Introduction to psycholinguistics
Lecture 2 – Introduction to linguistics
Psycholinguistics: neuro-cognitive mechanism for language processing
Linguistics: structure and function of language. Language evolution. Language change. Language norms.
This lesson:
1. What are the linguistic levels? Are they psychologically real?
2. Syntax
Linguistics levels
✓ Orthography: writing system. Letters, letters groups
✓ Phonology: the study of speech sounds. How do the organs make the sounds?
✓ Lexicon: words and morphemes. A human knows between 20.000 and 70.000 words.
✓ Syntax: the study of the structure. Rules that determine how to put the words together.
✓ Semantics: how do we encode the meaning of a sentence.
✓ Pragmatic: the study of the function of verbal exchanges.
1.Phonemes/graphemes:
This is the lowest level.
Orthography: letters, groups of letters
Phonology: speech sounds (phone, phonemes)
Letters: B O O T
Graphemes: B OO T. It’s a letter or a group of letters.
Phonemes: /b/ /u/ /t/
Onset=comienzo
Rime=lo que no es el onset
Nucleus=nucleo
Coda= final
The coda and the nucleus are usually together. Is what makes the word to pronounce it that way.
Coda is the phoneme that comes after the nucleus.
1.1.Why care about rime as relevant units?
For example, some graphemes have different pronunciations. It’s the coda what determines the pronunciation of
each grapheme.
1.2.Phonology
Difference between phoneme and phone:
1
, Introduction to psycholinguistics
They refer to a speech sound.
Different phones don’t lead to different meanings, but phonemes do.
Minimal airs are words that are similar in sthe sound but they hae differen menaing because they have different
phonemes: BEAR vs PEAR, LOCK vs ROCK…
The mapping phonology – orthography is not always consistent.
1.3.Inconsistent mapping:
- Spanish, Italian, Korean: very consistent (you know how is written, you know how it is pronounced.
- French: multiple spellings (eau=o=au)
- Dutch: fairly consistent, but… (c,s/au,ou)
- English: inconsistent all over. Multiple sounds and spellings
Consistency affects reading acquisition/dyslexia (Italy 3% vs UK 10%)!
The more consistent a language is, the easier is for children to learn how to write.
2.What is speech?
When you speak you move the air. This moving depends on:
- Shape of vocal tract
- Where and how you close off the vocal tract
If you make vowels: you leave the vocal tract open to let the air come out. Vowels depends on highest part of the
tongue.
If you make consonants: you constrict the air (temporarily). Vocal tract temporarily constricted.
Dimensions of making consonants:
- Manner of articulation: how much constriction.
o Plosive consonant: completely blocked (pbtdkg). PLace of articulation:
▪ Bilabial
▪ Alveolar
▪ Velar
o Fricative: partly blocked (fvz)
o Affricative: plosive + fricative
o Approximant: slightly hindered (wrjl)
o Nasalization: does air also flow through nose? (mn)
- Place of articulation:
o Bilabial
o Labiodental
o Dental
o Alveolar
o Palatal
o Velar
o Glottal
- Voicing:
When do the vocal chords vibrate (relative to release of constriction)
o Voiced: right away (b, d, z)
o Unvoiced: delay (voice onset time) (p, t, s)
Languages differ in vice onset times
2
, Introduction to psycholinguistics
Standard Netherlands Dutch: “foicing”
Dutch, German: final devoicing “hant”
3.Psychological reality of phoneme
Phonemes are minimal pairs obviously relevant for processing. But do we activate a representation of the phoneme
in our minds when we speak or listen? Do we have a unit for them? To study this question they used speech errors.
Speech errors. Phoneme important unit:
- Phonemes slip as a whole, hardly ever will single feature slip (tell Ken -> tell ten)
- Onsets switch place with other onsets but not with coda (NOT: dog -> god)
3.1.Beyond phonemes:
HIgher-order structures:
- Onsets, rimes
- Syllables:
o Rresyllaification in running speech: we don’t say “give it”, we say “givit”.
o Syllable vs stress-timed languages
Tone :
- In some languages tone makes a difference (Chinese)
- “Ma” in chinese can be “mum” or “toad” depending on the tone of your voice
Consequences of differences of phonology between languages
- Errors in perceiving minimal pairs in L2 (lice or rice for Japanese L1)
- Repetition priming with minimal pairs (néta-neta in Spanish and Catalan): repetition priming mens that
when you are doing a task in which you see words and have to give an answer, you are faster the second
or third time that you are exposed to the same word. For Spanish speakers, who don’t differentiate
between these 2 sounds, there was a repetition effect with both words, but not in Catalan.
