Introduction to Cognitive Science

1. Introduction to Cognitive Science Summary of the linguistics segment Lecturer: Dr A. Bodomo Date: 5th December 2000

2. Phonology and Morphology • Phonology: • the study of how sets of sounds produced by the vocal tract are organized into meaningful sound units in each language • Morphology: • the field of cognitive science which studies how knowledge about the form or internal structure of words is represented and processed in the minds of speakers. • Phonology and Morphology are: • two of the salient aspects of the tacit knowledge of speakers of a language • the levels of representations at which speakers capture the sounds and structure of words

3. Key concepts/terms in Phonology • Phoneme: a minimal meaningful sound unit • Allophone:variant of a phoneme • Minimal pair: a pair of words that are identical except for a contrast in one sound. E.g. /pit/ and /bit/ • Tone and Stress: can indicate differences in meaning among pairs of words • Phonological rules

4. Key concepts in Morphology • Morpheme: basic unit of morphology, can be captured by the morph, discrete speech unit. • Inflectional morphology: • deals with the knowledge through which speakers can create paradigms of the same word to express various grammatical categories like number, person, tense, aspect, case, and gender • Derivational morphology • is concerned with speaker’s knowledge of the processes of forming words out of existing ones by adding various affixes, which are pieces of words

5. An interface approach • There is an interrelationship between phonology and morphology. • This interrelationship is explored in the cognitive area of morphophonology. • Morphophonology: • the aspect of cognitive science that studies the classification of phonological aspects of knowledge representation based on knowledge about grammatical environments. • Morphophoneme: • a minimal meaningful unit of morphophonology, usually surrounded by braces {} • can be seen as parallel with a phoneme

6. Syntax and Semantics/Pragmatics • Syntax: • the scientific study of the combination of words to form phrases • Rules and constraints are posited to capture the knowledge for determining whether or not a particular string of words in a language constitutes a well-formed sentence. Reference: Brown, Keith and Jim Miller. 1991.Syntax: A Linguistic Introduction to Sentence Structure. London and New York: Routledge.

7. Key concepts in Syntax • The mental lexicon • Phrase structure rules • Sentence structure

8. Key concepts in Semantics/Pragmatics • Semantics • the study of meaning in language • Pragmatics • the study of how language is used in different social contexts, cultures, etc.

9. An Interface approach • Morphosyntax • the interface between morphology and syntax • applying the definitional criteria of morphology and syntax e.g. Number in English nouns - plural subject requires a plural verb The syntax-semantics interface • syntactic ambiguity creates semantic ambiguity in a sentence like Chan loves you more than Yan.

10. Formal Grammars • Linguistic knowledge representations can be formalized into an algorithm • Two main aspects of grammatical information processing: Generating and Parsing sentences • Generation and parsing are important in computer applications of natural languages which has become an important aspect of the computer or information processing industry

11. Sentence Generation (Bottom-up parsing) • Starts with an initial string and ends with terminal strings with lexical items as their daughters. • A sentence (S) has thus been generated, telling us how a sentence is built up (bottom-up parsing).

12. Sentence Parsing (Top-down parsing) • To parse a sentence means to analyse it into its constituent parts by the systematic application of lexical insertion rules and some phrase structure rules. • In top-down parsing, we begin with an existing sentence (S) and break it down into its component parts by applying rules. • It is like the reverse process of generation(bottom-up parsing).

13. Language and Literacy Acquisition • Language acquisition • innateness hypothesis • innate language faculty (also called Language Acquisition Device (LAD)). • Those aspects of language innately determined are universal (Universal Grammar) • Literacy acquisition • literacy as part of our mental, cognitive faculty • 6 stages of reading (Daswani 1999)

14. An interface approach to Language and literacy acquisition • They are both part of learning to USE language. • Both need input from the environment. • Literacy acquisition is like language acquisition • Literacy is best acquired in a language one has acquired i.e. one’s mother tongue.

15. What to expect in the exam... • You will be asked to identify the difference between basic terms in all the areas covered.

16. Conclusion • What next? • Students interested in the linguistic aspects of cognitive science can do more advanced courses such as… • LING1002 - Language.com: Language in the Contemporary World (1st year undergraduate, co-taught with other staff members) • LING2001 - Computational Linguistics (intermediate undergraduate) • LING2011 - Language and Literacy (intermediate undergraduate) • LING2016 - Syntax II: The Theory of Grammar (advanced undergraduate/graduate) • LING2018 - Lexical-Functional Grammar (advanced undergraduate/graduate) • LINGXXXX - Language and Cognition • LINGXXXX - Language and Information Technology