Greg Detre
Monday, 09 October, 2000
Draws attention to how amazing it is that babies are able to learn language at all (let alone as quickly and easily as they do), and how commonplace this seems to us.
Chomsky developed a new way of describing the rules governing whether or not a sentence is grammatical or not, taking linguistics in a new direction. Linguistics provides the vocabulary with which psycholinguistics is able to talk about how language is produced and understood.
Discusses non-nutritive sucking as a technique for measuring babies� interest (and so ability to perceive) in different sounds used in different languages, an ability which atrophies in adulthood. Discusses the effect of priming on reaction times in identifying non-words, as affected by associates in meaning, or sounding similar.
Psycholinguistics attempts to understand not language itself, but language as it is used by the mind (even as it begins to develop before birth).
at 20 months, his son Sam would respond �yeah� to most �do you want �� questions, as well as using it to mean �give it to me� and �do this for me�
this example highlights that:
children do not learn by simple imitation � no one else simply points at things and says �yeah�
methodological: when interpreting the ability of a child to use + understand words, it is important to understand the intentions of the child itself
two main goals of research into early language acquisition:
understand the acquisition of knowledge about individual words
understand the acquisition of knowledge about how words combine to form meaningful sentences
is there any definition of what constitutes normal development?
|
months |
ability |
|
8-10 |
ability to comprehend (+ produce) individual words |
|
10 |
may understand the meaning of a word without being able to articulate it |
|
12 |
comprehension vocabulary of about 100 words (� half/twice) production vocabulary of about 10 words (though some don't till 20 months) |
|
24 |
average production vocabulary > 300 (� half/twice) |
all such studies (the largest had 1800 infants) rely on parental assessments (with checklists + guidelines), which can be subjective
researchers have looked for correlations between the development of general abilities (possibly as prerequisites) and the development of language
pretend play = using one thing to symbolise another
considered to play a central part in how children�s minds develop, and in the development of language
after all, words are just spoken symbols that represent whatever the word means
the first words a child tends to utter are the names of observable objects in its enviornment
these may be learned by simple association, e.g. the word for a telephone being a �hullo�
how is it that children are able to make the right associations and not just associate with whatever�s in their field of vision, or on the basis of the radio or their parents� conversation?
exaggerated intonation in child-directed speech attracts the child�s attention
but some societies do not distinguish between child- and adult-directed speech (though only a few)
plus, how do they know which particular word/sound in the sentence to associate with the object?
and what if the child is not looking/attending to the object at the time? by the time they do look, the corresponding sound will be over
the problem is similar for associating words with events (verbs)
in the laboratory, the range of things a new word could be associated with can be controlled
Markman et al. (1980s):
the child is shown unseen/unnamed objects, and then has to pick them out (usually) for a demanding puppet
i.e. guess the meaning of a new word, and demonstrate it by picking out an object
or, for verbs, assigning a name to the puppet�s action, which the child has to repeat when the puppet next repeats the action
using puppets is fun for children, and so maximises their cooperation
two main findings:
1. if children hear a new word for something, they assume that it applies to the whole thing, and to the thing�s parts
2. if they already know the name of something, they assume that a new word cannot apply to that same thing (so either to a part, or to something else)
these assumptions could be largely a result of:
� primitive perceptual sensitivities
� associative learning
but did the sound of the bell have meaning for Pavlov�s dogs int eh same way that the word �dinner� has meaning for Pavlov himself?
