PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

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PSY 369 Psycholinguistics

• Review for Exam 3

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Chapters and topics

• 9 Conversation
• 10, 11, 12 Language Acquisition
• Early, Late, and Processes
• 14 Language thought

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Conversation

• Conversation is a specialized form of social
  interaction, with rules and organization.
• Herb Clark (1996)
• Joint action
• Autonomous actions vs. Participatory actions
• Face-to-face conversation - the basic setting

• Meaning and understanding
• Establishing Common Ground
• Common ground is necessary to coordinate
  speakers meaning with listeners understanding
• Knowledge, beliefs and suppositions that the
  participants believe that they share
• Identifying participants
• Layers
• Conversation is structured

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Identifying participants

• Conversation often takes place in situations that
  involve various types of participants and
  non-participants

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Structure of a conversation

• Conversations are purposive and unplanned
• Typically you cant plan exactly what youre
  going to say because it depends on another
  participant
• Conversations look planned only in retrospect
• Conversations have a fairly stable structure

• Opening the conversation
• Identifying participants
• Taking turns
• Negotiating topics
• Closing conversations

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Taking turns

• Typically conversations dont involve two (or
  more) people talking at the same time

• Three implicit rules (Sacks et al, 1974)
• Rule 1 Current speakers selects next speaker
• Rule 2 Self-selection if rule 1 isnt used,
  then next speaker can select themselves
• Rule 3 current speaker may continue (or not)

• These principles are ordered in terms of priority
• The first is the most important, and the last is
  the least important

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Language Acquisition

• Some of the major issues
• Imitation vs Innateness
• Learning words
• General patterns and observations
• Proposed Strategies
• Fast mapping
• Whole object
• Mutual exclusivity
• Learning Syntax
• Learning Morphology
• Commonalities across languages and cultures

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Typical language development

• 24 Months
• Can name a number of objects common to his
  surroundings
• Is able to use at least two prepositions
• Combines words into a short sentence
• Vocabulary of approximately 150-300 words
• Volume and pitch of voice not yet well-controlled

• 6 Months
• Responds to his name
• Responds to human voices without visual cues by
  turning his head and eyes
• Responds appropriately to friendly and angry tones

• 18 Months
• Has vocabulary of approximately 5-20 words
• Vocabulary made up chiefly of nouns
• Some echolalia (repeating a word or phrase over
  and over)
• Is able to follow simple commands

• 12 Months
• Uses one or more words with meaning (this may be
  a fragment of a word)
• Understands simple instructions, especially if
  vocal or physical cues are given
• Practices inflection
• Is aware of the social value of speech

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In the beginning

• Prelinguistic communication

• Mahler (mid 80s, in France)
• 4 day old babies Russian vs French
• Nonnutritive sucking method

• DeCasper, et al (1994)

• Had mothers read stories everyday to fetuses
  during 34-38 weeks of pregnancy
• After 38th week, babies reacted differently (HR)
  to familiar story than new

• Child-directed speech (motherese)

• Early conversations

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The early days phonology

• Eimas et al, (1971)
• Categorical perception in infants (1 month olds)

Sharp phoneme boundary
Young infants can distinguish different phonemes
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Early speech production

• The progression of cooing and babbling follows a
  universal pattern.
• Babies, until around 6 months old, can produce
  sounds/phonemes that their parents cannot produce
  or distinguish

• 6 - 8 weeks cooing
• 4 - 6 months babbling

• 6 - 7 months Reduplicated babbling

• 8 - 9 months CVC clusters may appear
• 10 or 11 months Variegated babbling dab gogotah

• By 12 to 14 months some evidence of language
  specific phonological rules

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Language Sponges

• Learning words

• Methods used to study this
• Diary studies
• Taped language samples (Roger Brown)
• Large database CHILDES

• About 3,000 new words per year, especially in the
  primary grades
• As many as 8 new words per day
• Production typically lags behind comprehension

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Early speech production

• Transition to speech

• Early words
• Common Phonological processes
• Reduction
• Delete sounds from words
• Coalescence
• Combine different syllables into one syllable
• Assimilation
• Change one sound into a similar sound within the
  word
• Reduplication
• One syllable from a multi-syllabic word is
  repeated

