Introduction (29/08/2023)
What is language?
- Torso: moving
- Mouth: smiling
- Hands: gesturing, greeting, touching, tapping
- Eyes: gazing, pointing, winking, squinting, widening
- Eyelids: blinking
- Eyebrows: frowning, raising
- Head: pointing, nodding
- Nose: wrinkling, sniffing, pointing
- Chin: pointing
- Lips: pressing
- Shoulders: shrugging
-> Many of those are nonverbal communication, is not part of language but is important in
communicating and with language/speech
- Language: spoken, written (letters -> story), sign-language (not universal or iconic (so memorize, not
that you can guess what it means by the movement))
- Different from human behavior: it changes from generation to generation, evolution from baby to
adult, you can communicate about abstract objects (things that don’t exist, like numbers)
- Language = a system of form-meaning pairings that can be used to intentionally communicate
meaning
* System: there is structure to the madness (not chaotic, very structured)
* Form-meaning pairings: of different sizes, at various levels of specificity (text)
* Use: different modalities, production and perception
* Intentionally: producer wants to achieve something
* Communicate meaning: almost anything can be expressed (also fictional things, and things
in past and future etc)
1) Language as a system
- Usually thought of as ‘’rules’’, but (psycho)linguists are generally not prescriptivists
* So they are descriptivists
* Meaning that most researchers do not consider it their job to establish or guard the rules of
preferred language use (like ‘’proper’’ grammar style, spelling, etc)
- Rather, they describe and try to understand and perhaps predict systematicities at different levels
(sounds, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, discourse)
2) Form meaning pairings
- The most intuitive form-meaning unit is a word, but we will see that there are units of different sizes
* Un- in unpleasant (if you put un- before a word people know what you mean even if they
haven’t heard of the word with un- before it, it has 2 units)
* The X-er the Y-er (the sooner the better, etc (more of those forms))
- We know that we can use language, but we don’t necessarily know how we do it (there is much
about which we are unaware)
* Leaned vs acquired language
* Effortless vs actively
* You can lose language skills by an accident or dementia or something
3) Intentional communication
- We use language to exchange information, to express emotions, to get others to du something, etc
- This makes language very relevant for students of communication sciences
- Sender and receiver, sending channel and feedback channel, context, (background) noise,
,soundwaves encoding and decoding
-> We can communicate almost anything, including:
* Deceiving and saying things that are not true (prevarication)
* Talking about things that are not physically present or do not exist (displacement)
(Part of design feature of Hockett, more in upcoming weeks)
Linguistics – the study of language
- Language can be studied in a number of different ways, at different levels and with different foci
- Phonetics (the study of raw sounds, like a, o (producing and perceiving), study of speech sounds)
* Consonants:
* Vowels: (tenseness and lip rounding are also components)
* IPA = International Phonetic Alphabet
- Phonology (the study of how sounds are used with a language, for example the difference between
a high tone and a low tone -> individual sounds are combined in specific patterns (words))
- Morphology (the study of words and a word formation, the internal structure of words)
* The smallest unpredictable combinations of form and meanings, these units are called
morphemes, the study of this is called morphology
* Free morphemes (morpheme that can stand by itself: rabbit)
* Bound morpheme (morpheme that can’t stand by itself: -s in rabbits or re- and -ceive (=
bound root) in receive )
* Suffix = affix after the root (rabbits), Prefix = affix before the root microrabbit
- Semantics (the study of meaning of words and sentences)
* Word meaning can change + one word can have more meanings
* A word in one language can have two different words for it in another language
- Syntax (the study of word order, how words group together to make sentences, relationships
between words)
- Pragmatics (the study of language use (in particular context), meaning of words and sentences in a
larger social context)
* Making assumptions about the context in order to understand each other
* Quality (sarcasm), Quantity (enough detail but not too much), Relevance (can be
misleading), Manner (as straightforward as possible) -> can be literal or non-literal
-> Minimal pair: A pair of words that have different meanings, but all of the same sounds, with
exception of one phoneme (Tan and Man)
- Discourse studies (the study of language in interaction)
-> And more…… -> the list goes from the smallest to biggest units
Psychology of language
- The study of language in mind and brain
- Focus on acquiring and processing language
- Often from a cognitive point of view (memory, attention, etc)
- Approaching language from a functional perspective
- Acquisition is very interesting, because when does baby’s find the magic of language? Adult
,language use and baby learning
Evidence in psychology of language
- What types of evidence would be needed and valued when doing research?
