PSYC10003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 32: Auslan, Chinese Sign Language, Drunken Sailor
12 Jun 2018
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Lecture 32, Thursday, 19 May 2016
PSYC10003 - MIND, BRAIN & BEHAVIOUR 1
LECTURE 32
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
THE SOUND/S OF LANGUAGE
MORPHOLOGY
•The morpheme is the smallest unit that denotes meaning in a language.
•Morphemes include root morphemes such as charge (and all the monosyllabic words that you
know). They also include affixes (prefixes and suffixes).
•For example the suffix ‘-ed” is a morpheme, as is “-ing”. The prefix “re-” is also a morpheme.
•Eg. Charge charged charging recharge.
•This form of creating language allows us to know what language means without hearing it. We
know that adding ‘ing’ makes it present tense, ‘ed’ makes it past tense.
•The term lexicon (dictionary) is used to describe the entire set of morphemes in a given language,
or in an individual’s vocabulary.
•The average adult speaker of English knows about 80,000 morphemes. When these morphemes
are combined, the size of the adult lexicon expands to hundreds of thousands of words.
WORD MEANING
SEMANTICS
•Knowing a language means knowing how to relate sounds to meanings (semantics). We can relate
the phonology of a language to the meaning.
•The relationship between words and the things they represent is arbitrary; there’s nothing about
the sound of words that denotes their meaning.
‣It is not always entirely arbitrary. Eg words that refer to small things tend to use short vowel
sounds, Eg. little, compared to large.
‣This is important because very words sounding like what it means would create an extremely
limited, inefficient language. There is a certain economy in selecting arbitrary sounds to convey
meaning.
•There is nothing about the sound of the word ‘CAT’ that denotes its meaning, and the same
meaning is signified by different sounding words in different languages.
•Sign languages are also arbitrary. Someone who knows Australian Sign Language (ASL) will not
understand someone who knows Chinese Sign Language.
THE RULES OF LANGUAGE
SYNTAX
•In addition to knowing the words of a language, linguistic knowledge includes knowledge of the
‘rules’ for forming sentences.
•The knowledge of the rules of sentence formation is known as syntax.
•Grammar is the internalised unconscious knowledge of the phonology, semantics and syntax of a
language. Grammar is linguistic competence, although often people refer to syntax with
‘grammar’. Syntax is simply part of the grammar of a language.
•Why is word order important?
•Eg. Eat Phil apple. Pragmatically, this is likely to mean that Phil ate the apple rather than the
apple ate Phil.
•Eg. Chase lion bear. We do not know who is chasing whom; neither is more reasonable or
pragmatic.
•A simple rule stating ‘agent first’ would indicate the lion is chasing the bear rather than the other
way around.
•More complex syntactic rules are needed to convey more complex relationships between ideas.
•Evolution of language – it is possible that syntax was the last thing to evolve, built on much
more basic phonology-semantics mappings.
Lecture 32, Thursday, 19 May 2016
PSYC10003 - MIND, BRAIN & BEHAVIOUR 1
•The meaning of a sentence is more than the sum of its parts.
•‘The children sang songs for the teacher’ means something different than ‘The teacher sang songs
for the children’ .
•And the string ‘songs the sang for the children teacher’ has no meaning even though it is made up
of meaningful units.
•Unconscious knowledge of the syntactic rules of grammars permits speakers to make
grammaticality judgments.
•Compare
•"Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957
Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct (logical form) but
semantically nonsensical. The sentence has no understandable meaning, and therefore
demonstrates the distinction between Syntax and Semantics.
•‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ and ‘Ideas green furiously colourless sleep’. The first is
syntactically correct but the meaning is strange (how can something be colourless and green, what
does sleeping furiously mean and how/why do ideas sleep?) the underlying syntactic structure of
the language is fine but the meaning (semantics) is unusual.
•Allows us to make judgements of utterances. If given a sentence that doesn’t make sense we can
make a judgement of the grammaticality of that sentence.
•From The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. Although constructed nearly entirely of nonsense
words, the poem is nevertheless meaningful. This relates to the underlying syntactic structure,
especially the preservation and placing of critical “function words” that act as sign-posts to tell us
what kinds of words to expect next.
•Eg. the word “the” signals that a noun is to follow; “did” signals that a verb is to follow; “in”
signals that a place is to follow, etc. Our unconscious knowledge of these syntactic classes enables
us to “understand” the poem. Even if we don’t know what ‘gyre’ and ‘gimble’ mean, we know
they are verbs, things that can be done. Our brain has a predictive capacity triggered by function
words; did, the, in etc.
•’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves"
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;"
All mimsy were the borogoves,"
And the mome raths outgrabe."
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!"
The jaws that bite, the claws that
catch!
•With the small set of rules on the
right, we can create an infinite set of
possibilities.
•From this simple set of phrase
structure rules and words we can
generate many sentences including;
•A cat saluted a horse
•A cat saluted a horse on the bridge
•The drunken sailor saluted the
puzzled cat.
•The puzzled, gregarious sailor on a
horse saluted the drunken cat on the
bridge.
•We can make sentences that have
never been said before. This explains
why CC and OC can’t explain
everything we do.
•Phrase Structure tree: (right).
Document Summary
Morphology: the morpheme is the smallest unit that denotes meaning in a language, morphemes include root morphemes such as charge (and all the monosyllabic words that you know). They also include affixes (prefixes and suffixes): for example the suffix -ed is a morpheme, as is -ing . The prefix re- is also a morpheme: eg. Charge charged charging recharge: this form of creating language allows us to know what language means without hearing it. When these morphemes are combined, the size of the adult lexicon expands to hundreds of thousands of words. Semantics: knowing a language means knowing how to relate sounds to meanings (semantics). We can relate the phonology of a language to the meaning: the relationship between words and the things they represent is arbitrary; there"s nothing about the sound of words that denotes their meaning, it is not always entirely arbitrary.
