pears to have psychological significance. It can help to
characterize the semantic difference between the members of such word pairs . longlshort and
horselmare.
 In the first pair, the unmarked unit is lonu because the normal way of measuring things is in
terms of length, as exemplified by such sentences as The bridge is one hundred yards long.

The Lexicon and Memory

 One of the major experiments dealing with the psychological reality of phonological and semantic
representations was Brown and McNeill's (1966) investigation of the tip-of-the-tongue
phenomenon; that is, the unsettling state of mind that occurs when we have difficulty thinking of a
particular word that we are certain we know.
 The subjects' guesses resembled the desired word either in sound or meaning. Thus, if the desired
word were sextant (a navigational in- strument used in measuring angular distances, especially the
altitude of sun, moon, and stars at sea), some typical guesses would be astro- labe and compass or
two-syllable words such as secant and sextet. The nature of these erroneous guesses provides some
indication of how words and definitions are stored in long-term memory.
 The fact that the subjects produced words similar in meaning to the desired word implies that the
semantic representations of words inter- sect to some degree and are stored together in memory.

OTHER APPROACHES

 By no means has all psycholinguistic research been dedicated to assessing the psychologiçal reality
of transformational-generative grammar.
 One other line of research is the quantificational approach to semantics, which originally was closely
associated with behaviorism, a theory of psychology.
 The quatificational approach attempts to quantify and graph semantic relations as expressed by
speaker.
 One aspect of this approach is the concept of a semantic space: words are plotted as points along
basic axes, representing such dimensions power and affect, and the words that lie closest to each
other in space are regarded as being most similar semantically.
 A common criticism of this approach is that it is grounded in the emotional ro. sponses of speakers
and does not really represent the content of words.
 Other approaches to semantics exist as well. and these have en- joyed varying degrees of success.
Still, no approach can claim to pro- vide a complete understanding of semantic representation and
the use of meaning, and this area remains one of the most inaccessible to psycholinguistic research.

Language Acquistion

 Learning a first language is about as natural to humans as walking upright. Humans have been able
to devise impressive linguistic moeis that describe and attempt to explain their knowledge of
language.
 In light of these facts, it is rather disheartening to admit how little we understand about the origin of
language and the nature of language acquisition.

Phonological Acquistion

 By the age of six months, the child has entered a babbling period, of prelanguage state, in which
almost anv sound can conceivably Be produced. This babbling period allows the child to develop
articue tory prowess.
 By the end of the first year, the rudiments of a pholi logical system are evident. Normally, the
first vowel produced w regularity is a low, somewhat fronted vowel such as (æ] or la many other
languages.
 However, these "words" are not originally uttered with the meaning "mother" and "father."
They may simpy nasal consonant in opposition to the oral consonant. This explains why mama
and papa are early occurrences in English as well as it the first consonant is generally a bilabial
stop, such as (p] or [b). The acquisition of additional sounds continues with the developmeains

The Two-Word State

 Naturally, the child will use his or her first words to describe the im- mediate environment,
including such objects as a ball, milk, and dog, and will guess generally at the meanings of these
words and how to bem, For instance, dog may first be used to refer to all animals; meaning is
narrowed later.
 Early in the second year of life, the sild will produce fifty or more of these one-word utterances;
they Ch be used to indicate roles, such as agent or affected object, as ll as the objects
themselves. Also in the second year, the child will hegin to develop two-word sentences. These
 two-word sentences, combined with a growing vocabulary, allow the child to express a rap- idly
increasing number of messages.
 These two-word sentences have been analyzed in several ways. Braine (1963) viewed such
sentences as combinations two classes: a small class called pivot words and a large class of open
words, which previously may have been onc-word sentences.
 Other types of two-word sentences are also found in the child's grammar; for example, noun-
plus-noun sequences like cup glass. In this case, the child's intent is something like "There is a
cup and a glass.
 " Lois Bloom (1970) has shown that in addition to conjunction. he houn-plus-noun sequence can
express attribution (party hat), pos- Session (Daddy hat), a subject-locative relation (Mommy
home), and 4 subject-object relation (Mommy ball, meaning, for example. Mommy threw the
ball"), Of course, the child may also use two word sentences consisting of a noun plus a verb.
 Thus, it is conceivable that the child's grammar has a rule of form S-N +V+N, but only two of the
constituents on the right hand side of the arrow may appear in a given sentence because of the
child's limited means of syntactic expression.

Syntactic Acquisition

 Following the two-word stage, children add morphological endings. articles, prepositions, and so
on to their speech. This acquisition of syntax takes place by hypothesis testing.
For example, a child may hypothesize that the past tense ending for all English verbs is -ed, thus
producing such forms as *goed and *singed.
 In fact, the correct SYNTACTIC ACQUISITION through random imitation. The correct forms
appear with regularity only when the child learns that go and sing are irregular verbs that do
forms may be produced before the appearance of *goed and * not take -ed.
 Between the ages of two and three, the child dcvclops a more complete syntactic system and is
often able to correct incomplete or misconstructed sentences that he or she has just uttered.
The development of this syntactic system continues with the appearance of complex sentences
at about the age of three.
 Complex sentences allow the combination of several meanings, or propositions, within a
sentence through syntactic devices such as relativization, coordination, and complementation.
 As the child's syntax develops, he or she also expresses increas- ingly complex messages. The
expression of the desire for a cookie progresses from Cookie to I want a cookie to It would be
nice to have a cookie.

