CHAPTER 9 : LANGUAGE Language and Communication Clark points out that the prototypical situation for human communication

n involves two people in a face-to-face contact, speaking, involving in mutual conversation using a language both of them know Keep the prototypical setting in mind when you go through this chapter Language use is studied in situations that are often quite unlike the standard F2F communication setting There has been specified a set of formal rules that determine how turns are allocated in a conversation The first person to start speaking gets the next turn If two people start at once, one person typically stops and allows the other to continue If the speaker reaches a break and nobody talks the speaker may continue Clark points out that previously mentioned proposal misses a lot of what actually occurs in conversation. Participants in convoys typically give feedback while speaker is taking turn This feedback is crucial for coordinating a conversation Joint Action = Coordination in communication in allowing the participant to follow along (Clark) One person ( Director) had the correct order and she had to tell (receiver) how to receive order "Over hearer " listened to the whole conversation and tried to put the shapes in the proper order The over hearer placed fewer shapes in correct order than receiver This probably happened because receiver could ask for clarification when she didn't know what shape meant Principles of Communication o Must be principles that people rely on in order to convey messages o Pragmatics = Communication principles of language - These refer to the practical matter of making sure that people understand not just what is said but also what is meant The Given-New Strategy o Clark proposed that the org of sentences supports "given new strategy" o Speaker or writer are trying to normally convey new info that is related in some way to what is already known o Clark demonstrated that the given new principle influences people's comprehension of sentences o This technique shows that numerous strategies can be used to promote or inhibit effective communication Presupposition and Assertion o Because attention is directed at the new or asserted info, it may be possible to slip misleading info into the presupposition part of the sentence o Presuppositions are sometimes hard to deny o E.G. The word smash seems to presuppose more speed than verb hit o The CONLUSION is that varying the presupposition associated with questions can affect the answers that are given an observation that has clear implications for practical life Conversational Maxims o Making the right inferences from info also depends on common conventions or rules o Grice proposed that communications requires adherence to a set of conversational maxims = Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner which mean = Be informative, tell the truth, relevance, and be clear o It is unlikely that people know these rules explicitly o 2 important influences on communication : They provide rules for formulating utterances

CHAPTER 9 : LANGUAGE Grecian Maxims = violations create polite ways of saying things that would be even more impolite if stated directly o Using these violations of maxims to create and interpret indirect speech acts requires knowing something about what other participants in the convo already know. o People are not always that good at keeping track of what other people know, particularly when it differs from what they themselves know o An intonation pattern would reveal if someone is being sincere or using sarcasm o When communicating face2face people coordinate their convo so that all participants understand the meaning of what is being discussed The Productivity of Human Language Language allows new concepts to be transmitted through language from one person to another Productivity and Novelty o Language is productive in that units at one level of analysis allow the generation of many more units at the next level of analysis o English has about 40 speech sounds that can be combined to make many thousands of words o Language is often characterized by novelty o Language does not permit all possible combos Ambiguity o This is one consequence of ambiguity of language o Human languages are different from monkey calls because the y are "productive" o This productivity is evident at the level of speech sounds , words , and sentences o Language is productive by re-using components at a given level of language o IMPORTANT _ These ambiguities are rarely noticed o Typical speech is actually not that clear when presented one word at a time o Single words in a test were represented wrong nearly half the time o Individual lexical items or words can also be ambiguous in their semantics - meaning - IE. To exact same words in sentences , switched around , could mean sometime completely different o Subtle kinds of ambiguity - polysemous words have a number of related word sense - i.e.. Paper can get wet or paper can report on war o The context in normal convo usually specifies the meaning and almost always the ambiguities we have been describing go unnoticed Phonology Phonemes which are ether smallest significant sound units in language(difference between lap and rap) English has about 40 different phonemes Languages differ from one another to some extent in the particular phonemes they employ We speak with know awareness of following speech sounds Phonological Rules o Phonology is centrally concerned with the rules that determine what sound combinations are allowed in the language o Rules are determining pronunciations o Another possibility is that one simply memorizes the pronunciation of each of the basic meaning units of language called "Morphemes" o There about 50000 Morphemes in English but it is not possible to memorize their pronunciation because how a morpheme is pronounced depends on the rest of the word it appears in