but this still doesn't rule associative learning out as part of the language learning process
children are much more sophisticated in terms of what they can kinds of things they can learn and under what circumstances
e.g. in communicating about our mental world
it�s not a simple/direct mapping from meaning to environment
verbs don't get learnt till later is that their use is more complicated because:
although the nouns used in speaking to infants refer to things in the here-and-now, verbs do not necessarily do so
moreover, the usage of verbs is more complicated, e.g. they often involve both a subject + object
this may require learning a body of nouns first
Naigles found that when two-year olds are shown a rabbit feeding a duck, and either hear:
1. �the rabbit is zorking the duck�
2. �the duck is zorking�
they interpret �zorking� to either mean �feeding� or �eating� � they appear to know that they should be mapped onto the event that involves one/two of them � this is important because:
1. it shows that children use the structure of the events they see in the wrold to aid in their interpretation of the structure of the sentences they hear
conversely, they also use the structure of the sentences they hear to guide what they should attend to in the world they see (Gleitman)
i.e. they are not trying to map individual words somehow excised from the rest of the utterance onto individual meanings somehow excised from the rest of the world
2. it means that verbs are learned in conjunction with a rudimentary knowledge of grammar
the meaning of a verb involves knowledge about the ways in which different things take part in the event described by that verb
adults, and indeed children, rarely confuse which things are doing what
however, it takes until about six years old that children learn that the sequential order of description in the sentence need not map on to the temporal order of events
infants start combining words when they have an expressive vocabulary of 50-100 words
the more words they can produce, they more combinations
but they rarely produce random combinations
and they learn that certain combinations require particular inflections (e.g. �I walk� but �he walks�)
children learning Turkish use inflections sooner than in English, where the inflections are not so noticeable/salient
Chomsky: adults use rules to generate meaningful sentences, which the child has to acquire somehow
e.g. transforming active into passive sentences, or tenses
the fact that children learn to avoid ungrammatical sentences cannot simply be the result of never hearing any, since what is so remarkable about language is that we can generate sentence we�ve never heard before
moreover, they hardly ever get negative feedback about ungrammatical sentences they do produce
Brown: if children are corrected for producing untruths, and not corrected for producing bad grammar, how is it that the result of this is an adult adept at telling untruths but whose sentences are perfectly grammatical
grammaticality is about the correct types of words (syntactic categories), not individual words
in order to learn the right internal structure, the child has to learn the right syntactic categories and the right positions, without knowing about either
Chomsky and Pinker: the only viable explanation is that we�re endowed innately with crude knowledge about types of words and their role in language, as a basis on which to determine which other types of words there are and where they can be found relative to one another
not specific to any particular language
children apparently assume� that the thing causing the event corresponds to the subject of the sentence they hear, and if they know the name for that, they�ve learned about the grammar of the subject category
apparently, newborn babies can imitate facial expressions
distinguishes between the innateness of (e.g.) the grasp reflex, and the less plausible innateness of knowledge about the structure of objects (i.e. the way the external world is organised) that the baby could encounter in its new world
but it might not be innateness about the noun/verb distinction, so much as innateness about perhaps states/changes in state
therefore, one aspect of the innate knowledge debate is whether the innate knowledge is about the nature of language, or more generally about the nature of the world
in some ways, Pinker�s account is not that different from Gleitman�s, about mapping onto the structure of the world
but Gleitman�s is simply about covariation in the world (in this case with language), whereas Pinker�s is specifically linguistic
very difficult to tell whether something�s innate � you have to find a stage at which the baby doesn't have the innate ability/knowledge, and be sure somehow that its failure is not due to the experiment�s sensitivity, or failure of the baby�s muscle control, or just that the innate behaviour might develop only after a certain time/maturation
Morgan: proposed that the input sequences that babies here have cues (clues) to their internal structure, e.g. prosody
newborns are sensitive to prosodic structure of their language, which may explain their sensitivity to syllabic structure
infants as young as 4� months are sensitive to the prosodic patterns that accompany some of the boundaries between the major constituents of a sentence
e.g. durational changes (slight lengthening of vowels before such a boundary) and slight changes in pitch before + after a boundary (generally a fall in pitch before, and a rise after)
Morgan and colleagues created a small artificial language composed of sequences of meaningless syllables ordered according to a set of rules they made up which specified which orders of syllables were grammatical
some of the sentences were spoken in a monotone way, and others with natural prosody (rhythm and intonation) to convey the constituent groupings
adults listened to one or other of the two spoken versions of the language, and were simultaneously shown visual symbols that represented the �objects� that the words in this language referred to
Morgan found that the language was learned more accurately when heard with its natural intonation, i.e. prosody does appear to aid the learning process
however, we do not necessarily mark constituent boundaries reliably by changes of prosody
on the other hand, speech to young children does tend to have exaggerated intonation, and very simple internal structure
although in Samoan and Javanese apparently the speech to children is not markedlyi different
in some communities, the parents do not address their children until they start talking
currently impossible to determine if this affects these children
and there could be other cues to internal structure provided
on Morgan�s account, how does the child know/learn (how) to use the prosody cues?
