REVIEW

1. REVIEW Language Use and Understanding Last class

2. Lenneberg’s biological (cognitive) approach • People from all cultures speak language. • Speech onset is age-related • Same acquisition strategy for all babies. • All languages based on same formal underlying system. • Operating characterstics don’t change over time. • Can be impaired by brain legions.

3. Miller • “Is linguistics a branch of cognitive psychology?” -- I.e., should it be studied in terms of how it is mentally represented? • Language is generative, knowledge is structured • Syntactic knowledge seems to go beyond the input (poverty of the stimulus argument)

4. Autonomous vs. Interactive • Are decisions at one level influenced by information from another level? • Yes, of course • But when? • Immediately or during revision? • Does it affect perception or is it a response bias?

5. Elman & McClelland • Does higher-level context influence lower-level processes? • Combine Ganong effect with compensation for coarticulation

6. Elman & McClelland • Ganong effect • Sound acoustically between [g] and [k] • G/k - iss - sounds like “kiss” • G/k - ift - sounds like “gift” • Feedback or response bias?

7. Elman and McClelland • Compensation for Coarticulation • Foolish dancer • Fearless dancer • “d” sounds different after “sh” and “s” • To perceive it as a “d”, people compensate for the preceding acoustic context • E.g., take stimulus between [t] and [k] • After “sh” sounds more like “t” • After “s” sounds more like “k”

8. Elman and McClelland • Can you get compensation for coarticulation when the preceding phoneme is inferred from the lexical context (Ganong effect)? • X = sounds on continuum btwn /s/ and /sh/ • EngliX [d/g]ates • copiouX [d/g]ates • Results look like results when word was intact

9. Brennan • How do speakers decide which characters to mention in subject or object position? • How do they decide when to use a pronoun, or a more explicit expression? • These questions are about how speakers maintain coherent discourses, and how discourse participants develop representations of discourse entities

10. Brennan • Centering Theory as described by Brennan: • Speaker indicates what she is attending to (I.e., what is “salient” or “accessible” to her) with her choices • Subject position used for salient entities • Pronouns used to refer back to entities introduced in salient (subject) positions • More explicit expressions used for entities introduced in nonsalient (object) positions

11. Brennan • What makes things salient? • It’s the thing the speaker plans to continue talking about for the upcoming segment • Determined by looking at the action for a reference event • High prominence - one person has the ball and does some interesting action • Low prominence - ball gets passed around, great uncertainty as to what would happen next

12. Brennan results • Prominent entities introduced as subjects more than low-prominence entities • Low prominence entities introduced as full NP objects more than high-prominent entities • Pronouns more common in high-prominence events than low-prom. ones • Players introduced as a full NP object more likely to be repeated with NP than pronominalized.

13. Side-note • Are these choices made for self or for listener? • Does the speaker put something in subject position just because it is more accessible to herself? • Or is it a signal to the listener to treat it as more accessible?

14. Bransford et al. • Three turtles rested on a log and some fish swam beneath it/them. • Old idea: we just interpret the semantics of an utterance (the deep structure) • Their proposal: we build a nonlinguistic mental model of the situation that includes more information than what is present in the text.