V Language and cognition

TWO scholars Chomsky: the publication of Syntactic Structure

helped ignite the cognitive revolution. Jean Piaget: the commonalities of language and

cognition, language emerged out of the same broad cognitive changes that transform the sensorimotor processing of infants into the formal and logical mind of adults.

What is cognition The mental processing of an individual, with

particular relation to a view that argues that the mind has internal mental states (such as beliefs, desires and intentions) and can be understood in terms of information processing, especially when a lot of abstraction or concretization is involved, or processes such as involving knowledge, expertise or learning for example are at work.

The mental process or faculty of knowing, including aspects such as awareness, perceptions, reasoning, and judgment.

Approaches to the study The formal approach: addresses the structura

l patterns exhibited by the overt aspect if linguistic forms, largely abstracted away form or regarded as autonomous form any associated meaning. This includes the study of morphological, syntactic, lexical structure.

There is a boat in the lake. 湖里有一条船。 polite-impolite, possible-impossible

The psychological approach: looks at language from the perspective of relatively general cognitive systems ranging from perception, memory, attention to reasoning.

Investigates language both for its formal properties and for its conceptual properties.

The conceptual properties include the analysis of semantic memory, the association of concepts, the structure of categories, inference generation, and contextual knowledge.

The conceptual approach: concerned with the pattern in which and the processes by which conceptual content is organized in language. To put it simple, it address how language structures conceptual content.

Cognitive linguistics has investigated the basic conceptual categories: space and time ( 空间隐喻时间：三天内，昨天前 ), scenes and event, entities and processes, motion and location, and force and causation.

Linguistic structure of basic ideational and affective categories attributed to cognitive agents: attention and perspective( 我见过它了 , 它我见过了） , volition and intention, expectation and affect.

Also it deals with the interrelationships of conceptual structures: metaphoric mapping( 春风是妈妈的手） , semantic frame, text and context, the grouping of conceptual categories into large structuring system.

What is psycholinguistics? Psycholinguistics is the study of psychological aspects of

language; it usually studies the psychological states and mental activities associated with the use of language.

It studies language acquisition esp. in children and linguistic performance such as producing and comprehending utterances or sentences among adults.

It focuses on the application of grammatical rules that enable people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences.

Relationship between language and thought: the boundary of our language is the boundary of our thought. (Wittgenstein)

Concerned with how language are learned and the role they play in our thinking.

Acquisition: how does child acquire language skills (1st lg, acquisition) and how are they extended to other languages?

Comprehension: how is the acoustic or visual signal linguistically interpreted by the hearer or reader?

Production: how is the information that sb. wants to convey transformed into acoustic waves or written characters?

Disorder: what causes the occurrence of transient or more permanent disturbances of the speech and lg. processing systems?

Lg. and thought: what role does human lg. play in thinking? What difference do different lgs. make to how we think?

Neurolinguistics: how is the cognitive architecture of lg. And lg. Processing implemented in the human brain?

Six subjects

Language acquisition—holophrastic stage Lg. acquisition begins very early in the human

lifespan, with the acquisition of a l;g.’s sound pattern.

Shortly before 1 year old (understand words)---around one year (start to produce them)

Words produced are in isolation, therefore, one-word stage.

The first words of children all all similar despite their different races or nationalities.

Object, actions or motions, routines, routine in social interaction

Two-word stage Around 18 months, vocabulary growth increase, at a

rate of one word every two waking hours. And children keep this rate or faster through adolescence.

Children’s two-word combinations are highly similar across cultures.

These combinations already demonstrate that children have already acquired the lg. Because in 95% of those combinations, the words are properly ordered.

Three-word stage Both two-word and three-word stages look like the

samples from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea.

Fluent grammatical conversation stage Between the late two-word and mid-three-word

stage, children’s lg. blooms into fluent grammatical conversation rapidly, sentence length increases steadily.

The number of syntactic types increase exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the 3rd birthday.

Children’s sentences are getting both longer and more complex, and they can embed one constituent inside another.

Fluent grammatical conversation stage The earlier sentences lack function words, such as “of,

the, does”, and inflections “-ed, -s” But by three, children can use these function words mo

re often than they omit them in more than 90% of the sentences that require them.

Sentence types flower: question, relative clause, comparative, negation, complements, conjunction, and passive.

Children do not favor any particular kind of language. It is safe to say that except for constructions that are rare, predominantly used in written lg., or mentally taxing to an adult, all parts of lgs. are acquired before children turns four.

