language and thought rozi ivády mcdaniel college
TRANSCRIPT
Language and thought
Rozi Ivády
McDaniel College
Language and communication
• All human cultures speak
• Every human being learns to speak– Not all of us can do integration– Mind you: SLI!
• Do animals speak?– Videos:– Talking animals
Can animals talk?
• It always depends on what you call talking…
• Kepek/evoluciosvideok
• There are two reasons
Faces on Mars?
• There are two reasons– We like to hear animals talk
– Kepek/evolucios/tatogo majom
• There are two reasons– We like to hear animals talk– Animals like to imitate us
Clever Hans – effect (1907)
ELIZA: http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html
Irene PepperbergAlex the African grey parrot
..\BME_evolúcióskurzus\evoluc200607BME\nyelvevolúció\ALex\alextheparrot[1].mov
Is it human language?
How many blue blocks?
„Bannery”
200 words
Avian Lanuage teaching EXperiment
Language
• Do animals speak?– Videos:
• Alex• Koko
Conclusion about ape studies
ape• Here and now• No syntax• explicit teaching
• Does not refuse badly formed sentences
• Rarely forms questions• Not using symbols
spontaneuosly• MLU same• Banana me me me eat.
child• timeline• syntax• No explicit teaching –
spontaneous signs with deaf children)
• Refuses badly formed sentences
• Frequent questions• Referential use of symbols• MLU grows and so does
complexity• I am going to eat all the bananas.
Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch
What is language?
• Closed ( 30-40 signs)
• Holistic– sounds, smells,
facial expressions
• Analogue (crying)• Concrete
• inherited
•Open Lexikon•Arbitrarily changeable
•Analytic Steven Pinker: nyelvtan= discrete combinatorial system
•hierarchy•recursivity
•infinite?•Digital•Detached, distanced
•learned
A nyelv szerkezete
language
soundsgrammar
meaning
phonetics
phonology
morphology
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
Sounds
phonemes
e.g. suffixes
phrases
Text, meaning
intention
40 20.000 infinite infinite
• Linguists and psychologists talk about different things… Grammarians are more interested in what could be said than in what people actually say, which irritates psychologists, and psychologists insist on supplementing intuition with objective evidence, which irritates linguists.
(Miller, 1990)
Competence vs. perfomance
What is one language?
• Which one of these are the same laguages?– English – German– American English – British English– Black English – American English– Jamaican Creole – Jamaican English
Mutual intelligibility
Dialect continuum
• Standard language – written language– Chinese – Japanese?
Dialect 1
Dialect 2
Dialect 3
Language typology
• Configurational – nonconfigurational
• Analytic-synthetic– Agglutinating - inflecting
Language typology
• Configurational – nonconfigurational
• Analytic-synthetic– Agglutinating - inflecting
Typology• Configurational and
non-configurational languages
• Arwen• Nazgǔl• chase
Typology
• Arwen• Nazgǔl• chase
The Nazgǔl are chasing Arwen.
A Nazgullok kergetik Arwent.
Arwent kergetik a Nazgullok.
•Free word order
•Null anaphora
•Syntactically discontinuous expressions
Language typology
• Configurational – nonconfigurational
• Analytic-synthetic– Agglutinating - inflecting
• In the box• At the table• You could have done
it
• A dobozban• Az asztalnál• (ti) megcsinálhattátok
(volna)
Linguistic universals
• Joseph Greenberg – 30 languages• Absolute – substantive
– Lexicon and grammar– Nouns, verbs, pronouns (deictics – time, space,
number)– First person– Vowel, consonant– Rules of intonation– No language without /a/ – Antonymy– Roman Jakobson – Linda Waugh: i sound
• What do you call a small cat? (Mackó – maci)
A war that never ends
• Descriptive and prescriptive linguistics
– third-person singular /s/: "she goes," - "she go." – no double negatives: "he didn't see anybody," - "he didn't see
nobody." "who/whom did you see"
– "Winston tastes good like/as a cigarette should" – "the data is/are unreliable" – "I disapprove of him/his doing it" – "get it done as quick/quickly as possible"
A nyelv szerkezete
language
soundsgrammar
meaning
phonetics
phonology
morphology
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
Sounds
phonemes
suffixes
phrases
Text, meaning
intention
• Sink vs sin
• Japanese /r/ and /l/
• Banned clusters ‘zmrzlna’
A nyelv szerkezete
language
soundsgrammar
meaning
phonetics
phonology
morphology
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
Sounds
phonemes
suffixes
phrases
Text, meaning
intention
Morphemes
• Smallest meaningful unit – the wug test
• Berko, 1958
A nyelv szerkezete
language
soundsgrammar
meaning
phonetics
phonology
morphology
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
Sounds
phonemes
suffixes
phrases
Text, meaning
intention
Reaction times are higher between phrases (SPRT)
The reality of syntactic categories
The witness examined by the jury was confused.