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CHAPTER 9 : LANGUAGE The strict memorization of the many morphemes wouldnt count for the strict memorization position fails to account for the other regularities or generalizations o The strict memorization position cannot predict this consistency because you could not have previously memorized these novel strings o Pronunciation of words is principled and the search for rules has the goal of describing these principles o Non-words remind people of known words and that people pronounce the no word by analogy with the known word. If no analogy is suggested, this procedure is not going to work o We could restrict our analogies to favor similar word endings to constrain (or focus) our search more narrowly. Necessary guidance to ensure appropriate reminding's would build rules in the mechanism o These pronunciation rules may just be a reflection of the way the articulatory system is set up o The dist of English plural morphemes is quite regular o Key observation of this is that there are regularities of pluralization that are captured in terms of phonological features present in the stem noun o Don't have to be consciously aware of the rules to follow them o The general characterization of the phonology in terms of systematic rules holds fairly uniformly across languages o The idea is undermined where how we say things is driven solely by articulatory constraints o How a word is pronounced is what order the rules are in Speech Perception o In normal speech we produce as many as 250 words per minute which is about 16-20 phonemes per second o Speech is continuous with one phoneme flowing into the next o Sound Spectrogram - Important tool for analyzing speech structure which provides a visual rep of sound energy for different frequencies as a function of time o Segment A or whatever contains info about both the consonant and the vowel that was spoken o This parallel transmission of info results from articulation = when the consonant is being pronounced, the articulators are already being shaped in preparation of the vowel sound o This is the articulatory movements for different sounds within a word overlap one another in time o It has proven difficult to find invariant properties in the acoustic signal that uniquely correspond to a given phonetic segment o Formant = dark band of energy on spectrum - Lowest frequency format is called the first formant o The perception of phonemes is context dependent. Speech perception entails the integration of multiple sources of info rather than the discrete id of isolated segments of the signal o The mapping of acoustic cues is highly variable from one speaker to the next o Listeners are able to adjust and adjust quickly for these differences Theories in Speech perception o Motor Theory of speech and Auditory Theory of speech o MT = Close link between sys responsible for perceiving speech and the system responsible for producing speech. We are able to suggest phoneme by particular hand gesture that is made
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CHAPTER 9 : LANGUAGE
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MT= Perception is innate. Our abilities to produce and perceive speech are inborn and species-specific . Claims that speech is special under MT The auditory theory is the logical antithesis of the MT AT = Speech perception derives from gen properties of auditory system AT=speech perception is not species-specific AT is neutral with respect to which perceptual distinctions are innate or learned Categorical perception = Favors MT - The time between release and vibration is known as voice-onset time Over most of range of voice-onset- time , id was unambiguous meaning two categories could be distinguished Categorical perception is consistent with motor theory even if it is not a necessary prediction of it Trans cranial Magnetic Stimulation = TMS= provide evidence consistent with motor theory. Pulse is sent to magnetic coil and resulting field activates the neurons on the cortex just below the magnet MT predicts that the areas of the brain that plan the movements associated with producing speech should be activated when comprehending speech Processing speech activates the motor areas of the brain Categorical perception is now known to be non-unique to just humans Both theories of data suggest categorical perception arises from rapid decay of AM not something special about speech Later evidence suggests that some ability to discriminate speech sounds within the category, suggests that after they categorize speech sounds within a same category , diff are forgotten A difficulty specifically with AT, suggests there will be conflict with visual and auditory input when saying something like nana and viewing lip movements Known as McGuire Effect - Somehow perceptual system integrates the info from the auditory and visual modalities to yield the unitary exp of a single speech sound Newest understanding is that speech perception involves the integration of a variety of sources of info including the info from both the auditory and visual modalities

