Language

Sophia Aragon, Camille Dequito, Angel Antollin

BAP II A
 WHAT IS LANGUAGE?
• A SYSTEM OF COMMUNICATION

USING SOUNDS OR SYMBOLS

THAT ENABLES US TO EXPRESS

OUR FEELINGS, THOUGHTS,

IDEAS, AND EXPERIENCES.

Language varies from

Sounds for spoken language

Letters and written words for written language

Physical signals for sign language

Language is..
A. Heirarchical

B. Governed by Rules
LANGUAGE IS HEIRARCHIAL
BECAUSE IT CONSISTS OF A SERIES OF

COMPONENTS THAT CAN BE COMBINED TO

FORM LARGER UNITS. FOR EXAMPLE,

WORDS CAN BE COMBINED TO CREATE

PHRASES, WHICH, IN TURN, CAN CREATE

SENTENCES, WHICH CAN BECOME

COMPONENTS OF A STORY.
LANGUAGE IS GOVERNED BY RULES
THAT SPECIFY PERMISSIBLE WAYS FOR THESE COMPONENTS TO BE

ARRANGED.
The Universality of Language
People’s need to communicate is so powerful that

when deaf children find themselves in an environment

where there are no people who speak or use sign
language, they invent a sign language themselves.
(Goldwin-Meadow, 1982)
Everyone with normal capacities develop a language and

learns to follow its complex rules, even though they are

usually not aware of these rules. Although many people
find the study of grammar to be difficult, they have no
trouble using language.
There are 5,00 different languages around the world

Babies babble at 7 months, and start multiword utterances

at age 2. (Levelt, 2001)

Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology
Wilhelm Wundt
Found the first laboratory of

scientific psychology

Wrote about the nature of the

sentence in 1900
 BF Skinner
The Modern Champion of Behaviorism

Published the book “Verbal Behavior”

in 1957
Proposed that language is learned

through reinforcement.
Children learn language by being

rewarded for using correct language,

and being punished for using incorrect
language.
Noam Chomsky
Published the book “Syntatic
Structures” that proposed that
human language is coded in
genes. According to this idea,
humans are genetically
programmed to acquire and
use language.
Saw studying language was a
way of studying the properties
of the mind.
Noam Chomsky
Reviewed Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” and destroyed
the behaviorist idea that language can be learned
through reinforcement. Chomsky’s most persuasive
argument was that as children learn language, they
produce sentences that they have never heard and
that have therefore never been reinforced (e.g. is the
sentence “I hate you, Mommy”)
His criticism of behaviorism was one of the most
important events in cognitive revolution and lead to
the development of Psycholinguistics, the
psychological study of language.
Psycholinguistics
The goal is to discover the

psychological process by which

humans acquire and process
language (Clark & Van der Wege,
2002; Gleason & Ranter, 1998)
 THREE MAJOR CONCERNS OF
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
1. Comprehension - How do people understand
spoken and written language? This includes how
people process language sounds; how they understand
words, sentences, and stories, as expressed in writing,
speech or sign language; and how people have
conversations with another.
2. Speech Production – How do people produce
language? This includes the physical processes of
speech production and the mental processes that occur
as a person creates speech.
 Acquisition – How do people learn language? This
includes not only how children learn language, but also
how people learn additional languages, either as
children or later in life.
Components of Language
1. Words
- How do we understand and pronounce words?
2. Sentences
- How do grammar and meaning help us understand
sentences?
3. Texts
- How do sentences create meaningful stories?
4. Producing Language
- How do people participate in conversations?
5. Culture and Language
- Is there a connection between language and cognition?
Perceiving and Understanding Words
By the time we turn into adults, we can understand over 50,000

different words. (Altman, 2001; Dell, 1995) All the words a person
understands is called a person’s lexicon.

The two smallest units of language are phonemes, which refer

to sounds, and morphemes, which refer to meanings.