The evidence examined by the jury was a mess.
A nyelv szerkezete
language
soundsgrammar
meaning
phonetics
phonology
morphology
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
Sounds
phonemes
suffixes
phrases
Text, meaning
intention
Lexical ambiguity - polysemy
• Where is the ball?
• Look at that chip.
Lexical Ambiguity - Types of Context
• Relevant context may come either before or after ambiguous word– The footballer asked “where is the ball?”– “Where is the ball?” asked the footballer.– A man in a tuxedo asked “where is the ball?”– “Where is the ball?” asked the man in a tuxedo.
• Context that follows an ambiguous word is unlikely to affect the process of word identification
A nyelv szerkezete
language
soundsgrammar
meaning
phonetics
phonology
morphology
syntax
semantics
pragmatics
Sounds
phonemes
suffixes
phrases
Text, meaning
intention
• Can you pass me the salt?
Context
• Where is the Statue of Liberty?– In Budapest– In the USA– In New York– In Ellis Island
Development of language
• Preferential looking task – phoneme discrimination– We actualy loose our
abilities to differentiate certain sounds at 8-9 months – r,l in Japanese
How do children learn language?
• All children learn language, whereas domestic animals do not
• Imitation?– Children sometimes say things they could not have
heard „goed”– When they do repeat sentences it is not an exact
repretition
• Conditioning– Parents rarely correct children as long as they
understand them– There is no punishment or prize involved
• Hypotesis testing– Children seem to acquire a rule and even
overgeneralize it for a time– U-shaped learning curve
– One explanation similarity :• -alk verbs (walk, talk, stalk)• brake, break!• ringed the city – rand the bell
Innateness?
• Our inborn abilities account for much of the structure– Signing children of hearing parents
• Critical periods– Second Language Learning– The cases of feral children – Genie– Untalking apes – aping language (Washoe,
Sarah, Koko, Kanzi)
1. Propositional thinking• General concepts and categorization• Economical• Provides additional, non-visible
characteristics (has stone)
• Prototypes and typicality
What’s the best furniture?
– couch– table– sofa– chair
– chair– sofa– couch– table
Is this a bird?
Is this a bird?
Is this a bird?
Is this a bird?
1. Propositional thinking• General concepts and categorization• Economical• Provides additional, non-visible
characteristics (has stone)
• Prototypes and typicality• Core concepts (grandmother, bachelor)
• Categorizing colours with the Dani• Rosch: Basic level categories
Animal
mammal bird insect
domestic wild Stock animal
dog cat
Siamese Persian Birman
• Categorizing colours with the Dani• Rosch: Basic level categories • Concept learning– Rules– Exemplars– Prototypes – only the best exemplars
• Children until the age of 10 rely on exemplars (burglar experiment)
Imagery
Language and thought
• Which direction do the windows have?– East, south, north,
west?
• Intrinsic, relative and absolute languages– The bag is in front
ofthe cat.– The cat is left of the
bag.– The cat is to the south
of the bag.
Deduction and Induction
• If it rains I’ll take an umbrella with me• It is raining.• I take an umbrella with me.
• John studied accountancy at university• John works at an accountant’s office.• Therefore John is an accountant.
The Wason task• There are 4 cards on the table
• All cards have a letter on one side and a number on the other
• If the card has a wovel on it, the other side must have an even number on it
• You can see one side of each card• Some break the rules• Which ones do you have to turn up to know if they break
the rules or not?
E K 2 7
The Wason task• There are 4 cards on the table
• All cards have a drink on one side and the age on the other
• If one drinks alcohol, they need to be over age (18)• You can see one side of each card• Some break the rules• Which ones do you have to turn up to know if they break
the rules or not?
beer Coke 22 17
• Why the difference?– Social rules– Evolutionary psychology – cheater detectors?
Conclusion
• Human language is different from that of animal communication in the sense that it is infinite
• Concepts are organized in a hierarchical strcture with a basic level (Rosch)
• Language influences thoughts, but does not determine it
• Reasoning is not always reasonable
• Thank you!