16 Nov 2017
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Chapter 10 – Language
The Organization of Language
• Language relies on well-defined patterns – patterns in how individual words are used, in
how words are put together into phrases
• What are the patterns of a certain language?
Phonology
The Production of Speech
• In ordinary breathing
o Air flows quietly out of lungs and up through nose and mouth
o Noise is produced if this airflow is interrupted or altered and this enables humans
to produce a wide range of different sounds
• Within the larynx there are two flaps of muscular tissue called the “vocal folds”
o Can be rapidly opened and closed producing a buzzing sort of vibration called
voicing
• You can also produce sound by narrowing the air passageway within the mouth itself
o Depending on where the gap is for air to rush through – different sound results
• The various aspects of speech production provide a basis for categorizing speech sounds
• We can distinguish sounds according to the airflow is restricted; this is referred to as
manner of production
o Air is allowed to move through the nose for some speech sounds but not others
o For some sounds the flow of air is fully stopped for a moment, for other sounds
the air passage is restricted but air continues to flow
• We can also distinguish between sounds that are voiced (produced with the vocal folds
vibrating) and those that are not
o Sounds of v, z, and n – voiced
o F, s, t, and k are unvoiced
• Sounds can be categorized according to where the airflow is restricted, which is the place
of articulation
o You close your lips to produce “bilabial” sounds – p and b
o You place your top teeth close to your bottom lip to produce “labiodental” sounds
like f and v
o You place your tongue just behind your upper teeth to produce “alveolar sounds
like t and d
• We are able to describe any speech sound in terms of
o Manner of production
o Voicing
o Place of articulation
• In English, these features are combined and recombined to produce 40 or so different
phonemes
The Complexity of Speech Perception
• Our description of speech sounds invites a simple proposal about speech perception
• Speech perception is actually much more complicated
• Amplitudes (form of air pressure changes) reach the ear and shows the pattern of input
with which “real” speech perception begins
• There are no markers to indicate where one phoneme ends and the next begins
• Prior to phoneme identification, you need to “slice” the stream into the appropriate
segments – known as speech segmentation
• Most of us are convinced that there are pauses between words that we hear which mark
the boundaries
o However, they are illusions
o We may hear these pauses in the wrong places, and thus segment the speech
stream in a way the speaker didn’t intend to speech stream
o Also why we don’t understand foreign language
o In a foreign language, we lack the skill needed to segment the stream, so we
perceive a continuous uninterrupted flow of sound – which is why it sounds so
fast
• Coarticulation – the fact that in producing speech you don’t utter one phoneme at a time
o They overlap – which helps to make speech production faster and more fluent
Aids to Speech Perception
• The 50 most commonly used words in English make up more than half of the words you
actually hear
• The perception of speech shares a crucial attribute with all types of perception: you don’t
rely only on the stimuli you receive; instead you supplement the input with other
knowledge guided by the context in which a word appears
o Phonemic restoration effect
Categorical Perception
• Term refers to the fact that people are much better at hearing the differences between
categories of sounds than they are at hearing the variation within a category of sounds
Combining Phonemes
• Phonemes can be combined and recombined to produce thousands of differen morphemes
– which can be combined to create word after word
• There are rules
• Limits are simply facts about English; they are not at all a limit on what humans ears can
hear or human tounges can produce, and other languages routinely use combinations that
for English speakers seem unspeakable
• Also rules governing the adjustments that occur when certain phonemes are uttered one
after another
• English speakers are seen to know the rule that governs this distraction
o They obey this rule even with novel, made up cases
Morphemes and Words
Building New Words
• Estimates of someone’s vocabulary size need to be interpreted with caution because the
size of an individuals vocabulary is actually quite fluid
o Because new words are created all the time
o The terms software and hardware have been around for a while, but spyware and
malware are relatively new