psycholinguisctics budapest semester in cognitive science cognitive psychology day 2

Psycholinguisctics

Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science

Cognitive Psychology Day 2.

Today’s themes

1. What is language?(Thursday) How do we recognize its parts and types?

2. What levels of linguistic studies are there? – some psycholinguistic experiments

3. What is the relationship between language and thought?

Linguists and psychologists talk about different things… Grammarians are more interested in what could be said than in what people actually say, which irritates psychologists, and psychologists insist on supplementing intuition with objective evidence, which irritates linguists.

(Miller, 1990)

Chomsky’s Competence vs. perfomance

What is a language?

Which one of these are the same laguages? English – German American English – British English Black English – American English Jamaican Creole – Jamaican English

Mutual intelligibility

Dialect continuum Standard language – written language

Chinese – Japanese?

Dialect 1

Dialect 2

Dialect 3

A disoputed case - German

Isoglosses:

Ik - ich

Maken - machen

•Isophone

•Isolex

•boot - trunk

•Isoseme

• dinner

•Isomorph

•Dived - dove

Language – same and different

Typology Based on morphological constructions Based on default word order

Universality

Language typology

Configurational – nonconfigurational Analytic-synthetic

Agglutinating - inflecting

Typology

Configurational and non-configurational languages

Arwen Nazgǔl chase

Typology

Arwen Nazgǔl chase

The Nazgǔl are chasing Arwen.

A Nazgullok kergetik Arwent.

Arwent kergetik a Nazgullok.

In the box At the table

You could have got it done

A dobozban Az asztalnál

(ti) megcsináltathattátok (volna)

•Free word order•Null anaphora•Syntactically discontinuous expressions

Language typology

Word Order S – subject V – verb O – Object

What is the default word order in English? The cat Mouse Little Chase

Linguistic universals Joseph Greenberg – 30 languages Absolute – substantive

Lexicon and grammar Nouns, verbs, pronouns (deictics – time, space,

number) First person Vowel, consonant Rules of intonation No language without /a/ Antonymy – categorial thinking? Roman Jakobson – Linda Waugh: i sound

What do you call a small cat? (Mackó – maci)

Cecil H Brown: body part namings Body, head, eyes, arms, nose, mouth IF foot > hand IF individual toes > individual fingers

Some languages lack the term for ‘body’

Implicational – statistical Trial grammatical number > dual

grammatical number VSO languages > adjectives come after

nouns SOV languages > postpositions

A war that never ends

Descriptive and prescriptive linguistics

third-person singular /s/: "she goes," - "she go." no double negatives: "he didn't see anybody," - "he didn't

see nobody." "who/whom did you see"

"Winston tastes good like/as a cigarette should" "the data is/are unreliable" "I disapprove of him/his doing it" "get it done as quick/quickly as possible"

What is a word?

Meaningful units (It is the light I switched on) potential pause – or is there? Undivisibility (absobloominglately) Phonetical boundaries (vowel harmony, stress) –

statistical learning! Minimal free morphemes (the, of)

How do children ever learn to distinguish words? (then the gavagai problem) Statistical learning might be one answer!

Statistical learning and Implicit learning

Initially very different Acquisition of syntax – remember artificial

grammars Acquisition of vocabulary

Later converged – now their interpretations are different, but reconciliable

Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996

Can 8-month old infants extract information about word boundaries solely on the basis of the sequential statistics of concatenated speech?

Familiarisation-preference procedure (Jusczyk & Aslin 1995)

Infants exposed to auditory material that serves as potential learning experience.


Test stimuli Items contained within the familiarisation

materialItems highly similar but weren't within the familiarisation material.

HypothesisIf they have extracted the crucial info from the data, there will be a differential fixation time.


Speech streamLength 2 mins

Speed 270 syllables/min

Content 4 trisyllabic nonsense words (repeated in random

order)

TP 1 within words; 0.33 across words.

No effect of co-articulation, stress...


Samplebidakupadotigolabubidaku...


What is a Transitional Probability (TP)? P= x/xy

X A TP(XA) = 1.0

A TP(XA) = 1/3 = 0.33

X B TP(XB) = 0.33

C TP(XC) = 0.33


Which one has a higher TP?

Pre.tty Ba.by

1. TP (Pre, tty) > TP (tty, Ba)2. TP (tty, Ba) > TP (Pre, tty)

Classical English example: „tp”

say a word that contains this sequence


Test items

4 items in total - 2 of the 'words' from familiarisation. - 2 with the same syllables from

familiarisation but not same order.

