语言6

1.

psycholinguistics: Psycholinguistics is the study of psychological aspects of language; it usually studies the psychological states and mental activity associated with the use of language. As an interdisciplinary academic field based on psychology and linguistics, psycholinguistics investigates the six following subjects: language acquisition, language comprehension, language production, language disorders, language and thought, and cognitive architecture of language, The most important research subjects are acquisition, comprehension and production.

language acquisition: Language acquisition is one of the central topics in psycholinguistics. Acquiring a first language is something every child does successfully, in a matter of a few years and without the need for formal lessons. Four phases are identified and acknowledged in the process of language acquisition: holophrastic stage, two-word stage, three-word utterances, and, Fluent grammatical conversation stage.

holophrastic stage: Holophrastic stage is the first phase of language acquisition. The main linguistic accomplishments during this stage are control of the speech musculature and sensitivity to the phonetic distinctions used in the parents' language. Shortly before their first birthday, babies begin to understand words, and around that birthday, they start to produce them. At this stage, words are usually produced in isolation; this one-word stage can last from two months to a year. About half the words are for objects: food, body parts, clothing, vehicles, toys, household items, animals. There are words for actions, motions, and routines. two-word stage: Two-word stage is the second phase of language acquisition. Around 18 months, the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours, and keeps

learning that rate or faster through adolescence. The primitive syntax begins with two-word strings. Children announce when objects appear, disappear, and move about, point out their properties and owners, comment on people doing things and seeing things, reject and request objects and activities, and ask about who, what, and where. These sequences already reflect the language being acquired: in 95% of them, the words are properly ordered. three-word utterances: Three-word utterances stage is the third phase of language acquisition. Three-word utterances look like samples drawn from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea. For example, although the children never produced a sentence as complicated as Mother gave John lunch in the kitchen, they did produce strings containing all of its components in the correct order.

connectionism: With respect to language comprehension, connectionism in psycholinguistics claims that readers use the same system of links between spelling units and sound units to generate the pronunciations of written words and to access the pronunciations of familiar words, or words that are exceptions to these patterns. In this view, similarity and frequency play important roles in processing and comprehending language, with the novel items being processed based on their similarity to the known ones.

cohort model: The cohort model is a supposed doctrine dealing with the spoken word recognition postulated by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh in 1990, it is suggested that the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with the input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. 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 may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.

interactive model: The interactive model holds that in recognizing the spoken words higher processing levels have a direct, “top-down” influence on lower levels. Lexical knowledge can affect the perception of phonemes. There is interactivity in the form of lexical effects on the perception of sublexical units. In certain cases, listeners’ knowledge of words can 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.

race model: The race model suggests in spoken word recognition there are two routes that race each other -- a pre-lexical route, which computes phonological information from the acoustic signal, and a lexical route, in which the phonological information associated with a word becomes available when the word itself is accessed. When word-level information appears to affect a lower-level process, it is assumed that the lexical route won the race. serial model: Serial model proposes that the sentence comprehension system continually and sequentially follows the constraints of a language’s grammar with remarkable speed. Serial model describes how the processor quickly constructs one or more representations of a sentence based on a restricted range of information that is guaranteed to be relevant to its interpretation, primarily grammatical information. Any such representation is then quickly interpreted and evaluated, using the full range of information that might be relevant.

parallel model: Parallel model emphasizes that 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 in general. Parallel model describes how the processor uses all relevant information to quickly evaluate the full range of possible interpretations of a sentence. It is generally acknowledged that listeners and readers integrate grammatical and situational knowledge in understanding a sentence.

resonance model: The resonance model is a model about text comprehension, in this model, information in long-term memory is automatically activated by the presence of material that apparently bears a rough semantic relation to it. Semantic details, including factors such as negation that drastically change the truth of propositions, do not seem to affect the resonance process. It emphasized a more active and intelligent search for meaning as the basis by which a reader discovers the conceptual structure of a discourse. In reading a narrative text, reader attempts to build a representation of the causal structure of the text, analyzing events in terms of goals, actions, and reactions. A resonance process serves as a first stage in processing a text, and, reading objectives and details of text structure determine whether a reader goes further and searches for a coherent structure for the text. construal: 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 etc.

construal operations: Construal operations are conceptualizing processes used in language process by human beings. That is, construal operations are the underlying psychological processes and resources employed in the interpretation of linguistic expressions.

figure-ground alignment: Figure-ground alignment seems to apply to space with the ground as the prepositional object and the preposition expressing the spatial relational configuration. It also applies to human perception of moving objects. Since the moving object is typically the most prominent one, because it is moving, it is typically the figure, while the remaining stimuli constitute the ground.

trajector: Trajector means a moving or dynamic figure.

landmark: Landmark means the ground provided for a moving figure.