learning language requires the right kind of exposure
estimated duration of the �critical period� of language learning is between the first six and twelve years
the ability to learn a first language easily tails off
one girl was discovered when six, but developed language about as well as any other child who acquires a language at that age (e.g. children of immigrants)
another girl was discovered at 12 or 13, and developed some language skills fairly quickly, but never progressed beyond the level of a three year old
Pinker: there may not have been selective pressure to maintian phenomenal learning abilities beyond an initial period
but we do not seem to simply acquire the language we are exposed to � we create a language consistent with what we hear
early 20th century, Hawaii was effectively one large sugar plantation, employing from Philippines, China, Portugal etc.
pidgin language (mishmash of words, mainly from English, which had the property that no two speakers of pidgin would necessarily use the same words in the same order)
studied by Bickerton: noticed that the children of pidgin speakers did not speak the same pidgin as their parents
they learned a language that shared the words of the pidgin they heard, but with none of the irregular word order of the different pidgins spoken by the different adults, i.e. the children seemed to imposed order on what they heard, which was reinforced during interactions with each other
creoles (e.g. Hawaiian Creole) contain grammatical devices (word order, inflections, and grammatical functions words like �the� or �was�) which may not appear in any ofht elangs that originally made up the pidgin
supports the idea of a more proactive learning mechanicsm driven by a fundamental (innate?) desire to describe the world using language, in some form or other (i.e. not necessarily spoken)
rather than just analysing what it hears, or being based solely on other people�s combinations of words
indeed, children learn sign language in sign language communities in a way that almost exacly mirrors the way in which spoken language is learned (even including the creation of the sign language equivalents of pidgin and creole)
the structures of the two languages, in terms of elemnts correpsonding to words, rhythm and even syllables are almost equivalent
average adult:
comprehension vocabulary of between 60,000 and 75,000 words
during speaking selects from about 30,000
Altmann�s book contains about 5500, including variants on the same word
lexicon = mental dictionary
what elements do we use to retrieve words from it?
infants apparently organise what they hear in terms of syllables
if different languages exhibit different properties with respect to their spoken structure (e.g. rhythmic structure, syllabic structure and melodic structure) this may cause infants brought up in those different languages to develop different access procedures
in French, the syllable has a more distinctive role in terms of defining the rhythmic properties of the language than in English
in English, the beat coincides with the stressed syllables
do adult French speakers make use of their syllables in a way that adult speakers of English do not?
Mehler et al.: original motivation was to discover whether the syllable functions as a perceptual unit (= the chunk used to access + organise the mental lexicon), using a syllable-monitoring task:
adult French speakers found it harder to match /ba/ against �bal-con� and /bal/ against �ba-lance�, supporting the hypothesis that adult French speakers organise what they hear into syllable-sized chunks
in contrast, the time taken for English speakers to respond was not dependent on the relationship between the target syllable and the syllable structure of the word they hear, i.e. they were not sensitive to syllable structure in the way that French speakers are
the vocal tract changes shape in a continuous, fluid manner, with each shape/sound being affected by the previous and next/intended shapes = coarticulation
because the syllabic structure in French is very clear, it can mean less coarticulation
Marslen-Wilson & Warren lexical decision task with phonemes spliced together:
people were slower at ruling out non-words whose starting phoneme could be a real word
i.e. we do use the smallest detail possible to distinguish between alternative words in the mental lexicon
criticises the syllable monitoring task (� xxx ??? pg 62)
points out that infants� sensitivities may develop, and the organisation of the lexicon along with them
what are words?
