PSYC3311 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Psycholinguistics, Noam Chomsky, Moodle
Week 1 lec 2
Semanticity – consistent association of utterance w meaning
Arbitrariness- sound doesn’t mean anything
Language features continued:
Ability to handle novelty: One can create and understand new messages. This is probably the
most important feature of language (as highlighted by Chomsky).
Only humans have all the features , features eliminate other animals
Maybe language is unique to humans simply because animals have never been given the
opportunity to learn language as humans have:
Since the 1960s there have been a number of examples of apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos
(advanced gorilla)) being raised in a human environment and with an attempt to teach them
language. Because apes cannot physiologically make sounds, though, the medium of
communication has either been the use of plastic tokens or, more frequently, sign language.
Mb animals would be able to acquire human like language if they lived in groups and weren’t
isolated etc….?
Since 1960s, ppl in America have tried to raise these animals to see whether they develop
language. Apes physiologically cant made human sounds. Medium of communication has been
plastic chips of diff colours and shapes to denote words, arranged in diff orders to denote
grammar. And also in more recent years, sign language
Claims of successful use of language have been made from this research. However, evidence for
creativity has been questionable and anything approaching the level of sophistication of human
grammar is lacking.
An example of evidence for creative use of language is when a chimp (Washoe) saw a duck, and
not knowing the word for it, signed "water" and "bird". But she was at the river at the time and
might have been referring to both the river and the bird.
For a critique of this field, see under "Useful Files/Links" on the course's Moodle site:
- Hu (2014): Animals perceive the emotions of the humans around them, and the
anecdotes in the release could easily be evidence that Koko was responding to the
sadness she sensed in her human caregivers.
In fact, if it is the case that language potential is transferred genetically, one might expect apes to
show rudimentary capacities given that they are related to humans. So, it's unclear what the ape
research is really meant to show.
We saw that the most important features of language is the ability to handle novelty. This seems
to imply that there are a finite number of rules and patterns that we can learn that can be used
to generate and comprehend the potentially infinite number of sentences that we interact with.
A distinction can be drawn here (Chomsky) between the knowledge that one can potentially
have about the rules and patterns (i.e., structure) of language and the actual use of these
structures. i.e., competence (knowledge of the rules and structures) vs performance.
= linguistics vs psycholinguistics Linguist – interested in studying the structure of language
Psycholinguist – describes how we as humans make use of that structure to understand and
produce language. Takes into account the cognitive mechanisms that a human possesses,
including cognitive limitations.
As a result of these limitations performance does not always coincide with competence. e.g.,
CATS DOGS CHASE CHASE RATS is strange but a valid linguistic structure. In terms of
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Document Summary
Semanticity consistent association of utterance w meaning. Ability to handle novelty: one can create and understand new messages. This is probably the most important feature of language (as highlighted by chomsky). Only humans have all the features , features eliminate other animals. Maybe language is unique to humans simply because animals have never been given the opportunity to learn language as humans have: Since the 1960s there have been a number of examples of apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos (advanced gorilla)) being raised in a human environment and with an attempt to teach them language. Because apes cannot physiologically make sounds, though, the medium of communication has either been the use of plastic tokens or, more frequently, sign language. Mb animals would be able to acquire human like language if they lived in groups and weren"t isolated etc . Since 1960s, ppl in america have tried to raise these animals to see whether they develop language.
