Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

In Collaboration
with
National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning
(NPTEL)
Presents
 Introduction
to the
Psychology of Language
Dr. Ark Verma,
Assistant Professor of Psychology,
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences,
IIT Kanpur
Week 1: Introduction to Language
Lecture 2: Basic Concepts in Psycholinguistics
“I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady in a flower
shop.”

-Eliza Doolittle/Bernard Shaw.

Why is grammar important?

• Grammar consists of the rules of a language.

• Grammar lets one understand the properties of language.

• It is matter of controversy whether rules of grammar are psychological

real or they just serve as descriptive properties of languages.
Basic Concepts in Grammar: Word Order

• Is “I see what I eat” the same as “I eat what I see”???

• Order of words in the sentences of the language might have an impact on
word meaning.

• Syntactic rules of the language determine the word order. For e.g. word
order is:

• Subject-verb-object (SVO) in English.

• The boy chased the girl.
• The girl chased the boy.
• Subject-object-verb (SOV) in Japanese/Hindi.
• Taro to hanako that gave.
• Ram ne Sita ko kitab di.
• However, not all languages are trict about word order:
• For e.g. Russian permits a variety of possibilities.
• Viktor celeut Lenu.
• Victor Lenu celeut.
• Celeut Victor Lenu.
• Lenu celeut Victor.
• These languages may make use of affixes for conveying specific
meanings (suffixed & prefixes)
• Trip, tripped, tripping etc.
• In Turkish:
• Gel: come; gelemedim: I could’nt come.
Basic Properties: Phonology

• Acoustics: study of physical properties of sounds.

• For e.g. using a sound spectrogram.

• Phonetics: the physical properties of speech sounds, manner & place

of articulation.

• Phonology: the sound categories each language uses to divide up the

space of possible sounds.
• E.g. pin (aspirated) vs. spin (unaspirated).
• Phoneme: basic unit of sound in a particular language.

• Changing phonemes might affect the meaning of the word.

• In Thai, “paa” (unaspirated) = “forest” while “paa” (aspirated) = “to
split”.
• Hence, they are different phonemes.

• Allophones: different forms of the same phoneme.

• Pin & Spin.
• Minimal pairs: two sounds in a word differing by just one sound.
• For e.g. “dog”, “log”, “hog” etc.

• Sound is produced by moving parts of the vocal tract, i.e. lips, teeth,
tongue, mouth and larynx.

• They are categorized on the basis of their source.

• Larynx modifies the flow of air from the lungs and produces a range
of higher frequencies.
• Vowels: sounds made with a relatively free flow of air, the vocal tract
remains more or less open. E.g. a, e, i, o, u.

• Dipthongs: a type of vowel which is a combination of two vowel

sounds. E.g. boy, wow, cow, my etc.

• Consonants: sounds made by closing or restricting some part of the

vocal tract as the air flows through it. E.g. p, b, t, d, k, g.
• Place of articulation: part of the vocal tract that is closed or constricted
during articulation.

• E.g.
• dentals: sounds formed by putting the tongue tip behind the upper front
teeth. As Ɵ (theta).

• labiodentals: sounds formed by putting the lower lip to the upper teeth.
For e.g. “V”.
• Manner of articulation: Way of modifying airflow in turn affecting the
sound produced.

• E.g.
• stops: when the airflow is completely restricted, as in /p/, /b/, /t/ etc.
• fricatives: formed by constricting airstream making hissing sound, as in
/f/, /v/, /s/ etc.
• Syllables: rythmic units that form words. Smallest note in a word.

• Syl-la-ble (3 syllables), matter (2 syllables), Cat (1 syllable).

• Syllables are formed from:

• Onset + Rime;
• onset: initial consonant or cluster. E.g. /c/ in cat or /cl/ in cloud.
• rime: nucleus + coda
• nucleus: central vowel, i.e. /ou/ in cloud.
• coda: final consonant or cluster. /d/ in cloud.
Basic Properties: Morphology

• Morphology: governs system of rules for words formation. Describes

smallest grammatical units which form words, i.e. morphemes.

• A simple example for understanding morphemes is:

• Play + er = Player, where Play is a free morpheme (that can stand alone)
and ‘er’ is a bound morpheme that cannot stand alone.
• Free morphemes can also be called lexical morphemes, i.e. units that can
stand alone as nouns, verbs etc. they do no alter the meaning of words.
• Bound morphemes are also called grammatical morphemes, they are tiny
markers as (er, ed, ness) which can be added to words and affect their
meaning.
Basic properties: Phrase Structure

• Sentences can be divided into smaller constituents called ‘phrases’.

• Phrases can be understood as combination of a critical word (noun or

verb) with other words, expressing a single idea.

• The young swimmer accepted the silver medal.

• (the young swimmer) (accepted the silver medal).
• (the young swimmer) (accepted [the silver medal]).
• Phrase-structure rules: syntactic rules that specify the permissible
sequences of constituents in a language.

• The central idea is that sentences are built up hierarchically from

smaller units using rewrite rules.

• Phrase structure grammar: a set of rewrite rules.

• E.g.:
• S - > NP + VP
• NP-> DET + N
• NP-> N
• VP-> V + NP
• VP-> V
• N -> vlad, borris, vampire, ghost
• V -> loves, hates, likes, bites…
• DET -> a, an, the …
• Phrase structure ambiguity: p-s rules might also lead to a degree of
ambiguity.