morpheme = smallest unit of meaning, e.g. �morph+eme+s�
morphology = which kinds of morpheme can be stuck onto which other kinds
stems = e.g. �unit�, �word� etc.
affixes = e.g. �-s�, �-ing�
most commonly a suffix in English, but also prefixes
some languages have infixes, e.g. Tagalog (Philippines)
can also change the meaning of a word by modifying a vowel in the stem (e.g. �run-ran�)
inflectional = do not change the meaning, but convey additional relevant information
e.g. �-s�, �-ed�; �permit� + �submit�, �der/den/dem�
derivational = do change the meaning, are used to derive new words
e.g. �govern� to �governor�; �governable� to �ungovernable�; �causal� + �casualty�
when we access the mental lexicon, we also seem to dredge up neighbouring words (i.e. that share some feature with the word we�re searching for)
Marslen-Wilson (1980s) � showed that we can recognise a word even while it�s still being heard (before the speaker has finished saying it)
i.e. we access the lexical entry before its acoustic offset)
when shadowing (= repeating aloud what they heard on headphones), they�d frequently start to vocalise a word before it had finished being said
yet if the words were jumbled up so that they made no sense (grammatically???), people were much slower, showing that they were interpreting what they heard and recognising individual words rather than just parroting back the noises
when word-monitoring (= pres a button as soon as they heard a particular word on a tape), people were responding so fast that they must have been initiating theire response well before the end of the word (taking into account the time it takes to decide to + press the button)
also found that the time it takes to recognise a word correlates very well with how much of the word has to be heard to uniquely distinguish it
Marslen-Wilson suggested that entries in the mental lexicon are not simply accessed, they are activated
after all, all the information in the mental lexicon is stored within the neural structures of the brain (i.e. latent, right???)
the priming task enables us to distinguish which meanings of a word have been activated
Zwitserlood & Marslen-Wilson: cross-modal priming = (e.g.) auditory priming word, visual target word
to explore when, during the sound sequence, words are activated
played them the first half of the priming word (e.g. �captain�), then flashed up the target words
if the target word was related (e.g. �ship�), subjects responded faster
this just shows that the lexxical entry for �captain� can be activated before the entire word is heard
but if they played �captive�, which can only be distinguished on the basis of the final phoneme (alternative continuation targets), the same priming occurs
of course, if the targets weren't flashed up until the end of �captain� had been heard, no priming effects occurred
i.e. as the acoustic input enters the system, we activate all the lexcial entires compatible with the input heard so far, de-activating alternatives as we hear more
furthermore, there was generally more priming from more frequent words than non-frequent words (even when you keep length constant)
this lexical access seems different from the recognition of determining a particular one though
acoustic mismatch leads to a rapid decline in the activation of a lexical entry
tolerance
context-sensitive
Gaskell: showed with priming experiments that while the �thim� in �thim book� would activate the lexical entry for �thin�, the �thim� in �thim slice� would not
do we really have rules governing the different kinds of word-final consonant changes that can occur that we can run backwards to decide what a speaker meant during lexical selection?
perhaps we associate different versions of /thin/ with meaning, e.g. �thing� � �carpet�, �thim� � �book�, �thin� � �tree�
but this seems to require storing all possible pronunciations of each word in different contexts, whereas a set of rules would be much more efficient
what about words with more than one meaning?
Swinney (late 1970s) first used cross-modal priming: demonstrated that the alternative meanings of ambiguous words are activated
asked: do we activate the alternative meanings of words even when those words are heard in the context of sentences which are compatible with only one of the meanings of the word
people listened to a sentence, then he immediately flashed up a word � people�s lexical decisions were faster for related words, i.e. a sentence with �bank� in primed both �money� and �river�
however, he found that if he presented the target word two or three syllables after (downstream from) the ambiguous word, only the target related to the contextually appropriate sense of the word was primed
however, some later studies failed to show the same results:
they found that in context, only the appropriate meaning was activated � and the more frequent the meaning, the greater its activation
general consensus is that Swinney�s results were right � we do activate all meanings of an ambiguous word
Tanenhaus et al.: can we eliminate from the lexical search all words from inappropriate syntactic categories?
