© Kip Smith, 2003 Psychology 110 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously Noam Chomsky’s theory of...

© Kip Smith, 2003

Psychology 110

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Noam Chomsky’s theory of Language

© Kip Smith, 2003

Language

Spoken, written, or gestured symbols

and

The way symbols are combined to communicate meaning

Humans tend to use the symbols called words But not all languages rely on words

© Kip Smith, 2003

How Symbols are Combined

The boy hit the ball



th e b o i h i t th e b ä l

Sentence

Phrases

Words

Phonemes

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The scientific method

Observations

Testing &ExperimentationHypotheses

Supportor

Refine Generate

Drive

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Language acquisition

Children are born with a propensity to communicate and will learn a language no matter what

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Stages 1-3 of language acquisition

Birth “AH”

Babbling A rich variety of intonations

One concrete word All refer to the here and now

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Stages 4-6

Two words Many different semantic relationships, e.g.

Agent - Action (“Doggie run”) Attribute – Object (“Red ball”)

Telegraphic sentences Function words (the, is, of) omitted

(“Doggie go bye-bye”)

Natural language Gradual acquisition of vocabulary and

grammatical complexity

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Overgeneralization

When learning the past tense of irregular verbs

E.g., see saw, go went, sing sang, etc.

First, children use the irregular correctly

Then, they overgeneralize seed, goed, singed

Then, they go back to the irregular

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Evidence for ?

What does overgeneralization tell us about language acquisition?

Examples

“I see her” but “I seed her” instead of “I saw her”

“I go to sleep now” but “I goed to sleep” instead of “I went to sleep”

© Kip Smith, 2003

Chomsky’s observations

Children learn language too fast for that learning to be explained by learning alone

Reinforcement and feedback are insufficient to account for language learning

Children create novel sentences Not imitation

Everyone, even a child of seven, is capable of generating more sentences than there are seconds since the beginning of time

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Drive


Observations


Supportor

Refine Generate

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Chomsky’s hypothesis:Characteristics of all languages

Productivity Language is structured in a way that enables

us to generate an infinite number of meaningful utterances from a small set of primitives (words)

Regularity The utterances are systematic There are acceptable and unacceptable

utterances

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Productivity

It was night It was a dark and stormy night It was a dark and stormy Tuesday night I’ll never forget that it was a dark and

stormy Tuesday night My friend tells me that I’ll never forget that

it was a dark and stormy Tuesday night This slide says that my friend tells me that

I’ll never forget that it was a dark and stormy Tuesday night

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The first principle of productivity

“The arbitrariness of sign” F. deSaussure

The pairing of sound with meaning by convention

“The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means dog just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning.

“For the price of this standardized memorization, the members of a language community receive an enormous benefit: the ability to convey a concept from mind to mind virtually instantaneously.” (Pinker, 1974, 75)

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The arbitrary nature of meaning

Rock

Grab

Brief

Boot

Skirt

Grave

Letter

Boat

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The 2nd principle of productivity

Semantics The mapping between the symbols (words) and

what they stand for (their meaning)

The mapping is purely arbitrary & is determined by convention within a linguistic group

[also, the academic field that studies meaning]

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Chomsky’s hypothesis:Language is a discrete combinatorial system

“Language makes infinite use of finite media”

Man bites dog Dog bites man

We use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts

That code is called a Generative Grammar

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Generative Grammar

The set of (implicit) rules that prescribe the translation between word order and thought

The set of rules that all children unconsciously come to use to generate acceptable utterances

The engine that drives makes a language both productive and regular

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On the structure of language

Grammar A system of rules that provides the structure to

language

Syntax The details of the grammar Rules for combining words into grammatically

sensible sentences in a given language

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Syntax structures

Word order Phrase structure

Violations of syntax: This is not a complete. This either. This sentence no verb. This sentence has contains two verbs. This sentence has cabbage six words. The child seems sleeping. Drum vapor worker cigarette flick BOOM.

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The acquisition and generation of language CANNOT possibly be the product of learning (classical and operant conditioning)

There must be an innate capacity for language

Knowledge of a “Universal Grammar”

Chomsky’s theory (1959)

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Nature + Nurture

Chomsky:

The universal grammar provides the templates for understanding andproducing language

Spoken language(s) heard in the environment

Mastery of your native language

+

Evolution selects individuals with the mechanisms for understanding and producing the structure of language

Experience relates sounds (words) to what they stand for (meaning, semantics)

© Kip Smith, 2003

Chomsky’s theory

Language is fundamentally different than all other behavior

The Universal Grammar is a discrete combinatorial system

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The components of language

A relatively small set of words (20,000) and their mappings to meaning

A generative grammar, a kind of discrete combinatorial system

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The elements of the generative grammar

Three types of rules assure linguistic regularity,

That is, they assure the generation of an acceptable utterance

Syntax Word order

Semantics Meaning

Phonology Sound Inflection

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How language works

“The way language works, then, is that each person’s brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar).”

(Pinker, 1994, 76)

© Kip Smith, 2003

One consequence of grammar’s discrete combinatorial system

“If a speaker is interrupted at a random point in a sentence, there are on average about 10 different words that could be inserted at that point to continue the sentence in a grammatical and meaningful way.”

(Pinker, 1994, 77)

In some places many more than 10, some less

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One consequence of grammar’s discrete combinatorial system

Assume an average of 10 words per insertion point, and

Assume most folks can produce meaningful sentences 20 words long

How many different sentences is that?

