Language and Communication
1. Introduction
Communication: the transferring of messages or exchanging of information/ideas.
(from Latin→to share, participate, make common)
Sender-receiver model of communication: there is a sender that gets their message into a format
by encoding (putting message into words→language), then the signal is transmitted (through air,
computer, paper…) and then it is de-coded by the receiver and understood. The receiver must be
able to read the code in which the message is put.
Channels of communication: (to send and pick up signals from others)
All 5 senses:
- Hearing (words, voice quality) including language
- Sight (body posture, gestures, facial expression)
- Touch (firm handshake)
- Smell (perfume, body odor) & Taste
⤷Language
Key properties of human language:
1. Arbitrariness: for many words, the pairing between their form (sound) and their
meaning is arbitrary/conventional, no natural connection between how they sound
and what they mean→many languages have different words for the same thing.
2. Displacement: humans can talk about events or things that are not currently
present / happening.
3. Discreteness: messages are made up of discrete individually distinct
statements→there are rules as to how these can be combined. (there is no in
between ‘p’ and ‘b’ or ‘pet’ and ‘bet’, it’s not continuous)
4. Duality of patterning: the smallest unit of these segments (phonemes - speech
sounds) are meaningless, but they become meaningful after combination. (‘p’ and ‘e’
and ‘t’ no, but yes ‘pet’)
5. Productivity: by recombination of language units (words), humans are capable of
making statements never uttered before and having them understood by the
listener→hence, the number of possible utterances is endless. (infinite use of finite
means)
6. Prevarication: humans can make false or meaningless statements. (we can lie)
7. Cultural (traditional) Transmission & Learnability: language is transmitted
down generations through exposure and learning. One does not inherit a particular
language, although some aspects of our capacity to learn language (in general) is
inherited.
★ Bee waggle dance (indicates location of food to colony)→productive, not discrete, displaced
★ Hand gestures (not sign language)→culturally transmitted, not characterized by duality of
patterning (no need to learn this for exam)
Functions of Language→exchanging info and ideas is not the only function of language, also
Emotional expression, Social interaction, Control of reality (rituals and beliefs), Keeping record,
Instrument of thought & Expressing identity (team anthems).
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,Who studies Language and Communication?
Levels of Language
Sentence (the birds talked to the players)➞Phrase(the birds)(talked to the
players)➞Word(the)(birds)(talked)...➞Morpheme(the)(bird)(s)(talk)(ed)➞Phoneme(𐤀ភ)(ጶ𐤍𐤙𐤅)
Language domains for each: semantics, lexicon, grammar (syntax), morphology, phonology.
Sound of Language
The frequency of
speech is where the
human ear is most
sensitive. Loud music
is often in the same
frequency range (it
can induce tinnitus
and hearing loss that
impairs speech
comprehension).
There is a rising number of adolescents (12-18 years old) with noise-induced hearing loss. Poor
adolescents are more prone to this and females are less likely.
The basic building blocks: Phonemes (language sounds)
In speech, we use the vocal tract (lips, tongue, palate, oral cavity, vocal cords …) +
breathing organs (trachea, lungs, diaphragm…)
In order to represent sound (speech) graphically→Oscillogram (sound waves over
time) & Spectrogram (amplitude/intensity of frequencies over time)
- Vowels: speech sounds produced with an open vocal tract.
- Consonants: speech sounds produced with partial or complete closure of
vocal tract.
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,Written Language (first attested written language: Sumerian Mesopotamia 3100 BC)
At first, written language were pictographic signs which evolved into abstract shapes in
Mesopotamian cuneiforms, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters.
And later, pictographic signs evolved further into early written language.
● Logography: each character represents a semantic unit such as a word or
morpheme (smallest meaningful unit of a word) - there can be several
thousand characters
● Syllabary: each character corresponds to one syllable - usually several
hundred characters
● Alphabet: each character corresponds to one basic sound (phoneme) -
typically less than 100 characters;
so you write every sound with the exception of Abjad: only consonants are
written / Abugida: vowel & consonant written together
{the big change is from logography (where every word signifies its meaning, like a little
drawing) and in the other two you write down the sound instead of the meaning}
Grammar: Phrase structure rules (Noam Chomsky: humans are born with the ability
to learn grammar)
Sentence→Noun phrase + Verb phrase (someone and what they are doing)
Verb phrase→Verb [or Verb + another noun phrase] (eats/eats bread)
Noun phrase→[Det]+[Adjective]+Noun (the happy dog)
There is also grammar in Sign Language;
- where you make the sign is determined by whether the doer is the subject or
the object.
- if you keep on doing the sign it means you do it continuously.
SUMMARY
→Language is one of the ways of communication: the transmission of a message from a
sender to a receiver
→ …but there are many other functions of language (instrument of thought…)
→Language can be described on several levels (from sounds/phonemes to words to
sentences)
→At the lowest level, language is built from phonemes, divided into vowels and
consonants, each with their own acoustic and articulatory properties. These properties
can be used to classify phonemes.
→Written language is a lot younger than spoken language, and there are different
systems varying in whether the written symbol represents sound or meaning.
→In each language, sequences of words and word parts are determined by grammar
rules. One type of these rules is Chomsky’s phrase structure rules.
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, 2. Studying the processing of language: From words to sentences
Language production
Questions in speech production research:
- What are the individual steps (processes) that a speaker follows from an idea to
its spoken production?
- How do these steps work exactly, according to which principles (and how does
the brain accomplish them)?
(fact: when using sign language, the processes/steps to produce it than you would spoken
language until the actual motor program - in sign language you use your hands/face and
in spoken your mouth, so sign language is exactly the same)
Sources of information to answer these questions:
- Observation (what can go wrong during speaking?) or Experiments
Observation 1: Speech Errors
People occasionally will make speech errors for various reasons…
- for example: being tired can worsen articulation
Other kinds of speech errors occur not at a single word level but when producing connected
speech (producing sentences)→”we have a tair of pickets” (errors where we swap the
beginning consonant of two words are very common, but mixing up the beginning of one
word with the end of another word are not common)
(speech errors are not random and they have consistency, they are collected in the
UCLA speech error database)
● These errors mean that you are preparing the next thing you are going to
produce; we prepare the sound of a couple of words ahead.
● Words are not planned and spoken sequentially, but the whole phrase (short
sentence or part of the sentence) is planned in advance.
● The articulation is sequential (we can’t say two things at once) but the
preparation of the articulation is not. We prepare short phrases.
● There seems to be feedback/monitoring of our own speech (we are always
checking if the output matches what we intended to say). Not only after saying it,
before too.
Observation 2: Tip-of-the-tongue states
People occasionally experience TOTs, where one is certain to know the word but cannot
think of its exact form/sound. (it’s typical to have partial access to the sound)
this means that…
● Accessing the meaning of a word must be a separate stage from accessing its
form/sound→the process can get stuck in between the two.
● TOT state is characterized by full access to the meaning and partial access to the
word sound.
There are 3 main steps from thought to speech utterance:
1. Conceptualization (abstract stage; what message do you want to convey?)
2. Formulation (more concrete, where you access meaning, sound of words; which
words in what order?)
3. Articulation (you pronounce the words)
Experiments on Language production
● Do we immediately access the intended word from memory or is there a race
between ‘competing candidates’ (words with similar meaning) first?
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