4.Lexicon
4.1.Words and morphemes
Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit.
Words have 1 or more morphemes
Example: deconstruction => de + construct + ion
There are different types of morphemes:
- Free (“apple”) or bound (“-s”, “-ed”)
- Derivational (construction) or inflectional (apples)
- Transparent – they tell you the meaning of the entire word- (unhappiness) or intransparent (deparment)
4.2.Consequences for processing
Do we decompose multimorphemic words into parts? (department = depart + ment) And if we do it, when?
Intransparency: do we activate irrelevant meanings in intransparent words ? (depart in department)
Is there a contribution of morpheme frequency on reading speed (beyond whole-word frequency)?
3
, Introduction to psycholinguistics
4.3.Psychological relevance
Morphological family size matters :
- Orange, orangewood, orangerie
- Aple, apple juice, apple sauce, crab apple…
Which word is recognized faster? Orange or apple? = apple
5.Syntax
5.1.Syntactic structures
Are the syntactic trees that we do realistic? (picture in slide)
5.2.Psychologically real?
Do we have representations of syntactic structures in our minds?
One study argues that this is indeed the case, and they used structural priming to see so:
Dialogue game – participant and confederate “describe each other picture”
Participants were influenced by confederates’ structure
Example:
- The dos chases the mailman -> A bullet hits a bottle
- The mailman is chased by the dog -> the bottle is hit by the bullet.
This means that people copy the syntactic structure from the prime, and this means that syntax is real.
6.Semantics
6.1.Units of meaning?
There are different approaches to how we understand the meaning of a word:
Semantic primitives or wholistic representations of the meanings?
- Semantic representations are a list of features: CAT= animal, furry, miows… You think about the features
and you link it with the correspondent word.
- We have wholistic representations: define “game” – Wittgenstein
A more recent approach is inferring meaning from linguistic context.
- The context might help you find the meaning of a word.
- Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)
The last element regarding semantics is grounding in human perception. Even though this semantic factors like LSA
capture quite a lot of the world, they don’t capture the experience that you have as a human. Some embodied
cognition theories of semantic consider experience crucial for semantics and they see the meaning like a simulation
of the list of experiences that we have with that object.
7.Summary
The units of representations assume din linguistics (morphemes, syntax etc) often have direct psychological reality.
What about the representation of Chomsky’s generative grammar? Influenced research on:
4
Lecture 2 – Introduction to linguistics
Psycholinguistics: neuro-cognitive mechanism for language processing
Linguistics: structure and function of language. Language evolution. Language change. Language norms.
This lesson:
1. What are the linguistic levels? Are they psychologically real?
2. Syntax
Linguistics levels
✓ Orthography: writing system. Letters, letters groups
✓ Phonology: the study of speech sounds. How do the organs make the sounds?
✓ Lexicon: words and morphemes. A human knows between 20.000 and 70.000 words.
✓ Syntax: the study of the structure. Rules that determine how to put the words together.
✓ Semantics: how do we encode the meaning of a sentence.
✓ Pragmatic: the study of the function of verbal exchanges.
1.Phonemes/graphemes:
This is the lowest level.
Orthography: letters, groups of letters
Phonology: speech sounds (phone, phonemes)
Letters: B O O T
Graphemes: B OO T. It’s a letter or a group of letters.
Phonemes: /b/ /u/ /t/
Onset=comienzo
Rime=lo que no es el onset
Nucleus=nucleo
Coda= final
The coda and the nucleus are usually together. Is what makes the word to pronounce it that way.
Coda is the phoneme that comes after the nucleus.
1.1.Why care about rime as relevant units?
For example, some graphemes have different pronunciations. It’s the coda what determines the pronunciation of
each grapheme.
1.2.Phonology
Difference between phoneme and phone:
1
, Introduction to psycholinguistics
They refer to a speech sound.
Different phones don’t lead to different meanings, but phonemes do.
Minimal airs are words that are similar in sthe sound but they hae differen menaing because they have different
phonemes: BEAR vs PEAR, LOCK vs ROCK…
The mapping phonology – orthography is not always consistent.
1.3.Inconsistent mapping:
- Spanish, Italian, Korean: very consistent (you know how is written, you know how it is pronounced.
- French: multiple spellings (eau=o=au)
- Dutch: fairly consistent, but… (c,s/au,ou)
- English: inconsistent all over. Multiple sounds and spellings
Consistency affects reading acquisition/dyslexia (Italy 3% vs UK 10%)!
The more consistent a language is, the easier is for children to learn how to write.
2.What is speech?
When you speak you move the air. This moving depends on:
- Shape of vocal tract
- Where and how you close off the vocal tract
If you make vowels: you leave the vocal tract open to let the air come out. Vowels depends on highest part of the
tongue.