apparently not � used words ambiguous between a noun and a verb (e.g. �watch�), and found that both senses were activated when listening to sequences such as �John began to ��
this might indicate that syntactic categories are not listed separately as in a dictionary � if the syntactic category is nothing more than a reflection of its meaning they will not be listed separately
the meaning would have to be activated before the syntactic inappropriateness could be judged
�the neural circuits are lik eso many combination locks, and as the speech input unfolds through time, so do the tumblers of the different combination locks move around, until eventually, just those combination locks whose sequences are completed spring open�
Shillcock (late 1980s): wanted to see whether listeners activate the lexical entry for (e.g.) �bone� in the sentence �He carefully placed the trombone on the table�
used the cross-modal priming: played the sentence, and flashed up �rib� (related to �bone�) at the offset of �trombone�
also played sentences like �He carefully placed the bone on the table� as a control
he found that �trombone� primed �rib� as much as �bone� did, i.e. the lexical entry corresponding to �bone� is activated even when� bone� is heard simply as part of the word �trombone�
this seems to indicate that we consider all possible hypotheses that arise at any pointi n the incoming speech signal during lexical selection
why don�t we notice all the possible ambiguities in a sentence? there are tens that get ignored in the usual �Time flies like an arrow�/�Fruit flies like a banana�
grammar as a set of conventions � some of these conventions often go together
e.g. if the prepositions come at the beginning of each prepositional phrase (e.g. �the man with the freckles�) then the verbs will generally come before their objects (�she liked the man�)
in this case, it may be because prepositions and verbs have a similar grammatical function (specifying relationships between things and agents)
can we say that each word in a sentence functions in exactly the same way as each phoneme/letter in a word?
we know the meanings of only a finite number of words, but the potential to understand an infinite variety of sentences
what about �un+govern+able+s� or �anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism� etc.???
the phonemes all fulfil the same function, of narrowing down the search through the mental lexicon, whereas words each play a different function
surely the earlier phonemes than have a more important role???
and surely the morphemes don't have same/equal roles???
grammar tells us where in the sentence to find the words filling each role
some words can have different interpretations
or, like �eating pizza, with one�s family or one�s fingers�
�if someone read this sentence thought it was ungrammatical because it missed an �and� between �sentence� and �thoughht� they would be wrong�
�read� here is in the passive, i.e. �someone who was read the sentence�
or �I was lent a book that I shall avidly read yesterday�
why do we show such consistent preferences in the face of ambiguity?
perhaps ambiguities are resolved in favour of whichever grammatical convention leads to the simplest interpretation / most frequently used (which may be the least complex) / grammatical structure most frequently associated with the individual words
but these theories imply that we don�t take the meanings of the words into account when resolving such ambiguities
it used to be assumed that young children have problems with relative clauses, e.g. �the elephant that a giraffe bumped against lay down and went to sleep�
asked them to act out the sentence�s meaning with toy models � children would often assume that it was the elephant that bumped against a giraffe
importance of giving the sentences in a context that makes sense
Crain & Hamburger � realised that relative clauses are usually used to show which of many elephants
found that children could do it, but only with more than one elephant
they could even then produce relative clauses
used infrared to monitor people�s eye movements as they read a sentence on a screen
usually spend more time on difficult bits, or look back at earlier parts of the sentence � unconsciously
�Sam told the writer that he didn't understand to get some help from a decent editor�
vs �Sam asked the writer that he didn't understand to get some help from a decent editor� (unproblematic)
when embedded in a natural context (with more than one writer), the eye movement pattern was the same for the two sentences
it may be that what is important is not the frequency of occurrence of the grammatical structures associated with each word, but rather the frequency of occurrence of the different meanings associated with each word
but the meaning determines the grammatical structure, so how can the two be told apart? the two theories have more or less collapsed together
prosody as a means of disambiguation
emphatic stress can convey extra information
do we have meaning-independent (i.e. purely grammatical, like formal linguistic) mental representations?