At 5 seconds per sentence, how long would it take to say them all?

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Other discrete combinatorial systems

Grammar Limited number of words

DNA 4 bases

Numbers 10 digits—Arabic numbers 7 letters—Roman numerals

Computer binary code Strings of 0s and 1s

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Observations


Supportor

Refine Generate

Drive

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One test of Chomsky’s theory


Syntactically OK Semantically irregular Syntax and sense can be independent

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More tests:Phonology disambiguates

Read the following headline aloud Hershey bars protest

Read it aloud again to generate a completely different meaning

Again Complaints about basketball team growing

ugly

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Phonology

The sounds of language Phonemes—smallest units of sound that can

change meaning E.g., bat—that, /b/ and /th/ different phonemes

Number varies across languages English = roughly 40 Khoisan = 141

The sounds of language differ from other sounds in the environment

© Kip Smith, 2003

Phonemic Invariance

A given phoneme is perceived the same way in a variety of contexts

/t/ in “tip” vs. /t/ in “tube” Sound spectrographs reveal that the 2 /t/

sounds are different in frequency Different voices = different pitches

Still perceive words the same

© Kip Smith, 2003

X-Bar Theory of Phrase Structure

Chomsky’s 1965 Aspects of a Theory of Syntax

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Rule 1: Sentences

Example:

A sentence has two parts:

Noun phrase (NP)& Verb phrase (VP)

The happy girl eats ice cream

The happy girl

Eats ice cream

S

NP

eats ice creamThe happy girl

VP

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Rule 2: Noun Phrases

Consists of an optional determiner,

followed by any number of adjectives,

[zero is a number]

followed by a noun

The

Happy

Girl

NP

det A

girlthe happy

N

© Kip Smith, 2003

Rule 3: Verb Phrases

Consists of a verb,

followed by a noun phrase

Not required when verbs are intransitive

E.g., flies, runs, eats

Eats

Ice cream

VP

V

ice creameats

NP

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The power of a phrase structure grammar

These three rules allow you to create every declarative English sentence

S

NP

det A

girlthe happy

N

VP

V

ice creameats

NP

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All you need to know to speak basic English

3 simple rules S NP VP

The mapping between words and what they mean

The generative phrase structure grammar

A mental dictionary Nouns Verbs Adjectives Determiners

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Modularity

The phrase structure grammar allows nesting

Key words signal the nesting

If S then S Either S or S

If the girl eats ice cream

then the boy eats hot dogs

S

SIf then

hot dogseatsboythe

S

VPNP

V NPdet N

ice creameatsgirlthe

VPNP

V NPdet N

© Kip Smith, 2003

Heads and Place Holders

The phrase structure grammar holds words in place

A phrase inherits the properties of its head

Either the girl eats ice cream

or gets candy

Who gets the candy?

S

SEither or

candy gets(girl)(the)

S

VPNP

V NPdet N

ice creameatsgirlthe

VPNP

V NPdet N

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NP

det A

the happy

N PP

of linguisticsstudent

N

N PP

of linguisticsstudent

N

Sub Phrases:

The phrase structure grammar allows subphrases to be role-players

Prepositional phrases

N

© Kip Smith, 2003

S

NP

The WHO

V NP

the hotelroom

destroyed

V

V

V NP

the hotelroom

destroyed

V

Sub Phrases:

The phrase structure grammar allows subphrases to be role-players

© Kip Smith, 2003

XX-bar

“With this common design, there is no need to write out a long list of rules to capture what is inside a speaker’s head. There may be just one pair of super-rules for the entire language, where the distinction among nouns, verbs, prepositions, and adjectives are collapsed and all four are specified with a variable like “X.”

(Pinker, 1994, 103)

© Kip Smith, 2003

An X-bar consists of a head word, followed by any number of role-players.

A phrase consists of an optional subject, followed by an X-bar, followed by any number of modifiers

This streamlined version of phrase structure is called “the X-bar theory”

X

© Kip Smith, 2003

Categorical Perception

Voice Onset Time (VOT) Time between when the sound is released at

the lips and when the vocal cords begin to vibrate

[ba] vs. [pa] /b/ is voiced, VOT for [ba] typically 0 ms /p/ is not, VOT for [pa] typically around 40 ms

Categorical perception Perceive discrete phonemic categories despite

gradual changes in VOT

© Kip Smith, 2003

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

Percentage of population

who are ableto discriminate

among the various

Hindi T’s

Hindi-speaking

adults

6-8 months

8-10months

10-12months

English-speaking

adults

Infants from English-speaking homes

Use it or Lose it

At birth, we are all able to recognize speech sounds from any of the world’s languages

© Kip Smith, 2003

100

90

80

70

60

50Native 3-7 8-10 11-15 17-39

Percentage correct ongrammar test

Age at first exposure

Sadly

Learning a new language gets harder with age

© Kip Smith, 2003

Why?

Critical Period Hypothesis (Lenneberg, 1969)

Children must be exposed to language within a given period to learn it correctly

Set end of critical period at puberty More supportive environment for children

Mistakes tolerated more Adults don’t like to appear Peers in similar situation

© Kip Smith, 2003

Why would language evolve?

To enable the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next?

To establish order in the social group? To assess what others know?

To provide a means for revealing your fitness and reproductive potential?

A peacock feather? A fitness display? An aid to courtship?

© Kip Smith, 2003 Psychology 110 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously Noam Chomsky’s theory of...

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