If you make consonants: you constrict the air (temporarily). Vocal tract temporarily constricted.
Dimensions of making consonants:
- Manner of articulation: how much constriction.
o Plosive consonant: completely blocked (pbtdkg). PLace of articulation:
▪ Bilabial
▪ Alveolar
▪ Velar
o Fricative: partly blocked (fvz)
o Affricative: plosive + fricative
o Approximant: slightly hindered (wrjl)
o Nasalization: does air also flow through nose? (mn)
- Place of articulation:
o Bilabial
o Labiodental
o Dental
o Alveolar
o Palatal
o Velar
o Glottal
- Voicing:
When do the vocal chords vibrate (relative to release of constriction)
o Voiced: right away (b, d, z)
o Unvoiced: delay (voice onset time) (p, t, s)
Languages differ in vice onset times
2
, Introduction to psycholinguistics
Standard Netherlands Dutch: “foicing”
Dutch, German: final devoicing “hant”
3.Psychological reality of phoneme
Phonemes are minimal pairs obviously relevant for processing. But do we activate a representation of the phoneme
in our minds when we speak or listen? Do we have a unit for them? To study this question they used speech errors.
Speech errors. Phoneme important unit:
- Phonemes slip as a whole, hardly ever will single feature slip (tell Ken -> tell ten)
- Onsets switch place with other onsets but not with coda (NOT: dog -> god)
3.1.Beyond phonemes:
HIgher-order structures:
- Onsets, rimes
- Syllables:
o Rresyllaification in running speech: we don’t say “give it”, we say “givit”.
o Syllable vs stress-timed languages
Tone :
- In some languages tone makes a difference (Chinese)
- “Ma” in chinese can be “mum” or “toad” depending on the tone of your voice
Consequences of differences of phonology between languages
- Errors in perceiving minimal pairs in L2 (lice or rice for Japanese L1)
- Repetition priming with minimal pairs (néta-neta in Spanish and Catalan): repetition priming mens that
when you are doing a task in which you see words and have to give an answer, you are faster the second
or third time that you are exposed to the same word. For Spanish speakers, who don’t differentiate
between these 2 sounds, there was a repetition effect with both words, but not in Catalan.
4.Lexicon
4.1.Words and morphemes
Morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit.
Words have 1 or more morphemes
Example: deconstruction => de + construct + ion
There are different types of morphemes:
- Free (“apple”) or bound (“-s”, “-ed”)
- Derivational (construction) or inflectional (apples)
- Transparent – they tell you the meaning of the entire word- (unhappiness) or intransparent (deparment)
4.2.Consequences for processing
Do we decompose multimorphemic words into parts? (department = depart + ment) And if we do it, when?
Intransparency: do we activate irrelevant meanings in intransparent words ? (depart in department)
Is there a contribution of morpheme frequency on reading speed (beyond whole-word frequency)?
3
, Introduction to psycholinguistics
4.3.Psychological relevance
Morphological family size matters :
- Orange, orangewood, orangerie
- Aple, apple juice, apple sauce, crab apple…
Which word is recognized faster? Orange or apple? = apple
5.Syntax
5.1.Syntactic structures
Are the syntactic trees that we do realistic? (picture in slide)
5.2.Psychologically real?
Do we have representations of syntactic structures in our minds?
One study argues that this is indeed the case, and they used structural priming to see so:
Dialogue game – participant and confederate “describe each other picture”
Participants were influenced by confederates’ structure
Example:
- The dos chases the mailman -> A bullet hits a bottle
- The mailman is chased by the dog -> the bottle is hit by the bullet.
This means that people copy the syntactic structure from the prime, and this means that syntax is real.
6.Semantics
6.1.Units of meaning?
There are different approaches to how we understand the meaning of a word:
Semantic primitives or wholistic representations of the meanings?
- Semantic representations are a list of features: CAT= animal, furry, miows… You think about the features
and you link it with the correspondent word.
- We have wholistic representations: define “game” – Wittgenstein
A more recent approach is inferring meaning from linguistic context.
- The context might help you find the meaning of a word.
- Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA)
The last element regarding semantics is grounding in human perception. Even though this semantic factors like LSA
capture quite a lot of the world, they don’t capture the experience that you have as a human. Some embodied
cognition theories of semantic consider experience crucial for semantics and they see the meaning like a simulation
of the list of experiences that we have with that object.
7.Summary
The units of representations assume din linguistics (morphemes, syntax etc) often have direct psychological reality.
What about the representation of Chomsky’s generative grammar? Influenced research on:
4