Syntax The need for structure o Syntax is the grammatical structure that determines how words are combined to form sentences o Speakers in English clearly know how to interpret this but it is not obvious how to describe the rule or principle that is involved o The generalization that a pronoun that appears first in the sentence is not referential with the noun that follows it o Findings suggest that the principles of question construction require a deeper analysis of sentence structure o Language use requires complex knowledge consisting of much more than simple rules based on word strings Structure o Sentences are hierarchically organized, that is , sentences can be divided into their main parts and then further subdivided o When we naturally break sentences into parts we called these chunks that we label noun phrase or verb phrase and etc o Understanding a sentence involves figuring out the intended structure o Observation that people have great difficulty describing the "rules" of their language

CHAPTER 9 : LANGUAGE The intuitions are obvious to any fluent speaker of English, but the underlying rules certainty are not Phrase Structure o Phrase Structure = is the way that a sentence can be broken up into smaller components o One major aspect of acquiring a language is learning its phrase structure rules o If we add a list of words categorized as verbs, nouns, articles, we have a procedure for generating sentences o Goal of syntactic rules = To generate all acceptable sentences of a language and not generate any word strings that are not sentences o Some verbs require explicitly stated objects whereas others do not o Phrase structures are a considerable advance over viewing sentences solely in terms of a linear sentence of words o Much of analysis of syntax comes from an examination of written sentences o Spoken language is not nearly as clean as written language The Psychological Reality of Syntax o There is evidence for the psychological reality of grammatical categories like noun and verb o Evidence focuses on the reality of rules that break sentences in to smaller components o One needs to appeal to syntactic structures such as phrases Understanding Language The fact that we have little underlying difficulty understanding sentences conceals the considerable underlying complexity of sentence comprehension It seems clear that we try to understand sentences "on-line" as we hear or read them; that is , we do not wait until the end of a sentence, encode that sentence as a single chunk, and then send the sentence off to some pattern rec device Comprehension process start with the first word and continue Language Comprehension System looks up the meaning of the first word of the sentence in the mental dictionary or lexicon and attempts to determine the role it plays in the sentence Because meaning can be only indirectly conveyed through signs or symbols, the LCS must make its guesses from the clues left by the speaker or writer in gen strings of words for meaning LCS presumably uses both syntactic and semantic info Heuristics and Strategies o LCS is biased to expect active rather than passive sentences o Both adults and child's were faster with active rather than passive systems Minimal Attachment o Aspect of a new sentence is parsing it o Parsing involves determining the grammatical form of the sentence - We do this in parse trees o Idea underlying parsing is that the language comp system must be able to take a sentence and determine the correct parse tree for that sentence o By breaking sentence down into syntactic components it is then possible to construct meaning for sentence o Minimal attachment = Making a guess about the right parse tree for the first few words of the sentence Then we attach new words or phrase to an existing node in the current tree whenever possible o Analysis suggests second sentence should be harder to parse because of the initial bias simply to attach the prepositional phrase to the verb phrase
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CHAPTER 9 : LANGUAGE Garden-Path Sentences = are another important phenomenon that gives us insight into the parsing device - Starts out as if it would have one structure but then turns out to have 2nd o This reinforces the idea that sentence processing is incremental and that the LCS makes certain commitments that it sometimes has to retract later o Garden path sentences are rare and the LCS makes the correct decisions most of the time o Language compression takes place over time o LCS uses heuristics to determine which syntactic structure is most likely to be the correct one o Garden path's are a valuable tool for learning about he heuristics by the LCS Text Compression Same text can be shown to many different individuals Gestures and intonation patterns aren't considered thus making it easier Many words have multiple meanings so at the very least the meaning of a sentence includes some decisions about the appropriate meaning of the words Simply understanding a sentence involves much more than resolving the ambiguity of words with multiple meanings Understanding includes many inferences that go beyond the info given The basic point is that one cannot view understanding as some passive process in which the presented info is taken in and understood We are able to draw inferences from what is said to fill in details about what is not stated directly If a word has been inferred, people should be slower to indicate that it did not appear in the paragraph It makes sense for an inference system to be somewhat conservative about its guesses because otherwise we might often be forced to retract inferences Without some control over inferences, a single sentence could leave us lost in thought for days Forward Chaining Inference = Inference is drawn at the time that the sentence is read Backward Chaining Inference = Doing little work during sentence but doing majority when more information is needed later Disadvantage of 1 is comprehension may require a long time to process inferences at the time sentence is read and 2's bad part is substantial time may be required later when new sentence
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