Infants can distinguish between novel/familiar orderings; So, they can extract serial-ordering info. (after 2 mins!!)

Word classes

How do you know what a noun is? Semantic definition – what designates

something What about happiness or love Grammatical definitions – comes after

„the”

What part of speech is it? / Guess

1. Can occur after „to be”

2. They can occur after articles (the, an) and before nouns

3. They can occur after very

4. Can haver superlative forms (er, est)

5. Can form an adverb with -ly

Or are things really as clear-cut?

Try these Happy Old Top Two Asleep Want

Why is psycholinguistics interesting?

Speech is natural

All humans learn a language – no culture without speech (numbers - Piraha! Colours - dani)

Any human baby can learn any human language – what about deaf children?

What’s the big deal?

It is actually sg of a miracle that we manage to speak and understand as well as we do.

What do we do?

We understand speech stream which includes no discrete boundaries to indicate where one word ends and another begins

To understand speech...

Vibrations arrive at eardrum discharged in auditory nerve; brain translates nerve signals into sounds; separated from background noise separated into individual words (segmented) Words are accessed in brain to find meanings; Words and grammatical structures are

interpreted Link with prior knowledge…… NO EFFORT?

different accents different speech rates stammering incomplete sentences ambiguity

vocabulary of between 50.000-100.000 words 2-4 words per second

Further aggravating things

Our language awareness is raised under special conditions:

language impairments, talk to children learning the language, when we are not sure what was said, when we cannot find the words, learning languages.

A nyelv szerkezete

language

soundsgrammar

meaning

phonetics

phonology

morphology

syntax

semantics

pragmatics

articulation

Sound patterns

suffixes

structure

meaning

intention

Sounds

Categorical perception of sounds Continuous vs categorical (Bird vs big) The role of Voice Onset Time –

Studies of Alvin Liberman (pa/ba) Yet: a/u are less so – motor theory of perception? Kuhl: Infants and chinchillas can do it – neither speaks

Develops in infancy – 6-9 months Bilinguals- there is a debate on their categories

Top-down construction – the Ganong effect Dash/tash or Dask/task problems with computer speech perception

Categorical perception in bilingualsVoices modified with the Klatt synthesizer

A nyelv szerkezete

language

soundsgrammar

meaning

phonetics

phonology

morphology

syntax

semantics

pragmatics

articulation

Sound patterns

suffixes

structure

meaning

intention

Morphosyntax – remember typologies!

Morphology The forms of words

Particularly important in languages using cases

3 main types of languages Isolating Agglutinative Fusional

Often studied with priming paradigms

The Great Rule Debate

Remember yesterdays discussion about rules and memory (chunks)?

Language has the same problem with regulars

You think English is an easy language? Have a thought about irregulars!

The rules seem flexible at best. If 2 mouses are mice, then why aren't 2 blouses blice? Or or 2 houses hice?

If it's one ox and 2 oxen, why shouldn't it be one fox and 2 foxen? "Henry, grab the shotgun, there's foxen in the henhice!"

Ambivalence is there!

What do you call A radius and another radius? A nucleus and another nucleus? A focus and another focus? An octopus and another octopus? A virus and another virus? A chorus and another chorus? A campus and another campus? A bacterium and another bacterium? A medium and another medium? An album and another album?

Irregulars tend to get lost over time-forgotten

Is Hungarian an easy language? Difficulties

agglutinating system Lots of irregulars Lots of subrules

Direct and indirect object marked on the verb

BUT the good news: you can make yourself understood even if you get all these wrong

Hungarian

Altaic language – Finno-Ugoric

Not Indo-European language

http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/dryer/dryer/family.maps

The Hungarian noun declination system –18 cases

Nominative – default case The cat is on the mat.

Accusative /Vt/ The girl hit the boy.

Plural /Vk/ The cats

Dative /nVk/ I gave the flowers to the lady.

Comitative /vVl/ I went to the market with Jane.

Exercise: try conjugating these:

•mázli (fluke)

•ribizli (blackcurrent)

•tojás (egg)

•lakás (apartment)

•virág (flower)

•house (ház)

A double division line

Meaning NOM

[-]

ACC

[-ØT]

PLUR

[-ØK]

DAT

[-NAK]

COM

[-VAL]

[dog] kutya kutyát kutyák kutyának kutyával

[luck] mázli mázlit mázlik mázlinak mázlival

[giraffe] virág virágot virágok virágnak virággal

[egg] tojás tojást tojások tojásnak tojással

[house] ház házat házak háznak házzal

[monkey] majom majmot majmok majomnak

majommal

[mouse] egér egeret egerek egérnek egérrel

[horse] ló lovat lovak lónak lóval

This would require tons of subrules!