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Early word learning

• First words (Around 10-15 months)

• Emergence of systematic, repeated productions of
  phonologically consistent forms
• Idiomorphs - personalized words

• Developed in systematic ways
• Not simply imitation, rather are creative
• Learned importance of consistency of names

• Typically context bound (relevant to the
  immediate environment)
• Important people, Objects that move, Objects that
  can be acted upon, Familiar actions
• Nouns typically appear before verbs

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Semantic Development

• Applying the words to referents

• Extension
• Finding the appropriate limits of the meaning of
  words
• Underextension
• Applying a word too narrowly
• Overextension
• Applying a word too broadly

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Extensions of meaning

• One-word-per-referent heuristic
• If a new word comes in for a referent that is
  already named, replace it
• Exception to that was horse, but it only
  lasted a day here

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Quines gavagai problem

• The problem of reference
• a word may refer to a number of referents (real
  world objects)
• a single object or event has many objects, parts
  and features that can be referred to

Frog
Frog? Green? Ugly? Jumping?
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Learning word meanings

• Fast mapping
• Using the context to guess the meaning of a word

• All got the olive tray
• Several weeks later still had some of the meaning

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Constraints on Word Learning

• Perhaps children are biased to entertain certain
  hypotheses about word meanings over others

• Markman (1989)

• Object-scope (whole object) constraint
• Words refer to whole objects rather than to parts
  of objects
• Taxonomic constraint
• Words refer to categories of similar objects
• Taxonomies rather than thematically related
  obejcts
• Mutual exclusivity constraint
• Each object has one label different words refer
  to separate, non-overlapping categories of
  objects
• An object can have only one label

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Language explosion continues

• Proto-syntax (?)
• Holophrases
• Single-word utterances used to express more than
  the meaning usually attributed to that single
  word by adults

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Language explosion continues

• Syntax
• Basic child grammar (Slobin, 1985)
• Similarities across all languages
• Mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes
• Take 100 utterances and count the number of
  morphemes per utterance

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Language explosion continues

• Syntax
• Roger Brown proposed 5 stages
• Stage 1 Telegraphic speech (MLU 1.75 around
  24 months)
• One and two word utterances
• Debate learning semantic relations or syntactic
  (position rules)

• Children in telegraphic speech stage are said to
  leave out the little words and inflections
• e.g. Mummy shoe NOT Mummys shoe
• Two cat NOT two cats

• More than two words
• Stages 2 through 5
• Stage 2 (MLU 2.25) begin to modulate meaning
  using word order (syntax)
• Later stages reflect generally more complex use
  of syntax (e.g., questions, negatives)

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How do kids learn the syntax?

• Innateness account
• Pinker (1984, 1989)
• Semantic bootstrapping

Child has innate knowledge of syntactic
categories and linking rules
Child learns the meanings of some content words
Child constructs some semantic representations
of simple sentences
Child makes guesses about syntactic structure
based on surface form and semantic meaning
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How do kids learn the syntax?

• It is in the stimulus accounts
• Children do not need innate knowledge to learn
  grammar
• Speech to children is not impoverished (Snow,
  1977)
• Children learn grammar by mapping semantic roles
  (agent, action, patient) onto grammatical
  categories (subject, verb, object) (e.g. Bates,
  1979)

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Language explosion continues

• Morphology
• Typically things inflections and prepositions
  start around MLU of 2.5 (usually in 2 yr olds)
• Wug experiment (Berko-Gleason, 1958)

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Language explosion continues

• Morphology

This person knows how to rick. She did the same
thing yesterday.
Yesterday she ________.
Typically children say that she ricked.
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Acquiring Morphology

• Stages in the acquisition of irregular inflections

time

• On the face of it, learning these morphological
  quirks follows a peculiar pattern
• Early correct irregular forms are used
• Middle incorrect regular forms are used
• Late correct forms are used again
• Why do we find this type of pattern?
• Memory and rules

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Memory Rules

• The use of overregularized forms starts at around
  the same that that the child is beginning to
  apply the default -ed rule successfully
• Early All forms-- whether regular or
  irregular-- are memorized
• Middle The regular rule is learned, and in some
  cases overapplied
• Late Irregulars are used based on memory,
  regulars use the rule (the idea is that if the
  word can provide its own past tense from memory,
  then the past tense rule is blocked)

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Positive and negative evidence

• What kind of feedback is available for learning?

