Language & Communication Year2, Sem 1 Mandatory Readings (Notes)

Week 1:

1. Beattie & Ellis (chapter 1)

2. Hockett (1960)

Chapter 1: The Nature of Communication (Beattie & Ellis)

 Communication occurs when one organism (the transmitter) encodes information into a
signal which passes to another organism (the receiver) which decodes the signal and is
capable of responding appropriately.
 Chimpanzees in the wild display a wide repertoire of communicative signals, including a
range of calls and facial expressions. Signal communicates something of the internal state of
the sender.
 Communication benefits the apes by regulating their social interaction and by relaying
information about events in the external world to other members of the group.
 The transmission of a signal from one organism to another. The signal carries information
from a transmitter organism to a receiver organism. Having decoded the signal, the receiver
is now in the position to make an appropriate response.

1) A transmitter who encodes information into a signal;

2) The physical transmission of a signal;

3) A receiver who decodes the signal to recover the information encoded by the transmitter.

 Faulty encoding- inadvertent slip of the tongue, or cannot remember the name of someone
you want to mention in the discussion.
 Faulty transmission- bad telephone line or by a low flying aeroplane drowning the sound of
your voice.
 Faulty decoding- a misreading or mishearing.
 Failure when - mismatch between the encoding processes of the transmitter and the
decoding processes of the receiver (e.g: accents)

 A signal is an encoded message, and transmitting and receiving are acts of translation

 A communicative signal, conveys information from transmitter to receiver. The information

content of a signal we may call the message. The message is in the signal, but only in the
sense that it is recoverable from the signal by a suitably equipped receiver. A communicative
signal carries its message in code. The requirement that a signal should cross space or time
means that we and other organisms must entrust our emotions, feelings and thoughts to a
physical code like a sound wave if we are ever to make others aware of them.

The same message may be communicated in more than one way

The receiver be ‘capable of responding appropriately’. Very often communication occurs without
the receiver giving any overt indication that anything has happened.

Neither transmitter nor receiver need be consciously aware of the passage of a communicative
signal
Language & Communication Year2, Sem 1 Mandatory Readings (Notes)

Hockett (1960) – The Origin of Speech

Hockett, (1960) The Origin of Speech, Scientific American 203, 88–111 Reprinted in: Wang,
William S-Y. (1982) Human Communication: Language and Its Psychobiological Bases,
Scientific American pp. 4–12 Charles F

 13 design-features
 Vocal-Auditory Channel- emit and receive sounds. Frees up the body to do other things at
the same time.
 Broadcast Transmission and Directional Reception”- comprehend and identify where the linguistic
signals are coming from.
 Rapid Fading- sound does not linger in time, it fades rapidly.
 Interchangeability- capture ad reproduce any signal we receive.
 Total Feedback- understand and be conscious of what you are saying.
 Specialization- physical ability the vocal tract has for spreading sound waves and communicating
speech.
 Semanticity- correspondence between a word and its meaning.
 Arbitrariness- a social convention, that objectively conditions a meaning to a word simultaneously
related to an object or concept. Communicate about anything we want.
 Discreteness- capacity to separate and distinguish signs.
 Displacement- refers to how we are able to talk about situations or things that stand far away in place
or in time.
 Productivity- competence we possess that allows us to create new words while being understood by
others.
 Traditional Transmission- humans are not born with language but meant to acquire it.
 Duality of Patterning- combination of small units to create new words.

 Blending- whenever a speaker combines utterances or sections of utterances to create a

new term that stands in between both original meanings. This situation implies that humans
may be evolving and shifting from a closed to an open system of language.

Week 2:

1. Griffin and Ferreira (2006) - up to 1.2 (pages 21-25)

Properties of Spoken Language Production
Zenzi M. Griffin and Victor S. Ferreira

 Utterance- consists of one or more words, spoken together under a single intonational
contour or expressing a single idea. The simplest meaningful utterance consists of a single
word.
 Generating- a word begins with specifying its semantic and pragmatic properties—that is, a
speaker decides upon an intention or some content to express (e.g., a desired outcome or an
observation) and encodes the situational constraints on how the content may be expressed.
This process, termed conceptualization or message planning, is traditionally considered
prelinguistic and language neutral
 Language & Communication Year2, Sem 1 Mandatory Readings (Notes)

 The next major stage is formulation, which in turn is divided into a word selection stage and
a sound processing stage. Sound processing, in contrast, involves constructing the
phonological form of a selected word by retrieving its individual sounds and organizing them
into stressed and unstressed syllables and then specifying the motor programs to realize
those syllables. Deciding which word to use involves selecting a word in one’s vocabulary
based on its correspondence to semantic and pragmatic specifications.
 The final process is articulation—that is, the execution of motor programs to pronounce the
sounds of a word.