Language comprehension Humans can understand sentences that carry

novel messages in a way that is exquisitely sensitive to the structure of the lg.

--He showed her baby the picture.

--He shoed her the baby picture. From a psycholinguistic point of view, we store

a great deal of information about the properties of words in our mental lexicon, and retrieve this information when we understand lg.

--Internationalization---industrialization

It means that frequency of exposure determines our ability to recall stored instances.

Connectionism (Rumelhart & McClelland 1986) claims that readers use the same system of links between spelling units and sound units to generate the pronunciations of written words like tove and to access the pronunciations of familiar words like stove, or words that are exceptions to these patterns, like love.

In this view, similarity and frequency both play important roles in processing and comprehending lg., with the novel items being processed based on their similarity to the known ones.

Word recognition How listeners hear a sequence of discrete units even tho

ugh the acoustic signal itself is continuous is the core question. (how can we tell the boundaries between words?)

Cohort model(Marslen-Wilson & Welsh 1990): the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with the input. As more acoustic input is analyzed, candidates that are no longer consistent with the input drop out of the set. This process continues until only one word candidate matches the input. The best fitting word would be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.

[in]—[inte]—[intere]—[interes]—[interest]—interestig]

Interactive model: the higher processing levels have a direct, “top-down” influence on lower levels.

Lexical knowledge can affect the perception of phonemes. [sixthplace]—* sixthp lace

--- sixth place In some cases, listeners’ knowledge of words c

an lead to the inhibition of certain phonemes; in other cases, listeners continue to “hear” phonemes that have been removed from the speech signal and replaced by noise.

--I have never seen such…

Listeners’ knowledge of language and its pattern facilitates perception in some way, and these type of knowledge help us solve the segmentation problem in a language that we know.

Printed word recognition How linguistic structure is derived from print. A lexical route is used to look up the phonological forms

of known words in the mental lexicon, this procedure yields correct pronunciations for exception words such as love.

A non-lexical route accounts for the productivity of reading: it generates pronunciations for novel letter strings (tove) as well as for regular words (stove).

With printed words, the connectionism holds that all phonemes of a word are activated in parallel, while the dual-route model claims that the assembly process operates in a serial fashion such that the phonological forms of the leftmost elements are delivered before those for the succeeding elements.

comprehension Understanding lg. requires far more than adding

the meanings of the individual words together. Parallel model: the comprehension system is

sensitive to a vast range of information, including grammatical, lexical, and contextual, as well as knowledge of the speaker / writer and of the world as well. The processor uses all the relevant information to quickly evaluate the full range of possible interpretations of a sentence.

Serial Model It proposes that the sentence

comprehension system continually and sequentially follows the constraints of a language’s grammar with remarkable speed.

The second wife will claim the inheritance belongs to her.

Factors in comprehension Structural factors: minimal attachment: structural simp

licity guides all initial analysis in sentence comprehension. The sentence processor constructs a single analysis of a sentence and attempt to interpret it.

--The second wife will claim the inheritance belongs to her.

Lexical factors:

--I saw a man with binoscope.

--The policeman glanced at the customer with suspicion / ripped jeans.

Comprehension of the text Text is composed of sentences which are by no means in

dependent and separate. Therefore, to understand a text requires information of cohesion and coherence between sentences.

Text or discourse makes contact with knowledge in readers’ long-term memory and material earlier in a discourse.

Resonance model: information in long-term memory is automatically activated by the presence of material that apparently bears a rough semantic relation to it.

于是她拿出一只鹅管。洋洋洒洒几万言跃然纸上。 她拿出一只鹅管。不一会儿一支鸡毛毽就做成了。 他挥起刷子在地上涂抹起来。

Language production The study of the ways in which a speaker formulates

some intention, or expresses some idea in speech, in a conversational setting or otherwise.

Comprehension: mapping the spoken or written input onto entries in the mental lexicon and generate various levels of syntactic, semantic, and conceptual structure. Sounds structure, ideas

Production: mapping a conceptual structure to words and their elements. Ideas sounds, structures.

Access to words Words are planned in several processing steps and each

step generates a specific type of representation, and information is transmitted between representations via the spreading of activation.

Step 1: conceptualization, which decides what notion to express.

Step 2: selects a word that corresponds to the chosen concept. The speaker first decides on the syntactic class of the word. (bark, John)

--Selecting a syntactic word unit is a competitive process: 小明， 球 （踢，打， 玩， 传， 进）

Step 3: morpho-phonological encoding: the retrieval of the morphemes corresponding to the selected word.