An Alternate View: The Behaviorist Approach

 To repeat, the key to language acquisition appears to be a system of hypothesis testing, or a set
of operating principles that are used as strategies in acquiring language structure.
 This view of language acquisition seems preferable to the theory that
(1) children imitate the spcech of their parents
(2) they are posi- ively or negatively reinforced, depending on whether their sentences are
grammatical.
 (3) this reinforcement leads children to generalize their verbal behavior accordingly.
 Such a view, usually associated with the behaviorist school of psychology, enjoyed great
popularity until the carly 1960s.
 The view that imitation is central to language acquisition has been challenged by several types
of findings. Recent studies --- see Clark and Clark (1977) – show that children imitate only words
or structures that they themselves have already used.
 Imitation, by itself, es not seem to provide for the acquisition of more complex sentence
structures.
 Also, it is assumed that children must speak a language in order to imitate their parents; thus,
by the behaviorist theory, children cannot learn a language without themselves speaking.
 Operating Principles Used by Young Children

An Assesment

 Transformational-generative grammar has not provided a complete, or completely correct,

theory of language acquisition. However, it has circumvented these problems by stressing that
the productivity of language can be accounted for by the learning of rules that are applied to
particular instance.
 Fodor, Bever, and Garrett (1974) have pointed out that at two years of age, children consider
any noun that immediately precedes the main verb to be the logical subject.
 By the age of three and a half, they consider the first noun in the sentence to be the actor,
regardless of the noun's surface relation to the verb.
 Such data are valuable because they relate the linguistic development of the child to a s of
strategies, or perceptual heuristics. These strategies certainly should be explored further in
developing an adequate theory guage acquisition.

Perception and Production of Language

 The study of speech perception is concerned with how a person hears, recognizes, processes, and
understands the linguistic message spoken by another individual.
 The first step in this process occurs when a person receives the acoustic signal; that is, a stream of
speech.
 Making use of acoustic cues, such as the characteristic hissing of (s), and other facts, such as
intonation and rhythm, the hearer phonological representation. One view of allempts to construct a
how this is accomplished is called the analysis-by-synthesis model.
The Analysis by Synthesis Model

 According to the analysis-by-synthesis view, the hearer internally generates, or synthesizes, a set of
speech sounds until he or she finds Bnatch with what has been heard.
 In the process, the hearer con-tinually adapts to the voice characteristics of the speaker and uses
acoustic cues and factors such as knowledge of permissible sequences of segments in the given
language to limit the number of sounds that are generated.
 After a match is found, the hearer constructs a phonological representation, which is stored in
working memory.
 Next, the phonological data must be organized into functional syntactic constituents, and an
underlying semantic, or propositional, representation must be determined.
 How this is done is the subject of much debate, although it is probable that hearers use some
combination of syntactic and semantic strategies. For example, when a person encounters the
articles a, an, and the or a quantificr such as some or many, he or she knows that a noun phrase is
being introduced for which the noun is forthcoming.

The Speech-Perception Grammar

 During the past decade, linguists such as George Lakoff and Henry Thompson (1975) have renounced
transformational-generative gram- mar as an abstract model of language and insist that it is of little
value in understanding language use. Instead, they claim, linguists should be concerned with
grammars of sentence perception and sentence production.
 In order to illustrate how a sentence-perception grammar works, Lakoff and Thompson discuss the
example The aardvark was given a bagel by Irving.
 In this sentence, the individual first hears the aardvark and interprets this noun as the subject. But
on hearing was egy again in order to regard the aardvark as the indirect object and a bagel as the
direct object. Finally, Irving will be regarded as the su Next, the individual perceives a bagel and is
forced to change stral- given, the individual reinterprets the aardvark as the direct object.
 This method of analysis is thus a step-by-step, left-to-right sent in succession. It is part of a more
gencral model of language use called cognitive grammar.

Speech Production

 Less is known about the way language is produced than about the way it is perceived. Clearly,
speakers form sentences by beginning with some sort of idea about what they wish to express,
and the basic components of this message are propositions.
 These propositions are combined and organized in various ways (syntax). Then they are supplicd
with actual words, which arc encoded into a set of phono- logical units.
 Finally, the articulatory apparatus must be activated to produce the appropriate waveforms.
Beyond these few vague re- marks, it is difficult to say much more about sentence production
with confidence.
 Nevertheless, one of the few accessible sources of data on specch production is speech errors,
and the most significant work in this area Aas been done by Victoria Fromkin (1973).
 Some of the types of speech errors that she has uncovered are the following:
1.The anticipation of a segment. For example, cup of coffee is re- placed by cuff. .. coffee.
2.The preservation of a segment. Instead of gave the boy, gave the Boy is produced.
 3.The reversing of segments. Rather than keep a tape, leep a cape is produced.
4. The blending of two forms. Switched and changed becomes swinged.
5. The elimination of a syllable or sequence of segments. Tremendously is replaced by tremenly.
6. The misderivation of a form. Instead of an intervening node, an intervenient node is
produced.
7. The substituting of one word for another. Before the place opens becomes before the place
closes.
 Such errors indicate that there are certain basic units in speech oduction; namely, distinctive
features, phonetic segments, sylla- , Words, and larger units (for example, phrases).