A phoneme is the shortest segment of speech that, if

changed, changes the meaning of a word. (e.g. the word “Bit”

contains the phonemes /b/, /i/, and /t/)
Morphemes are the smallest units of language
that have a definable meaning or grammatical
function.

(e.g. the word “Truck” consists of a single morpheme,

due to the fact that the one syllable has no meaning.

The word “Bedroom” has two syllables, and two

morphemes, because the syllables “bed” and “room”
mean something.

Adding an “S” or “ed” to a word is considered a

morpheme)
Perceiving Words
Phoenemic Restoration Effect

Speech Segmention
Understanding Words
Word Frequency – The relative usage of a word in a
particular language. The word-frequency effect
refers to the fact that we respond to high-frequency
words like “Home” than to low-frequency words like
“Bike”.
Context Effects – Our ability to access words in a
sentence is affected not only by frequency, but also
by the meaning of the rest of the sentence.
Lexical Ambiguity – Words can have more than one
meaning.
Understanding Sentences
Semantics – meaning of
words and sentences.

Syntax – the rules of

combining words into
sentences.

Parsing – central process

for determining meaning
of words
Parsing a Sentence
The goal of parsing a sentence is to determine the
message of a sentence. This message is determined
by the meanings of the words in the sentence and how
thsese words are grouped together in a phrase.
Example:
The sentence “The spy saw the man with the
binoculars.” can have two meanings.

MEANING #1 – The spy was looking through the

binoculars to see the man
MEANING #2 - The spy was looking at a man, who had
some binoculars.

This is an example of Syntatic Ambiguity, where the

words are the same, but there is more than one
possible structure or meaning.
Syntax-First Approach to Parsing
Focuses on how parsing is determined by syntax-the
grammatical structure of the sentence.
Though the grammar in a certain text may not be
entirely correct, due to syntax, we are able to
understand.
Parsing mechanism groups phrases together based on
structural principles.
The Principle of Late Closure states that when we
encounter a new word, the parser assumes that this
word is part of the current phrase. (Frazier, 1987)
The Interactionist Approach to Parsing
Semantics can influence processing as the person is
reading the sentence.
All information, both syntactic and sematic, is taken
into account when reading a sentence, so any
corrections that need to occur in the processing of a
sentence take place as the person is reading the
sentence. (Altman, 1998; Altman & Steedman, 1988;
MacDonald et al.,1994)
Understanding Text and Stories
Narrative – refers to
texts in which there is
a story that progresses
from one event to
another, although
stories can include
flashbacks of events.
Coherence – An
important part of any
narrative. The
representation of text in
a person’s mind.
HOW INTERFERENCE CREATES COHERENCE
Inference – the process by which readers create
information during reading that is not explicitly stated
in the text.

KINDS OF INFERENCE:
ANAPHORIC INFERENCE
INSTRUMENTAL INFERENCE
CASUAL INFERENCE
 Situation Models
A situation model is a model representation of what a text is

about. This approach proposes that the mental

representation people form as they read a story does not
indicate information about phrases, sentences, or paragraphs,
but instead includes a representation of the situation in terms
of the people, objects, locations, and events that are being
described in the story. (Graesser & Wienner-Hastings,1999;
Zwan,1999)
Producing Language
SPEECH ERRORS

A technique to determine how far we’ve

achieved producing language.


Also called “Slips of the Tongue”, made

famous by Sigmund Freud, who suggested

that slips of the tongue reflected the

speaker’s unconcious motivations

(Freud, 1910) (This is also known as

“Freudian Slips”)
Speech Errors and Language Mechanisms

1. Frequency of different types of errors

2. Patterns of errors
 Phoneme Exchanges – “fleaky squoor” instead of

“squeaky floor”

Word Substitutions – “Liszt’s Hungarian restaurant”

instead of “Liszt’s Hungarian rhapsody”

Producing Language: Conversations
SEMANTIC

COORDINATION

SYNTATIC

COORDINATION