basic level category: Basic level category is the most economical level at which you can find the most relevant information. The information on our interactions with objects in the real world are stored at this level. It is at this level that we conjure up the general gestalt of the category.

subordinate level: Subordinate level is the level at which we perceive the differences between the members of the basic level categories.

image schema: Image schema is a recurring, dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience.

metaphor: Metaphor involves the comparison of two concepts in that one is construed in terms of the other. It’s often described in terms of a target domain and a source domain. The target domain is the experience being described by the metaphor and the source domain is the means that we use in order to describe the experience.

metonymy: Metonymy is a figure of speech that has to do with the substitution of the name of one thing for that of another.

ontological metaphors: Ontological metaphors mean that human experiences with physical objects provide the basis for ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances.

structural metaphors: Structural metaphors play the most important role because they allow us to go beyond orientation and referring and give us the possibility to structure one concept according to another.

generic space: Generic space maps onto each of the inputs. It reflects some common, usually more abstract, structure and organization shared by the inputs. It defines the core cross-space mapping between them.

blend space: Blend space is the fourth space onto which is partially projected by inputs I1 and

I2.

2.

Psycholinguistics is the study of psychological aspects of language; it usually studies the psychological states and mental activity associated with the use of language. Most problems in psycholinguistics are more concrete, involving the study of language acquisition especially in children and linguistic performance such as producing and comprehending utterances or sentences among adults. An important focus of psycholinguistics is the largely unconscious application of grammatical rules that enable people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences. Psycholinguists investigate the relationship between language and thought, a perennial subject of debate being whether language is a function of thinking or thought a function of the use of language. Psycholinguistics is also concerned with how languages are learned, and the role they play in our thinking.

As an interdisciplinary study of language and psychology, psycholinguistics has its roots in structural linguistics on the one hand, and in cognitive psychology on the other hand. It is also closely related to a set of other disciplines, such as anthropology, or the neurosciences. The work of Chomsky and other proponents of transformational grammar have had a marked influence on the field. In the 1960s and early 1970s numerous psychologists and linguists used the transformational-generative model proposed by Chomsky to discover how children come to know the grammatical processes that underlie the speech they hear and to investigate the processing and comprehension of language; spoken or written. And now,

psycholinguistics has been turning increasingly to other functionally related and socially oriented models of language structure. Experts use experiments to investigate such topics as short-term and long-term memory, perceptual strategies, speech perception based on linguistic models, the brain activity involved in language use, and language impaired due to brain damage, cognition and language.

It is customary to distinguish six subjects of research within psycholinguistics:

1) Acquisition: how does a child acquire the language skills (first language acquisition) and how are they extended to other languages (second/foreign language acquisition)?

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

3) Production: how is the information that somebody wants to convey transformed into acoustic waves, or written characters?

4) Disorders: what causes the occurrence of transient or more permanent disturbances of the speech and language processing systems?

5) Language and thought: what role does human language play in thinking? And what differences do different languages make to how we think?

6) Neurocognition: how is the cognitive architecture of language and language processing implemented in the human brain, i.e., what is the cerebral-functional architecture of our language faculty? Here, we will focus on the former three subjects, say, acquisition comprehension and production. 3.

Language acquisition is one of the central topics in psycholinguistics. Possessing a language is the quintessentially human trait: all normal humans speak, no nonhuman animal does. Learning a first language is something every child does successfully, in a matter of a

few years and without the need for formal lessons. With language so close to the core of what it means to be human, it is not surprising that children's acquisition of language has received so much attention. Anyone with strong views about the human mind would like to show that children's first few steps are steps in the right direction.

Language acquisition begins very early in the human lifespan, and begins, with the acquisition of a language's sound patterns. The main linguistic accomplishments during the first year of life are control of the speech musculature and sensitivity to the phonetic distinctions used in the parents' language.

Around 18 months, language changes in two ways. Vocabulary growth increases; the child begins to learn words at a rate of one every two waking hours, and will keep learning that rate or faster through adolescence.

Children's two- and three-word utterances look like samples drawn from longer potential sentences expressing a complete and more complicated idea.

Between the late two-word and mid-three-word stage, children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation rapidly, sentence length increases steadily. Because grammar is a combinatorial system, the number of syntactic types increases exponentially, doubling every month, reaching the thousands before the third birthday. Normal children can differ by a year or more in their rate of language development, though the stages they pass through are generally the same regardless of how stretched out or compressed and many children speak in complex sentences before they turn two.

4.

Word lays in the central position in language comprehension because of its extremely important role in transmitting the meaning. Word recognition can be viewed in terms of recognition of spoken words and printed ones.

