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Lecture 8 - Language and The Mind
Lecture 8 - Language and The Mind
▪ Broca’s aphasia results in problems in the production of speech and a loss of some grammatical understanding
of language.
▪ Wernicke’s aphasia results in the patient making a lot of lexical errors and saying nonsense words despite fluent
speech.
▪ Conduction aphasia results in difficulties in repeating a word or phrase spoken by someone else.
2. Universal grammar
2.1. The logical problem of language acquisition
Some observations about children’s language acquisition:
▪ Children use the data available to them in the environment to develop their language;
→ Children are able to construct the grammar of a language in a short amount of time, in a uniform manner, with
ease, and without explicit instruction.
2.2. The problem of induction
The problem of induction: How can children figure out a grammatical rule from the examples they hear?
- Is mommy sad?
- Will dad come home soon?
Output
- Is the boy crying because his mom is gone?
- Is the man who is tall happy?
2.3. The poverty of the stimulus
The POS argument: The input to children is insufficient for them to figure out the full grammar of a language.
- John’s cat
- John’s aunt’s cat Output
- John’s aunt’s husband’s cat
- John’s aunt’s husband’s friend’s cat
2.4. The language faculty and Universal Grammar
To solve Plato’s Problem (rich linguistic capacity despite poor PLD), Noam Chomsky and generative
grammarians argue that children are born with a language faculty – the genetically given human cognitive
capacity to acquire language.
Universal Grammar (UG), the “genetically determined initial state of the language faculty” (Chomsky, 2014,
p. xiii), is the set of invariant general principles that determine a possible human language.
UG can be viewed as “a function that takes PLD as input and delivers a particular grammar (of English,
Brazilian Portuguese, German, etc.), a GL, as output” (Hornstein et al., 2005, p. 3).
PLD → UG → GL
UG, experience, and principles not specific to the language faculty are the three factors that “enter into the
growth of language in the individual” (Chomsky, 2005, p. 6).
2.5. Merge
Generative grammarians assume that the language faculty has two components:
▪ A lexicon: a mental “dictionary” which contains all the words a person knows and their linguistic
properties;
▪ A computational system: combines lexical items from the lexicon using Merge – the operation that puts
two items together, forming a set with the two items as members.
E.g. in
the [+past]
the
dog room the
big big in the big room
in
cat love big
room
chase in to room
The lexicon Selected lexical items The computational system (Merge) Output
The computational system generates an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions which are
mapped into the conceptual-intentional interface for semantic interpretation and the sensorimotor interface
for externalization (Chomsky, 2016, p. 4).
The interfaces with the computational system (Cook & Newson, 2007, p. 6)
References
Chomsky, N. (2005). Three factors in language design. Linguistic inquiry, 36(1), 1-22.
Chomsky, N. (2014). Aspects of the theory of syntax (50th anniversary edition). The MIT Press.
Cook, V., & Newson, M. (2007). Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (3rd ed.). Blackwell Publishing.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2017). An introduction to language (11th ed.). Cengage Learning.
Hornstein, N., Nunes, J., & Grohmann, K. K. (2005). Understanding minimalism. Cambridge University Press.
O’ Grady, W., & Archibald, J. (2021). Contemporary linguistic analysis: An introduction (9th ed.). Pearson.
Radford, A., Atkinson, M., Britain, D., Clahsen, H., & Spencer, A. (2009). Linguistics: An introduction (2nd ed.).
Cambridge University Press.
Rowe, B. M., & Levine, D. P. (2018). A concise introduction to linguistics (5th ed.). Routledge.
Yule, G. (2020). The study of language (7th ed.). Cambridge University Press.