The Great Rule Debate

The formation of different morphological forms of words: Memory? – is there a limit to memorized

forms (in acquisition time) Computational load?

Rule-based theories

Symbolic and abstract units of language V+-ed

Full regularity hypothesis the transformation remains, but underlying forms

predict surface forms Run ->rin (run, ran,run - cling, clang, clung)

rules dual route rote memory

declarative memory

manipulation - proceduralmemory

The Wug Test

Jean Berko Gleason’s test He administered it

to children to see how much they know about the rules.

Developmental data in Hungarian

Age and inflectional paradigms (Pléh, Palotás & Lőrik, 1994)

0

20

40

60

80

100

4 5 6 7 8

Age

Co

rre

ct

%

oroszlán

hal

róka

madár

viziló

majom

Dual route Pinker & Ullman

Race model – rather unfair: irregular always wins

Doublets are stored – in both forms


declarative memory


Stems

Idioms

Irregulars

Regulars (frequency)

Phrases, sentences

Regulars

Acquisition dissociation

Children start off knowing both regulars and irregulars

then somehow they tend to forget about irregulars Goed doed

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

2 years 3-4 years 5-6 years

Single Pattern Associator

Tried to exploit phonological similarities of irregulars

Back-progagation Using sounds as

input and other sounds as output

Rote memory Rummelhart & McClelland

Harald Baayen Transitions are not clear-cut

between regulars and irregulars

„The whole takes precedence over the parts”


declarative memory


Symbolic Sub-symbolic

deterministic Rules

Probabilistic WPM SPA

Morphological families

Lexical Decision Task Press YES or NO for whether the following is

a real word in English:

Non-words (BRUKE) are ‘fillers’ Just to check the subject is paying attention We only look at real words

FAST response = easy to access SLOW response = hard to access

HOUSENOIKSLEEPNURSEBRUKE

(450 msec)(500 msec)

1. Word Frequency High frequency words = common words (cat, mother, house) Low frequency words = uncommon words (accordion, compass)

What affects lexical access time?

High frequency are faster to access than Low frequency

even when they’re balanced on other features (e.g. length)

E.g. Pen vs. Pun Rubenstein et al. (1970)

What can this tell us about the organisation of the lexicon?

The Logogen Model Morton (1969)

Accounts for the frequency effect

The lexical entry for each word comes with a logogen

The lexical entry only becomes available once the logogen ‘fires’

When does a logogen fire? When you read/hear the word

Think of a logogen as being like a ‘strength-o-meter’ at a fairground

When the bell rings, the logogen has ‘fired’

‘cat’[kæt]

• what makes the logogen fire?

– seeing/hearing the word

• what happens once the logogen has fired?

– access to lexical entry!

– High frequency words have a lower threshold for firing

–E.g. cat vs. cot

‘cat’[kæt]

• So how does this help us to explain the frequency effect?

‘cot’[kot]

Low freq takes longer

Subject sees 2 words Must say YES or NO whether both are real

wordsdoctor grassdoctor nurse

SLOW

FAST … because nurse is already

‘warmed up’ by having just

activated doctor

2. Semantic Priming Effects (Meyer & Schvandeveldt, 1971)

What affects lexical access time?

canary

bird

animal

ostrich

mammal

Spreading Activation ModelSpreading Activation Model

yellow

doctordentist

fever

green

baby

cradle

bed hospital

sun

rainheat

grass

nurse

delirium

canary

bird

animal

ostrich

mammal

Semantic NetworkSemantic Network

yellow

doctordentist

fever

green

baby

cradle

bed hospital

sun

rainheat

grass

nurse

delirium

Fits nicely with Logogen Model

When we read doctor, its logogen fires= doctor gets ‘activated’

Each of the nodes in the network has a logogen with it

The activation from doctor spreads to nurse, this lowers the threshold for nurse so make nurse faster to access

• spreading activation from doctor lowers the threshold for nurse to fire

– So nurse take less time to fire

‘nurse’[nə:s]

‘doctor’[doktə]

nurse

doctor

Spreading activation network

doctor nurse

Previous experiments

Pinker és Prince (1998) Lukács, 2001

Acoustic visual priming

Lexical decision task Plural form - stem

Priming effect• ++ regulars• + irregulars• 0 phonological

Experimental design

Prime Target

Word suffixed root

Modality aud visual

250 msablak

Window (IN)Window

Do you see an existing word or not?

