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Blocks of Language For Curation

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14 views25 pages

Blocks of Language For Curation

Uploaded by

flexmartins
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Images

Nonverbal mental representations of


sensory experiences

Building Language
Blocks of A flexible system of symbols that
enables us to communicate our
Thought ideas, thoughts, and feelings

Nonhumans communicate primarily


through signs
Cognition is largely
language-based.

When alone, we may


talk to ourselves.
However, we also think
in images.

Thinking in Images
Images and Brain
Watching a physical activity activates the same brain
regions as when actually performing the activity.
The smallest distinct sound unit.

Phonemes Ex: bat, has three phonemes b · a · t


chat, has three phonemes ch · a · t

How many meanings can you make by varying the


vowel phoneme between B and T?
Bait, bat, beat/beet, bet bit, bite, boat, boot,
bought, bout, and but.
Consonant phonemes carry more meaning.

Phonemes Ex. The treth ef thes stetement shed be


evedent frem thes bref demenstretien.
Morphemes
The smallest unit that carries a
meaning.

It may be a word or part of a word.

Milk = milk
Pumpkin = pump . kin
Unforgettable = un · for · get · table
Grammar
System of rules that enable us to
communicate with and understand others.

Grammar

Semantics Syntax
Semantics

The meaning of morphemes, words,


and sentences.

Ex:

adding –ed to the word laugh


means that it happened in the past.
Syntax

Rules for making sentences.

In English, adjectives come


before nouns; white house.

In Spanish, it is reversed; casa


blanca.
Surface structure:
How we order the sentence

Structure of English “She ate an apple”


Japanese “She an apple ate”
Language
Deep structure:
Underlying meaning of a sentence
Language
Development
Children learn language before
learning to add 2+2.

After 1, we learn about 3,500


words a year, amassing 60,000

Time Life Pictures/ Getty Images


words by the time we graduate
from high school.
Imitation?
“Don’t they just listen to what is said around them and then repeat it?”

But, sentences produced by children are very different from adult


sentences
Cat stand up table
A my pencil
What the boy hit?
Other one pants
And children who can’t speak for physiological reasons learn the
language spoken to them and when they overcome their speech
impairment they immediately use the language for speaking.
Operant Learning (Rewards-Punishment)
Association of the sight of things with sounds of words

Reinforcement by the caregiver

But, this assumes that children are being constantly reinforced for
using good grammar and corrected when they use bad grammar.
(Seldom occurs)

Cute mistakes?
Inborn Universal Grammar
Noam Chomsky argues we are hard-wired to learn language.

Language is almost entirely inborn and will naturally occur.

Children acquire untaught words and grammar at a rate too high to be


explained through learning

Universal Grammar
Universal
Grammar
Critical Period
Language Machines - A one year old’s brain is statistically analyzing which syllables
most often go together to discern word breaks

Can we keep it up?

No, childhood seems to represent a critical period for mastering certain aspects of
language. (proven through deaf children getting cochlear implants at 2 and at 4).

Language learning capacity never fully develops when a young brain does not learn
ANY language.
Linguistic Determinism
Benjamin Lee Whorf argues language determines how we think. This is most
evident in polylinguals (speaking 2 or more languages).
i.e. someone who speaks English and Chinese will feel differently
depending on which language they are using. English has many words
describing personal emotions and Chinese has many words describing inter-
personal emotions.

Bilingual Speakers are able to inhibit their attention to irrelevant


information. Known as the bilingual advantage.
Linguistic Determinism
Hopi Tribe? Whorf argued that Hopi has "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions
that refer directly to what we call 'time'", and concluded that the Hopi had "no general notion or
intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at
equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past". Whorf used the Hopi concept of time
as a primary example of his concept of linguistic relativity, which posits that the way in which
individual languages encode information about the world, influences and correlates with the
cultural world view of the speakers.

In 1983 linguist Ekkehart Malotki published a 600-page study of the grammar of time in the Hopi
language, concluding that he had finally refuted Whorf's claims about the language. Malotki's
treatise gave hundreds of examples of Hopi words and grammatical forms referring to temporal
relations. Malotki's central claim was that the Hopi do indeed conceptualize time as structured in
terms of an ego-centered spatial progression from past, through present into the future. He also
demonstrated that the Hopi language grammaticalizes tense using a distinction between future and
non-future tenses, as opposed to the English tense system, which is usually analyzed as being based
on a past/non-past distinction. Psychologist Steven Pinker, a well-known critic of Whorf and the
concept of linguistic relativity, accepted Malotki's claims as having demonstrated Whorf's complete
ineptitude as a linguist.
How about language and color?
Jules Davidoff, a psychologist from Goldsmiths University of London,
who worked with the Himba tribe from Namibia.

In their language, there is no word for blue and no real distinction


between green and blue.
Himba struggle to complete this task –
takes a while to pick out the blue square
Not determinism but influence!
Another study by MIT scientists in 2007 showed that native Russian
speakers, who don't have one single word for blue, but instead have a
word for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), can discriminate
between light and dark shades of blue much faster than English
speakers.
THINKING AND LANGUAGE
Studies of the effects of the generic pronoun “he” show that subtle
prejudices can be conveyed by the words we choose to express our
everyday thoughts

Some evidence indicates that vocabulary enrichment, particularly


immersion in bilingual education, can enhance thinking
Children of signing deaf parents become fluent in sign language and
outperform other students on measures of academic and intelligence
achievement

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