PSY 369: Psycholinguistics

1. PSY 369: Psycholinguistics Review for Exam 3

2. Chapters and topics • 9: Conversation • 10, 11, & 12: Language Acquisition • Early, Late, and Processes • 14: Language & thought

3. 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 speaker’s meaning with listener’s understanding • Knowledge, beliefs and suppositions that the participants believe that they share • Identifying participants • Layers • Conversation is structured

4. Speaker Addressee Side participants Bystander All participants All listeners Eavesdropper Identifying participants • Conversation often takes place in situations that involve various types of participants and non-participants

5. Structure of a conversation • Conversations are purposive and unplanned • Typically you can’t plan exactly what you’re 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

6. Taking turns • Typically conversations don’t 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 isn’t 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

7. 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

8. Typical language development 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 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 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

9. In the beginning • Prelinguistic communication • Mahler (mid 80’s, 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”

10. 100 % /ba/ 0 1 ... 3 … 5 … 7 The early days: phonology • Eimas et al, (1971) • Categorical perception in infants (1 month olds) Sharp phoneme boundary Young infants can distinguish different phonemes

11. Early speech production • 6 - 8 weeks: cooing • 4 - 6 months: babbling • 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 - 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

12. 12 ms first words 2 yrs 200 words 3 yrs 1,000 words 6 yrs 15,000 words Language Sponges • Learning words • 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 • Methods used to study this • Diary studies • Taped language samples (Roger Brown) • Large database CHILDES

13. 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

14. Early word learning • Developed in systematic ways • Not simply imitation, rather are creative • Learned importance of consistency of names • First words (Around 10-15 months) • Emergence of systematic, repeated productions of phonologically consistent forms • Idiomorphs - personalized words • 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

15. 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

16. “tee” 1:9,11 1:10,18 “googie” 1:11,1 1:11,2 1:11,24 “tee/hosh” 1:11,25 “hosh” 1:11,26 1:11,27 “pushi” “hosh” “moo-ka” 2:0,10 2:0,20 “biggie googie” • 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 Extensions of meaning

17. Quine’s 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?

18. Please give me the chromium tray. Not the blue one, the chromium one. 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

19. Constraints on Word Learning • Markman (1989) • Perhaps children are biased to entertain certain hypotheses about word meanings over others • 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

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

21. 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

22. 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 Mummy’s 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)

23. 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

24. 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)

25. 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)

26. Language explosion continues • Morphology This person knows how to rick. She did the same thing yesterday. Yesterday she ________. Typically children say that she “ricked.”

27. 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

28. 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)

29. Positive and negative evidence • Positive evidence: Kids hear grammatical sentences • Negative evidence: information that a given sentence is ungrammatical • Kids are not told which sentences are ungrammatical(no negativeevidence) • Let’s consider no negative evidence further… • What kind of feedback is available for learning?

30. Negative evidence via feedback? • Kids resist instruction • Cazden(1972) & McNeill (1966) • Do kids get “implicit” negative evidence? • Brown & Hanlon (1970): • Adults didn’t show a preference for Adam’s grammatical or ungrammatical sentences (either in terms of what they understood or what they expressed approval of)

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

32. 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)

33. 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

34. Word Association Model Concept Mediation Model concepts conceptual conceptual links links lexical L1 L2 links IMAGES CONCEPTS CONCEPTS L2 L1 L1 L2 IMAGES Bilingual Representations • How do we represent linguistic information in a bilingual lexicon?

35. 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

36. Does language affect thought? • Sapir-Whorfhypothesis • 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

37. 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

38. 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

39. Conclusions • 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 • At this point it is apparent that the strong view of Whorf’s hypothesis is not supported.