in ASL + other sign languages, the equivalent of a pronoun is very much like pointing
when someone is introduced into a conversation, the sign for them is made in a particular location of the space in front of the signer
has the advantage of avoiding ambiguity with more than one pronoun
you can also refer to them having done something to someone else by starting the sign for the appropriate verb in the first pronoun-location and finishing the sign for that verb in the second pronoun-location
apparently in every language that has both other- and self-oriented (reflexive) pronouns, the two can never refer to the same person
why won't we tolerate this ambiguity?
is it innate?
children take a long time to learn what pronouns can/can't refer to � errors on both kinds can be found up till about 10, though they�re usually pretty good by 4-6
e.g. �the monkey is tickling him�, meaning itself
Frisian does allow �him� to be used like �himself�, but only in situations where there�d be no ambiguity
perhaps it�s related to the fact that children usually assume that two words don�t refer to the same thing
asking a question is trying to find out what fulfils a particular role in a gap
e.g. who did Cecily hope her second cousin would propose marriage to ___?, what did Cecily hope ___?
or relative clauses
e.g. the person who Cecily eventually proposed marriage to ___ was her second cousin
but we do not wait to find out where the gap is, even in complicated cases
Tanenhaus et al. (1980s/90s) � used two almost identical sentences:
�which woman did Bertie present a wedding ring to ___?�
�which horse did Bertie present a wedding ring to ___?�
they found that the implausibility (of presenting a wedding ring to a horse) is discovered when you get to �wedding ring�, before getting to the gap
the subject had to press a button to see the next word appear on a computer screen � the time taken to press the button indicated how long it took to read each word
usually the more implausible, the longer it takes to read
alternatively, use an EEG � Kutas et al. (early 1980s) found a wave in response to contextually implausible words
we appear to try and fit agents into roles as soon as we encounter them, and revise our assumptions later if necessary
and languages like German (or Japanese or Turkish), where the verb indicating the roles may be left till the end of the sentences, tend to be case-marking
there are definite constraints on where the gap can go in questions, even when the meaning of such ungrammatical statements is clear
e.g. �What did she think Berit�es ___ of marriage was long overdue?� or �What was Bertie�s offer of marriage long ___?� etc.
but these rules differ from language to language
why are there these seemingly arbitrary constraints?
they may reflect underlying, non-arbitrary conventions
it may be partly related to whether the language is case-marked, or where the verb appears in the sentence
even grammatical sentences can be hard to process
e.g. �What did you throw the tray that you brought the book that I didn't want to be read to out of up on away for?�
Altmann thinks that Caroll�s poem, Jabberwocky illustrates the difference between the meaning conveyed and the conventions used to convey it
a dictionary can never be a repository of meaning, since it�s circular
between 18 months and 6 years, children learn upwards of 9 words a day
different levels of meaning
level of conversation/individual utterance/words/morphemes/prosody/gestures
two main kinds: meanings of individual words vs the meanings of combinations of words
meaning of a word = the knowledge of the situations/contexts in which it would be appropriate to use it
= also when some particular neural circuitry somewhere in the brain is stimulated into activation
the neural activity associated with a word progressively changes to reflect the context in which the word occurs (like Pavlovian conditioning)
and so similar words (occurring in similar contexts) will come to have similar patterns
could a computer doing something exactly equivalent to what we suppose to be happening the brain accumulate meaning + understanding?
understanding a sentence requires knowledge of the world, as well as of the meanings of individual words
do we translate the world around us into a mental description of the things being talked about, i.e. the mental equivalent of a language
meaning could be talked about analagously with maths and logic
this would still require explanation of what any sentence in that mental language meant, and how it came to have that meaning
Johnson-Laird (late 1970s/80s): what happens when we hear language (i.e. its meaning) has much in common with what would happen if we directly observed the situation that the language described
Garnham: trying to distinguish between meaning as the mental equivalent of the language used to describe something or as the mental equivalent of what happens when one observes that something directly
gave people short stories containing (e.g.)