• E.g. They are eating apples.

• S: (NP)They (VP)are eating apples.

(NP) They (VP) are eating (NP) apples.

• S: (NP) They (V) are (NP) eating apples.

(NP) They (V) are (adj) eating (N) apples.
Basic Properties: Linguistic Productivity

• Our ability to create and comprehend novel utterances.

• Given the infinite amount of possible utterances, we must be storing

rules (finite) for creating sentences. E.g. by embedding one sentence
into other.
• VP-> V + S
• (V) The child thinks (S) the man left.
• Another possibility:
• S-> NP + V + S

• Such a rule, that refers back to itself is called a recursive rule.

• It is resilient property of human language, even used by children.

• We can coin new words when needed, also use existing ones in new
combinations.

• However, not all aspects of language are productive.

A word on SYNTAX

• When talking of the role of syntax is human language processing one

of the most important names to come to mind is that of Noam
Chomsky (1928 – present), who has had a profound impact on
linguistic thought.

• Two important ideas:

• Relationship between language & brain.
• Technical description of the structure of language.
• Acc. to Noam Chomsky:

• Langauage in innate, biologically programmed, unique to the human

species.

• Language is independent of other cognitive functions.

• Distinguished between:

• Linguistic competence: our abstract knowledge of the language. E.g.

intuitions about grammatically acceptable samples.

• Linguistic performance: our actual language production, limited by our

cognitive capacity. E.g. speech errors etc.
• Also specified:

• Externalized Language (E-Language): the language we use. Samples &

properties of real utterances. Linguistics should be concerned with
describing the regularities of real language via grammar.

• Internalized Language (I-Language): the knowledge of language. The

mental phenomena that precede & follow performance.
• Chomsky distinguished between:

• Surface structure: refers to the superficial arrangement of constituents,

and reflects the order in which the words are pronounced.

• Deep structure: refers to the underlying structure of a sentence that

conveys the meaning.
• Lets elaborate:

• Flying planes can be dangerous.

• (deep structure ambiguity: single surface structure, two possible deep
structures).

• (a) John is easy to please.

• (b) John is eager to please.
• John is object in (a) while subject in (b).

• Arlene played the tuba.

• The tuba was played by Arlene.
• Same deep structure, different surface structure.
Relationship between Language & Grammar

• Language: infinite set of well-formed sentences.

• Grammar: formal device with a finite set of rules, that can generate all
possible sentences in a language & no bad sentences. Hence,
generative grammar.

• Theories of language, composed of more specific hypotheses about the

structure or organization of language.
Evaluating Grammars

• Observational adequacy: a grammar must be able to generate all the

acceptable but none of the unacceptable sentences.

• Descriptive adequacy: must be able to describe the relationships

between utterances that are similar or not similar. E.g. syntactic
differences.

• Explanatory adequacy: involve s the ability to explain the role of

linguistic universals in language acquisition. E.g. how children choose
from samples & deduce correct rules.
Much ado about grammar…

• There might still be problems:

• Most grammars still cannot fully account for all the linguistic utterances.

• They also do not take into account cognitive processing considerations.

• Also they lack the details as far as smaller constituents may be

concerned.
Transformational Grammar

• Acc. to Chomsky, phrase-structure rules do not capture linguistic

competence fully.

• These relations can be captured by a set of rewrite rules, called

transformational rules.

• Transformational rule: a grammatical rule for converting one syntactic

structure to another.

• Transformational grammar: based on transformations.

• Examples:

• Particle movement transformation:

• John phoned up the woman. (VP-> V + part + NP)
• John phoned the woman up. (VP-> V + NP + part)

• Passivization transformation:
• The vampire chases the ghost.
• The ghost was chased by the vampire.
Lexical – functional grammar/psychologically reaslistic
grammar (Bresnan, 1978, 2001)

• Takes into account, properties of individual lexical terms, i.e. words.

• Lexical entries include the various forms of the word (e.g. kiss, kissed,
kissing) and the types of compatible sentences.
• Mary kissed John.
• John was kissed by Mary.
• kiss: (agent= subject, patient = object) &
• (be) kiss: (agent= object, patient = subject).
• Advantages:

• Helps simplify the explanatory burden to lexicon.

• Seems a more economical/plausible way of explaining effortless

comprehension of sentences.

• Take into account the consideration that working through syntactic rules
might be more difficult than retrieving from the mental lexicon.
• Views of Ray Jackendoff (2002):

• Rejects the view that syntax is the core of our linguistic knowledge.

• Rejects that linguistic productivity is solely due to syntactic rules.

• Suggests that grammars have multiple formation rules (syntax,

semantics, phonology) which operate in parallel to facilitate simplified
language processing.

• Grammars must study these interfaces.

• E.g.
• It’s only a parent, not a teacher.
• It’s only apparent, not real.
Take home message…

• It is important to know the linguistic rules to have a deep

understanding of any language.

• Deep understanding of properties of languages may help in studying

language processing.

• However, linguistic rules/syntax are not paramount and alternative

views must also be considered.
References

• Traxler, M.J. (2011) Introduction to Psycholinguistics: Understanding

Language Science. Wiley – Blackwell.