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LANGUAGE
Four levels of analysis:
Phonology
Syntax
Semantic
Pragmatic
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PHONOLOGY: the study of the sound system of language
The basic unit of sound is a PHONEME. A phoneme does not always correspond to a letter:
Many letters may be combined to form a single phoneme, for example /th/ is a phoneme made up by two letters;
A single letter may correspond to multiple phonemes as it often happens with vowels: "i" corresponds to two different phonemes in "mint" and "pint".
Language acquisition and phonology:
Phonemes are different in different languages. As adults, we are sensitive only to differences between phonemes that belongs to our language. For example, Japanese speakers are not able to distinguish between /r/ and /l/ and English (or Italian) speakers are not able to distinguish, for example, some of the Hindi phonemes.
Why is that? You have to think in terms of signal detection theory. Signal is always presented with noise. Also, there is variability in the way each phoneme is spoken from time to time. An efficient way to deal with this problem is to be able to recognize phonemes in a certain range of variability. You can think of phoneme recognition in this way:
Lets take two very similar phonemes such as /b/ and /p/. If you hear a sound that is different from the "perfect" /p/ but pretty close, you will hear /p/. As a metaphor, we can think of holes in the "phonetic space". The black marble will roll down to the /p/ or /b/ hole depending on its original position. So: The function of our categorical perception of phonemes is to increase our ability to perceive phoneme with a noisy and changing signal.
As I said before, phonemes are not the same in different languages. Also, the boundary between phonemes and the acoustic features of each phoneme are different. For example, in Italian we also have /p/ and /b/, but the boundaries of the two phonemes are different. So, when I spell my last name, I always have to specify "P as in Paul", otherwise my /p/ is translated by an English speaker in /b/
Babies are very sensitive to language sounds. They can easily distinguish between different phonemes. At the beginning, they are able to distinguish all possible phonemes, also the ones that are not in his/her native language. We can imagine this situation like a "flat" phonetic space, in which also small acoustic differences are perceived as different phonemes. However, through experience (that is, being exposed to their parents language), the capacity to distinguish between different phonemes start to decline and the infant will become sensitive only to the phonemes that are actually present in her native language.
Is this process reversible? Recent studies show that it may be possible to reverse the structure of the phonetic space and to create a more detailed categorization of phonemes in adulthood.
Which kind of problems do you think will a late-learning of a second language have?
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SYNTAX: Rules that determine how words are put together to form sentences. A simple example is word order. In English this is a very important rule (but not in other languages such as German or Italian). Sentences are usually organized in terms of subjects-verb-object.
For example the difference in meaning between:
the dog chased the cat and the cat chased the dog
is just in the word order. All the words are the same, but the way we arrange them completely change the meaning of the sentence.
Some of the rules of syntax are present in all languages (what is referred to as "universal grammar"). Some of this syntactic rules may be a consequence of limitations in our processing systems, as we saw studying working memory.
How do we learn syntax? This seems a strong example of implicit rule learning. When a child learn to speak, he doesn't study grammar and grammatical rules, but she learn this rules generalizing from speech.
Syntax seems very sensitive to the period of acquisition. That is to say, the later you learn a second language, the worse will be your syntactic performance for grammatical rules that were not already in your first language. This leads to the concept of CRITICAL PERIOD in language. According to the critical period hypothesis, there are particular periods in development in which a skill can be learned perfectly. Outside these time windows, learning will not be so good. So, people that learned their second language late in life (the crucial moment seems to be puberty), may never sound like a native speaker in some aspect of language such as phonology or syntax. The few examples of people that did not learn a language until adulthood show that they seem unable to grasp even simple grammatical rules such as word order.
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SEMANTICS: the meaning of words and sentences
The unit of meaning is the morpheme. In the same way as phonemes and letters are not the same unit, morphemes and words are not the same units.
People working in Artificial Intelligence discovered how complex semantics is. The quantity of knowledge that we need to have to understand simple sentences, is a lot more that we imagine, and it is not at all limited to the dictionary definition of a term.
* All words are, in a way or another, AMBIGUOUS. A word such as BANK, for example, has a very different meaning in the context of "river" or in the context of "money", and we need to be able to solve this ambiguity while reading a text or listening to a speech, using cues from the previous or future part of the sentence.
* We make INFERENCES, so that actually we understand a lot more than what it is said. For example, in the sentence "The policeman held up his hand and the cars stopped", we automatically infer that that are drivers in the car and that actually drivers stopped the cars, even if this is not mentioned in any part of the sentence. Also, we did in class the demonstration of the passage on "doing laundry" with and without title, and we realized that our comprehension and memory is completely different when we can apply a previous schema. We do this all the times and this is what allows us to understand language.
* We have way to convey the exact opposite of what we say. For example, let's suppose that I say "today is another beautiful spring day!" and you look outside the window and see that it is raining. What do you understand? Probably that today is another awful day, that I'm tired of the rain and that I expect the whether to be nicer because we are in the middle of May. You can understand this, just comparing my sentence with what you know is the reality. This is an aspect of PRAGMATICS. Many times we say something that is not be taken in its literal meaning, but has an ironic meaning, and the incredible thing is that usually people can understand us.
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PRAGMATICS refers to a variety of "extralinguistic" factors in language.
An important part of pragmatics is the knowledge of the social rules of language. We know a big deal of what is appropriate and what is not appropriate to say in a particular social context, and the way we talk to a professor in class is different from the way we talk to our best friend during a party. Language is behavior, and some philosopher of language talked about "linguistic acts", particular ways of saying things that, in a social context, can be thought as actions.
When we listen to someone speaking we don't only pay attention to the meaning of the sentences, but also on what the sentence says about the speaker and what the sentence says about what the speaker thinks of us.
For example, if someone tells you:
"Why would you want to take Dr. Wilson's Personality class? It's just a bunch of experiments with rats, isn't it?"
What would you think about the speaker?
And if someone tells you:
"Maybe you shouldn't take Wilson's class next term. Don't you have to be pretty smart to do all that reading?"
What would you think that the speaker thinks about you?
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