Generation of sentences Sentences are generated to describe scenes and events. Step 1: decides on what to express.--Speakers prepare utterances incrementally. That is, they

initiate linguistic planning as soon as they have selected the first few lexical concepts and prepares the rest later.

Step 2: retrieves words and syntactic structure.--Two process involved in the generation of syntactic

structure.--Functional planning process: assigns grammatical

functions, such as subject, object, or direct objects.--Positional encoding: uses the retrieved lexicon-grammar

units and the functions they have been assigned to generate syntactic structures that capture the dependency among constituents and their order.

What is cognitive linguistics? Cognitive linguistics refers to the new established

approach to the study of language that emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm which pursues an autonomous view of language (Ruiz de Mendoza 1997).

It is based on human experiences of the world and the way they perceive and conceptualize the world. (Ungerer & Schmid 1996/2001)

Construal and construal operation Construal is the ability to conceive and portray the same

situation in alternate ways through specificity, different mental scanning, directionality, vantage point, figure-ground segregation. (Langacker 2000: 25)

Construal operation are conceptualizing process used in language process by human beings.

Attention and salience: it has to do with our directions f attention towards something that is salient to us.

We drove along the road. She ran across the road. The building workers dug through the road. 他在商场里走来走去。他在讲台上走来走去。 他打开电视。 He turned on /opened the TV.

Judgment/ comparison Judging something by comparing it to something

else. Figure-ground alignment: moving object (figure)

—background (ground) Static phenomenon : There is a boat (figure) in t

he lake (ground). Dynamic phenomenon: 飞机 (trajector) 飞过

天空 (landmark). 那幅画旁边有一只苍蝇。那只苍蝇旁边有一

幅画。 湖里有一个小岛。小岛周围有一个湖。

Perspective /situatedness How we view a scene in terms of our situatedness. It depends on (1) where we are situated in relation to th

e scene we’re viewing. (2) it depends on how the scene is arranged in relation to our situatedness.

I am in front of you.I am behind you. 你们在我面前。你们在我背后。 Tom killed John. John was killed by Tom. John was killed by his brother. John’s brother killed him. Tom killed his brother. Dexis: This is a book. That is a pen. social dexis: Papa, mama, Your Majesty

categorization It refers to the process of classifying our exper

iences into different categories based on commonalities and differences.

1. Basic level: the most culturally salient and are required to fulfill our cognitive needs the best. (human being—animals)

2. Superordinate level: the most representative and general members. (vehicle—car, bus)

3. Subordinate level: with lots of individual specific features (rain coat)

Image schema （意象图示） It refers to the recurring, dynamic pattern of our

perceptual interactions and motor program that gives coherence and structure to our experience.

Center-periphery: 濒临死亡，处在灭绝的边缘 Containment: 进入了社交生活，心如一潭死

水 Cycle: 生命的轮回，四季流转，冬去春来 Force: 他那无情的眼神刺痛了我的心。 我被青春撞了一下要。

Image schema （意象图示） Link: 他们决不可能割断血缘关系。插上电源 Part-whole: 来帮把手 Path: 人在旅途，我们走向光明的未来。 Scale: 人们的收入提高了。你的热情可不高

了。 Verticality: 爬楼梯，爬山， climb the social la

dder

metaphor It involves the comparison of two concepts in t

hat one is construed in terms of the other. 春风 (target domain) 是妈妈的手 (source do

main) 。 Lakoff and Johnson (1980): ontological metaph

or, structural metaphor, and orientational metaphor.

ontological metaphor

Human experiences with physical objects provide the basis for ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances.

This idea cheers us up. This suggestion helped increase our income. 她反复掂量这这句话。 This question is really hard.

Structural metaphor How one concept is metaphorically structured

in terms of another. ARGUMENT IS WAR You claims are indefensible. 他在这场辩论中战胜了对手。 他在这次辩论中凯旋而归。 邓小平是我们的总设计师。 他为我们描绘了建设社会主义大厦的宏伟

蓝图。

Orientional metaphor HAPY IS UP; SAD IS DWON. I’m feeling up. Very high. He is in a low spirit. 士气高涨、士气低落 群情激昂，心情郁闷

Metonymy In the cognitive literature, it is defined as a

cognitive process in which the vehicle provides mental access to the target within the same domain. 北京－中国

Metaphor: 春风是妈妈的手

Blending Theory A cognitive operation whereby elements of

two or more “mental space” are integrated via projection into a new, blended space which has its unique structure.