The perception of spoken words is an important task for language user. It seems that human is well adapted for the perception of speech because we usually seem to perceive speech automatically and with little effort. Speech is distributed in time, a fleeting signal that has few reliable cues to the boundaries between sound segments and words. How listeners hear a sequence of discrete units even though the acoustic signal itself is continuous is the core question in this subfield of psycholinguistics. Features of speech could cause difficulty for listeners, for example, some phonemes may be omitted in conversational speech, some may change their pronunciations depending on the surrounding sounds (e.g., /n/ may be pronounced as [m] in lean bacon), and many words have “everyday” pronunciations (e.g.,

going to frequently becomes gonna). Listeners attempt to map the acoustic signal onto a representation in the mental lexicon almost as the signal starts to arrive. According to cohort model proposed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh in 1990, the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with the input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. 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 may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner. For example, to an instruction “pick up the candle” listeners sometimes glance first at a picture of a candy. This suggests that a set of words beginning with /kæn/ is briefly activated. Listeners may glance at a picture of a handle, too, suggesting that the cohort of word candidates also includes words that rhyme with the target. The interactive model holds that higher processing levels have a direct, “top-down” influence on lower levels. Lexical knowledge can affect the perception of phonemes. There is interactivity in the form of lexical effects on the perception of sublexical units. In certain cases, listeners’ knowledge of words can 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. The race model does not agree “top-down” effects, it has two routes that race each other--a pre-lexical route, which computes phonological information from the acoustic signal, and a lexical route, in which the phonological information associated with a word becomes available when the word itself is accessed. When word-level information appears to affect a lower-level process, it is assumed that the lexical route won the race. Listeners’ knowledge of language and its patterns facilitates perception in some ways. For example, listeners use phonotactic information such as the fact that initial /tl/ is illegal in English to help identify phonemes and word boundaries. Listeners also use their knowledge that English words are often stressed on the first syllable to help parse the speech signal into words. These types of knowledge help us solve the segmentation problem in a language that we know.

Print serves as a map of linguistic structure, readers use the clues to morphological structure that are embedded in orthography in reading the printed words. For example, they know that the prefix re- can stand before free morphemes such as print and do, yielding the two-morpheme words reprint and redo. Encountering vive, reads may wrongly judge it to be a word because of its familiarity with revive. Phonology and other aspects of linguistic structure are retrieved in reading. In printed word recognition, there is a question about how linguistic structure is derived from print. One idea is that two different processes are available for converting orthographic representations to phonological representations. 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 nonlexical route accounts for the productivity of reading: It generates pronunciations for novel letter strings (e.g., tove) as well as for regular words (e.g., stove) on the basis of smaller units. This latter route gives incorrect pronunciations for exception words, so that these words may be pronounced slowly or erroneously (e.g., love said as /lʌv/) in speeded word naming tasks.

connectionist theories claim that a single set of connections from orthography to phonology can account for performance on both regular words and exception words.

Another question about orthography-to-phonology translation concerns its grain size. English, which has been the subject of much of the research on word recognition, has a rather irregular writing system. For example, ea corresponds to /i/ in bead but /ɛ/ in dead; c is /k/ in cat but /s/ in city. Such irregularities are particularly common for vowels. Quantitative analyses have shown, however, that consideration of the consonant that follows a vowel can often help to specify the vowel’s pronunciation. The /ɛ/ pronunciation of ea, for example, is more likely before d than before m. Such considerations have led to the proposal that readers of English often use letter groups that correspond to the syllable rime (the vowel nucleus plus an optional consonantal coda) in spelling-to-sound translation.

Because spoken words are spread out in time, spoken word recognition is generally considered a sequential process. With many printed words, though, the eye takes in all of the letters during a single fixation. The connectionist models of reading maintain that all phonemes of a word are activated in parallel. Dual-route models, in contrast, claim 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. Although many questions remain to be answered, it is clear that the visual representations provided by print rapidly make contact with the representations stored in the mental lexicon. Once this contact has been made, it matters little whether the initial input was by eye or by ear. The principles and processing procedures are much the same.

5.

Structural factors in comprehension. Comprehension of written and spoken language can be difficult because it is not always easy to identify the constituents (phrases) of a sentence and the ways in which they relate to one another. Psycholinguists have proposed principles

interpreting sentence comprehension with respect to the grammatical constraints. The most popular principle is Minimal attachment which defines “structurally simpler”, and it claims that structural simplicity guides all initial analyses in sentence comprehension. In this view, the sentence processor constructs a single analysis of a sentence and attempts to interpret it. The first analysis is the one that requires the fewest applications of grammatical rules to attach each incoming word into the structure being built; it is the automatic consequence of an effort to get some analysis constructed as soon as possible. Consider the sentence The second wife will claim the inheritance belongs to her. When the inheritance first appears, it could be interpreted as either the direct object of claim or the subject of belongs. It was found that readers’ eyes fixated for longer than usual on the verb belongs, which disambiguates the sentence. They interpreted this result to mean that readers first interpreted the inheritance as a direct object. Readers were disrupted when they had to revise this initial interpretation to the one in which the inheritance is subject of belongs. They described the readers as being led down a garden path because the direct object analysis is structurally simpler than the other possible analysis.

