Langston

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Introduction

• Langston
• Psycholinguistics
• Lecture 1

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What is psycholinguistics?

• How many languages do you speak?
• Linguistics The study of language itself.
• Psycholinguistics How language develops, is
  used, and represented.

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A note about the class

• This class was quite a bore. I think the
  professor tried to make the topics interesting
  but he failed miserably. He required us to write
  five reaction papers to pass the class, problem
  was... it was hard to find anything he said worth
  reacting to and it will be hard to make an A on
  these because his grading is very subjective. The
  class was a disappointment and I strongly suggest
  CDIS Language Acquistion if you would like to
  gain more knowledge about language because this
  class is far too broad and unorganized. It was
  one of those classes that are based on theories
  but no concrete answers. Unless you aspire to be
  a linguist, i don't suggest taking this class
  because the professor doesn't focus on one topic
  long enough for a student to have a clear
  understanding. I suggest no one take this class
  with the " i need an elective mentality" or this
  class will be your most confusing nightmare. I
  passed but I'm not ashamed to say that it was
  pure luck.

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What interests us?

• Whos the boss?
• Is secular humanism a religion? Who decides what
  words mean?
• Humpty Dumpty

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• Where do words come from and why?
• From Savage Love (5/23/01)
• At the end of last weeks column, you asked what
  we should call it when a woman fks a man in
  the a with a strap-on dido. We should call it
  a woman fking a man in the a with a
  strap-on dilo. Does every sexual practice need
  a cute term? Im sick of not being able to say
  everyday, previously run-of-the-mill phrases like
  tossed salad because now everyone thinks I
  want

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• Author Toni Morrison, in her Nobel lecture, says
  that representations of violence are not just
  representations, they are violence, says
  Worsham. Language has a way of doing violence.
• What power do words have? Where do they get their
  power?

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• How are words connected to the body?
• Is hot under the collar hot?
• Does the cold shoulder make you cold?
• Is there such a thing as amodal cognition?

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The plan

• The goal is to trace language through the system
• Some background
• Speech input to comprehension
• Reading input to comprehension
• Words
• Syntax (word order)
• Semantics (meaning)
• Development (biology, of a language, and of the
  individual)

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Language Facts

• mans most important cultural invention
• language pervades thought, with different
  languages causing their speakers to construe
  reality in different ways
• children learn to talk from role models and
  caregivers

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Language Facts

• grammatical sophistication used to be nurtured
  in the schools, but sagging educational standards
  and the debasements of popular culture have led
  to a frightening decline in the ability of the
  average person to construct a grammatical
  sentence
• Engish is a zany, logic-defying tongue
• English spelling takes such wackiness to even
  greater heights ghoti

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Language Facts

• All facts from Pinker (1994, p. 4)
• Lets look at them again. Pinker and I both want
  to convince you that all of this is wrong.

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Language Facts

• mans most important cultural invention
• Its biology. We will see a lot of these
  arguments at the end, but
• Species specific.
• Replicated in every member of the species.
• Differentiated spontaneously with maturation.
• Certain aspects emerge only during infancy.
• (List from Fernandez Cairns after Lenneberg,
  1967)

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Language Facts

• language pervades thought, with different
  languages causing their speakers to construe
  reality in different ways
• Language and thought are related, but language is
  not equal to thought.
• Language evolved for communication of thoughts.

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Language Facts

• children learn to talk from role models and
  caregivers
• Much of what kids know is not explicitly taught.
• The debate is not so much whether they are
  explicitly taught, but more about what is
  available in the information given to them. Can
  they pick up language without biology?

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Language Facts

• children learn to talk from role models and
  caregivers
• A unicorn is in the garden. How do you make it a
  question?
• A unicorn that is eating a flower is in the
  garden. How do you make it a question?
• Jabberwocky

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Language Facts

• grammatical sophistication used to be nurtured
  in the schools, but sagging educational standards
  and the debasements of popular culture have led
  to a frightening decline in the ability of the
  average person to construct a grammatical
  sentence
• Language evolves.
• The problem of aks.

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Language Facts

• Engish is a zany, logic-defying tongue
• English spelling takes such wackiness to even
  greater heights ghoti
• The goal of the system is different from peoples
  expectation.
• Electric
• Electricity

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More on the distinction

• More Alice.

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More on the distinction

• Markedness (linguistics) Some terms seem to have
  an extra feature (theyre marked). For example
• Long-short
• Hot-cold
• Happy-sad

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More on the distinction

• Markedness How do we know?
• Unmarked is the name of the dimension (this
  board is three feet long versus this board is
  three feet short).
• Unmarked can be used in questions without
  implying anything (how long is it? versus how
  short is it?).

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More on the distinction

• Markedness (psycholinguistics) What does it do?
• Marked terms take longer to access.
• Marked terms are a possible account of a
  relationship between language and spatial
  processing.

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More on the distinction

• Insert

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History

• Very abbreviated
• Behaviorism Verbal behavior can be acquired
  through classical and operant conditioning just
  like the rest of psychology.
• Not necessarily. We need to make the distinction
  between whether it can be learned and whether it
  is learned the way behaviorists expected.

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History

• Very abbreviated
• Chomsky
• Poverty of the stimulus
• John wants him to win.
• John wants Bill to see him.
• Trouble with associations as an account for
  language
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• Competence/performance
• Blit, blib, blish

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History

• Very abbreviated
• A different model (the cognitive revolution)
• Information theory We can calculate how much
  information is in a message.
• This can explain this
• MST PPL CN RD THS SNTNC.
• And this
• The witness was examined by the _____.

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History

• Very abbreviated
• A different model (the cognitive revolution)
• It was also a philosophical change (e.g., you can
  have representations).
• Methodology came along.
• More subject matter (sometimes the way you look
  at things affects what you see).

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Our problem

• The Language Instinct

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The End