• Positive evidence Kids hear grammatical
  sentences
• Negative evidence information that a given
  sentence is ungrammatical
• Kids are not told which sentences are
  ungrammatical(no negative evidence)
• Lets consider no negative evidence further

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Negative evidence via feedback?

• Kids resist instruction
• Cazden (1972) McNeill (1966)
• Do kids get implicit negative evidence?
• Brown Hanlon (1970)
• Adults didnt show a preference for Adams
  grammatical or ungrammatical sentences (either in
  terms of what they understood or what they
  expressed approval of)

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Evidence for critical period for language

• Lenneberg (1967) proposed that there is a
  critical period for human language

• Feral Children
• Children raised in the wild or with reduced
  exposure to human language
• What is the effect of this lack of exposure on
  language acquisition?
• Two classic cases
• Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron
• Genie

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Effects of the Critical Period

• Learning a language
• Under c. 7 years perfect command of the language
  possible
• Ages c. 8- c.15 Perfect command less possible
  progressively
• Age 15- Imperfect command possible

• Johnson and Newport (1989)

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Second language acquisition

• Contexts of childhood bilingualism
• Simultaneous versus Sequential acquisition
• Frequency of usage of both languages
• Dominance of L1 vs. L2
• Language attrition
• Mode of acquisition
• Native bilingualism - growing up in a two
  language environment
• Immersion - schooling provided in a non-native
  language
• Submersion - one learner surrounded by non-native
  speakers
• Language dominance effects
• Relative fluency of L1 and L2 may impact
  processing

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Bilingual Representations

• How do we represent linguistic information in a
  bilingual lexicon?

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Interesting effects in bilinguals

• Interference
• Does knowing two languages lead to interference?
• Code switching
• When bilinguals substitute a word or phrase from
  one language with a phrase or word from another
  language, usually follows rule of switched
  language
• Cognitive advantages
• Problem solving, executive control, inhibition
• Bialystok and colleagues

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Does language affect thought?

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
• Linguistic determinism
• Language determines thought.
• Speakers of different languages see the world in
  different, incompatible ways, because their
  languages impose different conceptual structures
  on their experiences.
• Whorf posited that cultural thinking differences
  were the direct result of differences in their
  languages
• Linguistic relativity
• Weak version(s) of the linguistic relativity
  hypothesis
• Language influences thinking conditions how we
  think and perceive the world

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Color Terms

• Brown Lenneberg (1954) codability
• Berlin and Kay (1969) Color hierarchy
• Hieder (1972)
• Dani tribe of New Guinea use only two color names
• Kay Kempton, (1984)
• Investigated English and Tarahumara (no separate
  terms for blue and green
• Winawer, Boroditsky and others (2007)
• English and Russian divide up blues differently

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Counting Arithmetic

• Miller Stigler (1987)
• The greater regularity of number names in
  Chinese, Japanese and Korean as compared to
  English or French facilitates the learning of
  counting behavior beyond 10 in those languages.
• Miura et al (1993)
• Another advantage is earlier mastery of place
  value (understanding that in 23 there are 2
  tens and 3 ones)

• Gordon (2004) Piraha tribe
• Hoi (falling tone one), hoi (rising tone
  two), aibai ( many)
• Matching tasks - show an array of objects, they
  have to put objects down to match the array

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Conclusions

• At this point it is apparent that the strong view
  of Whorfs hypothesis is not supported.

• However, there is continued support for the
  weaker version(s) of the hypothesis
• The data from areas of investigation concerning
  color naming, counting arithmetic, reasoning,
  visual memory, and other areas (e.g., social
  inference) indicate that the use of certain
  specific terms can influence how we think