Psycholinguisctics Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science Cognitive Psychology

Psycholinguisctics Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science Cognitive Psychology Day 2.

Today’s themes 1. 2. 3. What is language? (Thursday) How do we recognize its parts and types? What levels of linguistic studies are there? – some psycholinguistic experiments 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) n Chomsky’s Competence vs. perfomance

What is a language? n 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 n Standard language – written language ¡ Chinese – Japanese? Dialect 1 Dialect 2 Dialect 3

A disoputed case - German • Isophone • Isolex • boot - trunk • Isoseme • dinner • Isomorph • Dived - dove Isoglosses: Ik - ich Maken machen

Language – same and different n Typology ¡ ¡ n Based on morphological constructions Based on default word order Universality

Language typology n n Configurational – nonconfigurational Analytic-synthetic ¡ Agglutinating - inflecting

Typology n Configurational and nonconfigurational languages n Arwen Nazgǔl chase n n

Typology The Nazgǔl are chasing Arwen. A Nazgullok kergetik Arwent kergetik a Nazgullok. n n n Arwen Nazgǔl chase

n n n In the box At the table n You could have got it done n n A dobozban Az asztalnál (ti) megcsináltathattátok (volna) • Free word order • Null anaphora • Syntactically discontinuous expressions

Language typology n Word Order ¡ ¡ ¡ n S – subject V – verb O – Object What is the default word order in English? ¡ ¡ The cat Mouse Little Chase

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

n Cecil H Brown: body part namings ¡ ¡ ¡ n Body, head, eyes, arms, nose, mouth IF foot > hand IF individual toes > individual fingers Some languages lack the term for ‘body’

n 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 n ¡ ¡ ¡ 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? n n n 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 n Initially very different Acquisition of syntax – remember artificial grammars ¡ Acquisition of vocabulary ¡ n Later converged – now their interpretations are different, but reconciliable

Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996 n Can 8 -month old infants extract information about word boundaries solely on the basis of the sequential statistics of concatenated speech? n Familiarisation-preference procedure (Jusczyk & Aslin 1995) Infants exposed to auditory material that serves as potential learning experience.

Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996 n Test stimuli Items contained within the familiarisation material Items highly similar but weren't within the familiarisation material. n Hypothesis If they have extracted the crucial info from the data, there will be a differential fixation time.

Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996 n Speech stream Length Speed Content 2 mins 270 syllables/min 4 trisyllabic nonsense words (repeated in random order) TP 1 within words; 0. 33 across words. No effect of co-articulation, stress. . .

Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996 Sample bidakupadotigolabubidaku. . .

Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996 n What is a Transitional Probability (TP)? P= x/xy X A TP(XA) = 1. 0 X A B C TP(XA) = 1/3 = 0. 33 TP(XB) = 0. 33 TP(XC) = 0. 33

Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996 n 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

Saffran, Aslin & Newport 1996 n 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 serialordering info. (after 2 mins!!)

Word classes n 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. 2. 3. 4. 5. Can occur after „to be” They can occur after articles (the, an) and before nouns They can occur after very Can haver superlative forms (er, est) Can form an adverb with -ly

Or are things really as clearcut? n Try these ¡ ¡ ¡ Happy Old Top Two Asleep Want

Why is psycholinguistics interesting? n Speech is natural n All humans learn a language – no culture without speech (numbers - Piraha! Colours dani) n Any human baby can learn any human language – what about deaf children?

What’s the big deal? n n 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. . . n n n n 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?

Further aggravating things n n n n different accents different speech rates stammering incomplete sentences ambiguity vocabulary of between 50. 000 -100. 000 words 2 -4 words per second

Our language awareness is raised under special conditions: n n n 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 sounds phonetics meaning grammar semantics morphology phonology articulation Sound patterns pragmatics syntax suffixes meaning structure intention

Sounds n Categorical perception of sounds ¡ ¡ Continuous vs categorical (Bird vs big) The role of Voice Onset Time – n n n ¡ ¡ n 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 bilinguals Voices modified with the Klatt synthesizer

A nyelv szerkezete language sounds phonetics meaning grammar semantics morphology phonology articulation Sound patterns pragmatics syntax suffixes meaning structure intention

Morphosyntax – remember typologies! n Morphology ¡ The forms of words n ¡ 3 main types of languages n n n ¡ Particularly important in languages using cases Isolating Agglutinative Fusional Often studied with priming paradigms

The Great Rule Debate n n n 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! n What do you call ¡ ¡ ¡ ¡ ¡ n 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

n Is Hungarian an easy language? ¡ Difficulties n agglutinating system ¡ ¡ n ¡ 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 n Altaic language – Finno-Ugoric Not Indo-European language http: //linguistics. buffalo. edu/people/faculty/dryer/fa mily. maps

The Hungarian noun declination system – 18 cases n Nominative – default case ¡ n Accusative /Vt/ ¡ n The cats Dative /n. Vk/ ¡ n The girl hit the boy. Plural /Vk/ ¡ n The cat is on the mat. I gave the flowers to the lady. Comitative /v. Vl/ ¡ 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 This would require tons of subrules! Meaning NOM [-] ACC [-ØT] PLUR [-ØK] DAT [-NAK] COM [-VAL] [dog] kutya kutyát kutyák kutyának kutyával [luck] mázlit mázlik mázlinak mázlival [giraffe] virágot virágok virágnak virággal [egg] tojást tojások tojásnak tojással [house] házat házak háznak házzal [monkey] majom majmot majmok majomnak majommal [mouse] egér egeret egerek egérnek egérrel [horse] ló lovat lovak lónak lóval

The Great Rule Debate n The formation of different morphological forms of words: ¡ ¡ Memory? – is there a limit to memorized forms (in acquisition time) Computational load?