�By the window was a man with a martini�
then they read that he waved at the hostess of the party
then they were asked to remember later which of these sentences they had read:
�The man with the martini waved at the hostess�
�The man by the window waved at the hostess�
they were unable to remember which they�d read, suggesting that the meaning of the text had been stored in terms of the mental equivalent of something like a film of what had happened, rather than in terms of a script which would have specified things in terms of the �man by the window� or �the man with the martini�
it is possible though that the meaning was stored in text/script-like form, but that the two descriptions/sentences had been conflated in the mentalese, isn't it???
we construct a mental model of the world when understanding a sentence, e.g. one about winged unicorns
what material do we build this mental model out of?
(isomorphism (Hofstadter)) � perhaps the neural activity that happens when we think the of the arch reflects what is common to all the different patterns of neural activity evoked when we have experienced arches
an individual sentence is just a specification of what should be done to the mental model
considers a story about �a stonemason and an apprentice� � if we didn't start to refer to them as �the stonemason/apprentice� or �he/they�, then we wouldn't know we were talking about the same people
first we establish the centre-stage characters, then we introduce new information about them
continuity/coherence makes a text/conversation understandable, which relies on inferring links
prediction/expectation � add a lot more than the literal content of the story
prediction as nothing more than the patterns of neural
activity evoked by the sequences of words up to that point � the wanting things
to be coherent and inferring links wherever necessary is just an inevitable
consequence of the way we acquire meaning � of what meaning is
�In the mid-1990s, it was believed that a change of government would do the country some good� � not a signe word refers to something that can be seen or experienced
we learn these words� meaning just like any other � with sufficient experience of the circumstances in which they�re used
similarly, the neural consequences of seeing a shrug or hearing a particular intonation may simply reflect what is common across each experience of that kind of shrug/intonation
does a video tape then understand too with its magnetic (rather than neural) patterns that change in response to experience? because the magnetic patterns replace rather than (progressively) modify old patterns
we could decide whether an alien is intelligent on the basis of its responses to its environment � if it learned associatively � all we can say is whether it behaves as if it understands
perhaps languaged evolved:
languages seem to have a common origin:
o indo-european
o afro-asiatic
the language tree may also be similar to the gene tree (Luigi Cavalli-Sforza)
languages differ in:
different written forms:
ultimately, language serves no other purpose than to convey meaning
meaning consists of the experience accumulated since infancy
meaning relies on what we have learned, and what we can predict from that learning
it�s all about our internal representations of the world, and language is our means of sharing that with each other � he doesn�t really discuss whether language is in fact crucial to the processing of that internal representation, i.e. long term considered planning + abstraction
no evidence that children with normal hearing born of deaf parents in communities where sign language is the more usual form of communication suffer from the lack of prenatal exposure to spoken limits, as long as they have sufficient exposure + interaction with spoken language
see above
see above
with all these button-pressing experiments, e.g. Marslen-Wilson�s word-monitoring, how do you decide how much time to subtract for decision + actual movement???
I thought that Altmann had discussed that we used minute co-articulation cues to distinguish syllables on the basis of preceding + succeeding syllables, so you�d think that you could distinguish �slander� from �slant� even earlier than hearing the /d/??? perhaps /t/ and /d/ don't differ much in coarticulation???
are homophones represented separately in the lexicon??? use priming tasks to find out???
lexical decision tasks are always about choosing whether word or non-word, right???
what evidence is there that syntactic category is represented in the mental lexicon??? could it be represented elsewhere somehow, that isn't probed by Tanenhaus� study??? do we work on a statistical basis then??? do we have different syntactic categories in the mental lexicon instead???
�do we have meaning-independent (i.e. purely grammatical, like formal linguistic) mental representations?� � it could just be that the grammar is the fully- (and richly-) specified mental lexicon???
why doesn't Altmann mention the garden path theory???
how do children get over their assumption that the same object won't have two names???
Altmann says that definitions are �just another circumstance� � does that make sense � aren't they more than that somehow???
not necessarily � the circumstance is �a government is/does (1) ___ (2) ___ � etc.
what are the philosophical objections to Altmann�s account???
is it (broadly) Wittgensteinian???