Representations
Steps
Messages: propositions composed of semantic
& pragmatic features or lexical concepts
conceptualization
Formulation Lemmas/lexical entries: abstract word
representations
Word selection
Forms/lexemes/morphemes: phonological &
Sound processing metrical information as segments & frames

articulation Articulatory gestures/syllable programs

Word Production

 (Property 1), describe how speakers deal with the relationship between meaning and word.
(Properties 2–9), explain how speakers represent and assemble the sounds of words
(Properties 10–13), and how these processes play out in time (Properties 14 and 15).

Error Types

Semantically related word substitution- replacement of word when info is forgotten or

unknown.
 Blend- more than one word is being considered; two words fuse together.
 Phonologically related word substitution- one sound replaces another sound.
 Morpheme substitution
 Sound substitution
Language & Communication Year2, Sem 1 Mandatory Readings (Notes)

Week 3:

Juhasz & Rayner (2003)- Investigating the Effects of a Set of Intercorrelated Variables on Eye
Fixation Durations in Reading
The present experiment investigated the influence of 5 intercorrelated variables on word recognition
using a multiple regression analysis. The 5 variables were word frequency, subjective familiarity, word
length, concreteness, and age of acquisition (AoA). Target words were embedded in sentences and eye
tracking methodology was used to investigate the predictive power of these variables. All 5 variables
were found to influence reading time. However, the time course of these variables differed. Both word
frequency and familiarity showed an early but lasting influence on eye fixation durations. Word length
only significantly predicted fixation durations after refixations on the target words were taken into
account. This is the 1st experiment to demonstrate concreteness and AoA effects on eye fixations.

A word that occurs with high frequency in the language is usually processed faster or more
accurately than a word that occurs with a lower frequency.

Week 4:

1. Beattie & Ellis (chapter 4) (pgs. 50-56)- Chomsky & “modern” linguistic
2. Ferreira et al. (2002)- Good enough representation in language comprehension

1.

Chomsky and modern linguistics

Creativity of language- can only be explained if we credit speakers not with a repertoire of learned
responses but with a repertoire of linguistic rules used to generate or interpret sentences. The body
of rules constitutes the grammar of the language – their job is to assemble or describe grammatical
sentences, and only grammatical sentences. Because the rules generate rather than simply describe
sentences, this type of grammar is known as a generative grammar.

Chomsky’s solution to this dilemma is to propose that every sentence must be given two
grammatical descriptions. The surface structure of a sentence is its description as produced, but
underlying that is a separate deep structure. - The rules which generate deep structures are called
‘base’ or ‘phrase-structure’ rules. The term ‘rewrite rules’ describes the sort of rules they are – rules
which take a symbol and expand, or rewrite it.

To get beyond the deep structure and generate a speakable sentence, transformational rules- these
operate upon the deep structure tree to create the desired surface structure. Different optional
transformations would turn our deep structure into the surface structures of other related
sentences.

Semantic component- interprets the meaning of the sentence interacts with either the deep
structure alone or the deep structure and the surface structure.

Phonological component- includes a word store (the lexicon) and knowledge of the sound system of
your language. It plugs the desired words, represented as strings of phonemes (individual
consonants and vowels), into the surface structure, creating a description of the sentence which
could serve as input to articulatory processes.
Language & Communication Year2, Sem 1 Mandatory Readings (Notes)

2.

People comprehend utterances rapidly and without conscious effort. Traditional theories assume
that sentence processing is algorithmic and that meaning is derived compositionally. The language
processor is believed to generate representations of the linguistic input that are complete, detailed,
and accurate. However, recent findings challenge these assumptions. Investigations of the
misinterpretation of both garden-path and passive sentences have yielded support for the idea that
the meaning people obtain for a sentence is often not a reflection of its true content. Moreover,
incorrect interpretations may persist even after syntactic reanalysis has taken place. Our good-
enough approach to language comprehension holds that language processing is sometimes only
partial and that semantic representations are often incomplete. Future work will elucidate the
conditions under which sentence processing is simply good enough.

Week 6:

Nadig & Sedivy (2002)- The use of perspective-taking in children

Young children's communication has often been characterized as egocentric. Some researchers claim
that the processing of language involves an initial stage that relies on egocentric heuristics, even in
adults. Such an account, combined with general developmental difficulties with late-stage processes,
could provide an explanation for much of children's egocentric communication. However, the
experimental data reported in this article do not support such an account: In an elicited-production
task, 5- to 6-year-old children were found to be sensitive to their partner's perspective. Moreover, in
an on-line comprehension task, they showed sensitivity to common-ground information from the
initial stages of language processing. We propose that mutual knowledge is not distinct from other
knowledge relevant for language processing, and exerts early effects on processing in proportion to
its salience and reliability.