Lexical factors in comprehension. Psycholinguists have proposed that the human sentence processor is primarily guided by information about specific words that is stored in the lexicon. In the sentences like The salesman glanced at a/the customer with suspicion/ripped jeans, the prepositional phrases with suspicion or with ripped jeans could modify either the verb

glance or the noun customer. This is true only for action verbs, not for perception verbs like glance at. It has been noted that an actual preference for noun phrase modification only appeared when the noun had the indefinite article a.

6.

Psycholinguists are also interested in the way in which a speaker formulates some intention, or expresses some idea in speech, in a conversational setting or otherwise. Various

aspects of process of language production, such as conceptualization and linearization, grammatical and phonological encoding, self-monitoring, self-repair and gesturing during speech have been topics of interest.

The first focus is on the generation of simple utterances. Among the simplest utterances we produce are single words. The ability to produce words is, of course, a core ingredient of the ability to produce larger utterances. Therefore, single word access has been and still is a central research topic. Multiple word utterances require the speaker to run the word access procedure repeatedly. The issue is whether these access procedures overlap in time and whether they mutually interact. In language comprehension, as we have discussed, comprehenders must map the spoken or written input onto entries in the mental lexicon and must generate various levels of syntactic, semantic, and conceptual structure. In language production, people are faced with the converse problem. They must map from a conceptual structure to words and their elements 7.

Cognitive linguistics is a newly 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. Cognitive linguistics is based on human experiences of the world and the way they perceive and conceptualize the world.

8.

Lakoff and Johonson (1980) classify conceptual metaphors into three categories: ontological metaphors, structural metaphors and orientational metaphors.

Ontological metaphors mean that human experiences with physical objects provide the basis for ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc., as entities and substances. Ontological metaphors can serve various purposes. By ontological metaphors we give bounded surfaces to less clearly discrete entities (mountains, hedges, street corners) and

categorize events, actions and states as substances. In ontological metaphors it is our experiences of interacting with physical bounded bodies, which provide the basis for categorizing events, activities, ideas etc., as entities and substances.

Structural metaphors play the most important role because they allow us to go beyond orientation and referring and give us the possibility to structure one concept according to another. This means that structural metaphors are grounded in our experience. Structural metaphors imply how one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another.

Orientational metaphors give a concept a spatial orientation. They are characterized not so much by structuring one concept in terms of another, but by a co-occurrence in our experience. The orientational metaphors are grounded in an experiential basis, which link together the two parts of the metaphor. The link verb “is”, part of the metaphor, should be seen as the link of two different co-occurring experiences. For example, MORE IS UP. This metaphor is grounded in the co-occurrence of two different kinds of experiences: adding more of a substance and perceiving the level of the substance rise. Orientational metaphors are based on human physical and cultural experience. For example, in some cultures the future is in front of us, whereas in others it is in back of us. Now let us study some orientational metaphors and give a brief hint about how each metaphorical concept might have arisen from human physical and cultural experience. 9.

Blending operates on two input mental spaces to produce a third space, the blend. The blend inherits partial structure from the input spaces and has emergent structure of its own. There are some conditions needed when two input spaces I1 and I2 are blended: 1) Cross-Space Mapping: there is a partial mapping of counterparts between the input spaces I1 and I2. 2) Generic Space: It maps onto each of the inputs. It reflects some common, usually more abstract, structure and organization shared by the inputs. It defines the core

cross-space mapping between them. 3) Blend: the inputs I1 and I2 are partially projected onto a fourth space, the blend. 4) Emergent Structure: the blend has emergent structure not provided by the inputs. This happens in three interrelated ways: (a) Composition: Take together, the projections from the inputs make new relations available that did not exist in the separate inputs. (b) Completion: Knowledge of background frames, cognitive and cultural models, allows the composite structure projected into the blend from the inputs to be viewed as part of a larger self-contained structure in the blend. The pattern in the blend triggered by the inherited structures is “completed” into the larger, emergent structure. (c) Elaboration: The structure in the blend can then be elaborated. This is “running the blend.” It consists in cognitive work performed within the blend, according to its own emergent logic.

The blending theory suggests a new way of thinking about what constitutes a novel inference. Because the mapping operation involves integrated frames rather than isolated predicates, the choice of one particular framing over another necessarily results in a different set of attendant inferences. Besides the acquisition of unknown facts, a novel inference might involve a new construal of a well-understood phenomenon, a change in prominence of a particular element, or simply the availability of connected frames.