Rule-based theories n Symbolic and abstract units of language ¡ n V+-ed Full regularity hypothesis n n the transformation remains, but underlying forms predict surface forms Run ->rin (run, ran, run - cling, clang, clung)

The Wug Test n Jean Berko Gleason’s test ¡ He administered it to children to see how much they know about the rules.

n Developmental data in Hungarian

Dual route n Pinker & Ullman ¡ ¡ Stems Idioms Irregulars Regulars (frequency) Phrases, sentences Regulars Race model – rather unfair: irregular always wins Doublets are stored – in both forms

Acquisition dissociation n n Children start off knowing both regulars and irregulars then somehow they tend to forget about irregulars ¡ ¡ Goed doed

Single Pattern Associator n n n Tried to exploit phonological similarities of irregulars Back-progagation Using sounds as input and other sounds as output

Rote memory n Rummelhart & Mc. Clelland Symbolic deterministic Rules Probabilistic WPM Subsymbolic n n n SPA Harald Baayen Transitions are not clear-cut between regulars and irregulars „The whole takes precedence over the parts” Morphological families

Lexical Decision Task n Press YES or NO for whether the following is a real word in English: SLEEP HOUSE BRUKE NURSE NOIK n Non-words (BRUKE) are ‘fillers’ ¡ ¡ n n Just to check the subject is paying attention We only look at real words FAST response = easy to access SLOW response = hard to access (450 msec) (500 msec)

What affects lexical access time? n 1. Word Frequency High frequency words = common words (cat, mother, house) n Low frequency words = uncommon words (accordion, compass) n n High frequency are faster to access than Low frequency n even when they’re balanced on other features (e. g. length) ¡ E. g. Pen vs. Pun ¡ Rubenstein et al. (1970)

The Logogen Model Morton (1969) n n 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!

‘cat’ [kæt] • So how does this help us to explain the frequency effect? – High frequency words have a lower threshold for firing –E. g. cat vs. cot ‘cot’ [kot] Low freq takes longer

What affects lexical access time? n 2. Semantic Priming Effects ¡ (Meyer & Schvandeveldt, 1971) n Subject sees 2 words n Must say YES or NO whether both are real words SLOW ¡ doctor grass … because nurse FAST ¡ doctor nurse is already ‘warmed up’ by having just activated doctor

Spreading Activation Model cradle baby bed hospital nurse dentist doctor heat delirium sun green grass mammal bird canary rain fever animal yellow ostrich

Semantic Network cradle baby bed hospital nurse dentist doctor heat delirium sun green grass mammal bird canary rain fever animal yellow ostrich

Fits nicely with Logogen Model n Each of the nodes in the network has a logogen with it n n When we read doctor, its logogen fires = doctor gets ‘activated’ The activation from doctor spreads to nurse, this lowers the threshold for nurse ¡ so make nurse faster to access

‘doctor’ [doktə] • spreading activation from doctor lowers the threshold for nurse to fire – So nurse take less time to fire ‘nurse’ [nə: s] Spreading activation network doctor nurse docto nurse

Previous experiments n Pinker és Prince (1998) Lukács, 2001 n Acoustic visual priming n n Lexical decision task Plural form - stem n Priming effect n • • • ++ regulars + irregulars 0 phonological

Experimental design Prime Word suffixed root Modality aud 250 ms Window (IN) Target visual ablak Window Do you see an existing word or not?

Contrasting theories Exp. Stem priming result Theory Rules & subrules ? ? Dual route WPM Suffixed Paradig priming m priming ? ?

A nyelv szerkezete language sounds phonetics meaning grammar semantics morphology phonology articulation Sound patterns pragmatics syntax suffixes meaning structure intention

Pragmatics n Sperber and Wilson – relevance theory ¡ ¡ n We automatically assume, that ¡ ¡ n n most new information least amount of effort 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.

n Language (with capital L): ¡ ¡ n 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 n n 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.

n Linguistic determinism ¡ ¡ n Impossibility to avoid linguistic category traps No understanding can be established between the cultures Linguistic relativity

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis n “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. ” n “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 n Vocabulary size debates ¡ n Categorization debates ¡ n Focal colours debate Grammatical constructions & gender ¡ n The great snow debate 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 Alternatin Sounds No inferior languages – is mispercieved

Edward Sapir n n n 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 n n Chemical engineering – later studied linguistics with Sapir His hobby was studying languages – mainly meso-American ones (hopi, nahuatl, maya) ¡ n 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 n n n 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. n n n -tsiaq-well -junnaq-be able to -nngit-not -tualuu-very much -junga 1 st pers. singular present indicative non-specific

The end of the hopi debate n B. L. Whorf n n Malotki n n The hopi use a very complicated character and a time very similar to that of other cultures Hindi though n n 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 Has the same word for yesterday as for tomorrow! ‘kal’ Spanish n Same problem ‘ya’

The language-thought interface n Vocabulary size debates ¡ n Categorization debates ¡ n Focal colours debate Grammatical constructions & gender ¡ n The great snow debate Grammatical gender of words Spatial language debates ¡ Description systems

Frames of reference and dead reckoning

Hypothesis n n 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 deadreckoners

Today we learned n n n 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?