14.+Language

April 10, 2010
 * 14. Language**

Language basics Talking with your hands
 * Outline**
 * Phoneme perception
 * Language structure
 * Biology of language
 * Gesture


 * Phonemes -** the smallest unit of sound that can distinguish words in a language (ex: "bat" and "cat" differ by 1 phoneme
 * 46 phonemes in English
 * 200 phonemes worldwide
 * Perception of phonemes**
 * Call vs. Car
 * The last sound is subphonemic in Japanese
 * Key vs. Cool
 * The first sound is subphonemic in English
 * Seemingly effortless speech perception is actually really hard:
 * It's fast: we can perceive up to 50 phonemes a second
 * A phoneme's sound can vary
 * Coarticulation: pronouncing a phoneme in a way that anticipates a future phoneme (example: put your hand in front of your mouth and say pot and spot)
 * Different people speak the same sentence differently
 * The same person doesn't speak exactly the same way all the time
 * Categorical Perception
 * We rely on categorical perception - we identify phonemes as one or the other, rather than as a spectrum
 * [[image:categorical perception.png]]
 * Phoneme restoration effect
 * Happens when other sound replaces phoneme
 * Doesn't happen when there's no sound
 * Warren and Warren (1970):
 * Subjects hear sentences with a cough (*) spliced in to replace a phoneme
 * The *eel was on the axle
 * The *eel was on the shoe
 * The *eel was on the orange
 * The *eal was on the table
 * Subjects reported hearing different phonemes depending on the context (Example: "...the __wh__eel was on the axle."
 * Subjects claim they really heard it
 * Top-down processing
 * Visual cues help us hear phonemes
 * Lip reading
 * McGurk effect: even if the sound is the same, visual cues make us hear it differently (ba vs. fa)
 * Perception of words
 * Jesse & Massaro (2010): Subjects exposed to a song (Don't Cry for me Argentina)
 * 3 conditions
 * Visual only
 * Auditory only
 * Audiovisual
 * Result: Sung lyrics were better understood when the singer was seen as well as heard.
 * [[image:audiovisual.png width="272" height="169"]]
 * Summary: besides basic hearing, how do we perceive phonemes
 * Categorical perception
 * Context
 * Lip-reading

Language basics Sentence Parsing
 * Language Structure**
 * Morpheme: the smallest unit of sound that carries meaning
 * Types of morpheme:
 * Content morphemes - ex. lock, tall, book, talk
 * Function morphemes - ex. un-, -est, -s, -ed
 * Hierarchical organization
 * [[image:hierarchical organization.png width="581" height="299"]]
 * Syntax: rules that govern word order (e.g., subject, verb, object)
 * Orthography: spelling (and punctuation)
 * Semantics: meaning
 * Grammar:
 * Morphology
 * Phonetics
 * Syntax
 * Principal of minimal attachment - we assume the simplest phrase structure that works so far
 * Causes problems with garden path sentences
 * Example: The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi
 * Prosody - patterns of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production
 * Prosody emphasize elements, highlights intended structure, signals a question
 * Examples: You want fries with that? vs. You want fries with that!


 * The Biology of Language**
 * Aphasia - acquired language disorder
 * Production or comprehension
 * Spoken or written
 * Damage to Broca's area produces:
 * Non-fluent aphasia
 * Semantics are intact
 * Syntax is disabled
 * Damage to Wernicke's area produces:
 * Fluent aphasia
 * Syntax is intact
 * Semantics are impaired (they speak gibberish)
 * Our brain appears to parse form (syntax) separately from meaning (semantics)
 * Mnemonic: Wernicke is the longer word = they talk more

Krauss (1998):
 * Gesturing**
 * Participants asked trivia questions about both spatial and non-spatial content
 * Group 1: Normal gesturing
 * Group 2: No gesture (hands tied to a chair)
 * Results:
 * Participants took longer to come up with words when they couldn't gesture
 * Only applies to spatial words
 * [[image:gesture.png width="456" height="266"]]

Practical tricks:
 * If you can't understand what someone's saying, look at their mouth.
 * If you can't think of a word, gesture. Or look up. Or go through the alphabet.