* Eye-tracking
* Brain measures (EEG, MRI -> expensive)
* Study of phonetics (soundwaves -> less expensive)
* Observational/fieldwork
* Corpus linguistics: analyse written text to look how people use language
-> From the slides: Actual language use (production and perception), language processing data (eye
tracking , brain activity -> temporal lobe), behavior as influenced by language (tone), attitudinal
measures (judgement sound good/bad), errors/problems in language use
- So important: lots of experimental data (e.g. reaction times in lexical decision tasks)
* Tightly controlled for many factors, but…. Not very realistic/close to what people do in real
life (not representative)
* So be critical, what does this experimental result imply for how we store and use language?
Language and the Brain (06/09/2023)
Basic brain anatomy
- Brain stem: Coordinate of reflexes (vomit, cough, pumping blood)
- Cerebellum: Sophisticated tasks (standing up right, balance)
- Spinal cord: sent signals to other body parts + brings input to the brain
- Cortex: distinct us from animals/other species
- Corpus callosum: connect the two brain hemispheres (information can here go from one to another
hemisphere)
- Frontal lobe: problem solving, judgement, motor functions, prefrontal cortex (impulscontrol,
regulates behaviour)
- Parietal lobe: sensations, helps in coordination body position, motor function
- Temporal lobe: hearing, remembering
- Occipital lobe: vision (e.g. sign language, lip movement)
-> All parts contribute to language in a certain way
Brodmann areas (left hemisphere)
- Anatomically different subareas of the cortex (looked different on the microscope i.e. different cell
structures making up the neutral tissue)
- These subareas are not necessarily functionally different (i.e. involved in performing separate sets of
tasks)
- But this map is a reasonable starting point for further exploration
-> Opportunities for testing the function of particular cortical areas in humans were rare until
, techniques like PET, fMRI, and EEG were invented
* They had to rely on research in damaged brains (brain injury)
Two different areas
- Broca’s area (44, 45, frontal lobe) and Wernicke’s areas (between 22 and 39, temporal lobe)
-Aphasia: an acquired (high level language function/fluent -> lost that ability) language disorder
caused by a focal brain injury
* Broca’s area: He understands everything (good comprehension, he immediately response
and the words makes sense), but he can’t find a lot of words and can’t put them together in a
sentence
* Wernicke’s area: He understands the questions, his language is fluent but not
understandable
- Broca’s aphasia (motor aphasia, expressive aphasia): halting speech, great difficulty in choosing
words (spoken and signed language), also difficulty in writing and gesturing, closed-class (fixed:
prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, pronouns (voorzetsels, voegwoorden, determinatoren,
voornaamwoorden)) words are affected more than open-class (adaptable: nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs (zelfstandige naamwoorden, werkwoorden, bijvoeglijke naamwoorden, bijwoorden)) words,
fairly good speech comprehension
* Difficulty with complex structures and unusual words order (e.g. who chased who?)
-> Adverbs geven info over een werkwoord, adjectives over een zelfstandig naamwoord
-> Rough impression
-> Alle pronouns zijn een anaphor, maar niet alle anaphoren zijn een pronoun
- Wernicke’s aphasia (sensory aphasia, receptive aphasia): fluent but largely meaningless speech,
great difficulty comprehending spoken and written
* Anomia: difficulty in finding the name for an object (resulting in roundabout expressions)
* Frequent neologisms: non-existing words (usually of the expected part-of-speech, sounds
like the words and looks like open-class words in form)
- Conduction aphasia: difficulty repeating speech verbatim (word by word), fairly good production
and comprehension, the underlying deficit is an inability to keep phonological information active (but
long enough to interpret the meaning first)
-> They do know the category but not the sound anymore (for example vehicle, but they don’t know
if it was a van or a truck)
The Werknicke-Lichtheim Geschwind (WLG) model
- Arcuate fasciculus: Little curved bundle of neurons -> Between Brocka’s and Wernicke’s area
- Perceptual and motor processing are dealt with by separate brain networks. In language
comprehension and production, these networks cooperate
- Broca’s area (part of motor network): constricting grammatical sequences (syntax, put words in the
right order), planning speech (articulation) movements
- Wernicke’s area (part of perceptual network): storing lexical information (meaning) and
corresponding phonological (sound) codes
- Arcuate fasciculus: communication between Wernicke’s and Broca’s area (talking and movement at