Contrasting theories

Exp. result

Theory

Stem priming

Suffixed priming

Paradigm priming

Rules & subrules ? ? Dual route ? ? WPM

A nyelv szerkezete

language

soundsgrammar

meaning

phonetics

phonology

morphology

syntax

semantics

pragmatics

articulation

Sound patterns

suffixes

structure

meaning

intention

Pragmatics

Sperber and Wilson – relevance theory most new information least amount of effort

We automatically assume, that a) implicit messages are relevant enough to be

worth bothering to process b) the speaker will be as economical as they

possibly can be in communicating it. Specially important in the understanding of

irony. You are very hard-working. The intellectual Gurus – Derrida

Language and thought

Why do we bother to use euphemisms and politically correct terms?

of Newspeak in 1984.

Language (with capital L): the human language capacity linguistic universals

languages (with small l): individual languages (e.g., English,

Arabic…) types of languages (e.g., Indo-European,

Semitic…)

Slobin, Dan

If each language is simply an alternative code for the same underlying cognitive processes and states, the diversity of languages can be ignored by cognitive science.

But if linguistic diversity reflects cognitive diversity, individual languages are critical independent variables in cognitive science theory and research.

Linguistic determinism Impossibility to avoid linguistic category

traps No understanding can be established

between the cultures Linguistic relativity

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

“We cut up and organize the spread and flow of events as we do largely because, through our mother tongue, we are parties to an agreement to do so, not because nature itself is segmented in exactly that way for all to see.”

“From this fact proceeds what I have called the ‘linguistic relativity principle,’ which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations … and hence are not equivalent as observers …”

The language-thought interface

Vocabulary size debates The great snow debate

Categorization debates Focal colours debate

Grammatical constructions & gender Grammatical gender of words

Spatial language debates Description systems

The Snow-word debate

Franz Boas•Geographer and physicist originally – interested in language and anthropology

•Clash between sciences and humanities (psychophysics)

•Against the orthogonal evolutionary theory – all cultures are equally developed

•Debate among geographers – is cultural diversity determined by environmental factors or „memes”?•He mentions that Eskimos have four words: aput ("snow on the ground"), qana ("falling snow"), piqsirpoq ("drifting snow"), and qimuqsuq ("snowdrift"), where English has only one ("snow").

Language: On Alternating Sounds

No inferior languages – it is mispercieved

Edward Sapir

Studied indigenous languages of the Americas

More interested in structure of languages – language drift and actually – universalisms!

He fell ill and B. L. Whorf took over his classes – and the snow legend started

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Chemical engineering – later studied linguistics with Sapir

His hobby was studying languages – mainly meso-American ones (hopi, nahuatl, maya) The Hopi language is seen to contain no

words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions or that refer directly to what we call “time”, or to past, present, or future…

He was employed at an insurance company to explore causes of fire Empty gasoline drums

The end of the snow debate

There is no such language as Eskimo.. Eskimo people might have more words for snow –

but so do ornitologists for birds! This is true of any expert…

What is a word? All inuit languages are polisynthetic – agglutinating very ardently Tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga. I can't hear very well.

-tsiaq-well -junnaq-be able to -nngit-not -tualuu-very much -junga1st pers. singular present indicative non-specific

The end of the hopi debate

B.L. Whorf The Hopi language is seen to contain no words,

grammatical forms, construction or expressions or that refer directly to what we call “time”, or to past, present, or future

Malotki The hopi use a very complicated character and a time

very similar to that of other cultures Hindi though

Has the same word for yesterday as for tomorrow! ‘kal’ Spanish

Same problem ‘ya’

The language-thought interface

Vocabulary size debates The great snow debate

Categorization debates Focal colours debate

Grammatical constructions & gender Grammatical gender of words

Spatial language debates Description systems

Frames of reference and dead reckoning

Hypothesis

Speakers of languages using absolute frames of reference will be good dead reckoners – r-statistic close to 1.00

• Speakers of languages using relative frames of reference will be poor dead reckoners – r-statistic approaching zero.

The pointing task dead-reckoners

Today we learned

How difficult it is to use language, although it’s easy and how difficult it is to really know what a language is.

That by studying different levels of language we can learn about general mechanisms of the mind

That linguistic relativity might have some truth in it and the wuestion again is: How much?

psycholinguisctics budapest semester in cognitive science cognitive psychology day 2

Documents