Psychology and Language

THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE
• Two basic human activities which carry out the communication with language are : Speaking and Listening.
• In speaking and listening, there are three parts as the cause of misunderstanding such as: Comprehension is by what mental process do people listen to, comprehend, and produce what they say
Production is by what mental process do people come to say what they say
Acquisition is what course do children follow in learning to comprehend and produce their firs language, and why.
• We begin to study speaking and listening with language, its structure, and function.
• In studying the language, there are some parts that should be considered :
a. Grammar
It deals with three major aspects of language such as: Phonology, syntax, and semantics. Grammar is very important for the psychology because it will help in speaking and listening.
b. Competence and performance
Linguistic competence : one’s capacity to use language it has relation with the system rules that has been mastered
Linguistic performance : the actual application of this competence in speaking or listening. It means that how someone use his knowledge that has been mastered.
• A language has not only a structure but also a function to which that structure is put.
• Function has close relation to structure, and structure has to be studied in relation to function.
• Structure : The grammar of the language
Function : A description of how sentences communicate what they are meant to communicate.
Process : A description of the mental tools, materials, and procedures people use in producing or comprehending them.
• Speaking and listening must be more complicated skills and what makes these skills even more complicated that they are creative.
• Complexity and creativity in language are how people are able to learn or use such a complicated system.

THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE
• Every sentence, then has two levels of structure:
- Surface structure: Its linear arrangement of clauses, phrases, words, and sound (how to be spoken)
- Underlying representations : its meaning which consists of proposition that are interrelated in particular way (how to be understood)
• Combining proposition:
- Coordination : links two proposition by and, but, or, or some other coordinate conjunction
- Relativization: one proposition is attached to a part of another proposition in order to restrict or qualify that part.
Ex: the troops defeated the army
The army belonged to Napoleon
the troops defeated the army that belonged to Napoleon
- Complementation: the final way of combining propositions, one proposition is used to fill in an empty part of another.
Ex: (something) was nice
- Recursion: what makes coordination, relativization, and complementation so powerful is that they can apply again and again to form very complex sentence.
• Combining Sentence
- Ellipsis: in this case, certain words can be omitted from surface structure when they repeat content given elsewhere in the sentence-usually earlier.
Ex: a. Napoleon conquered Italy, Napoleon conquered Prussia, and Napoleon conquered Australia.
b. Napoleon conquered Italy, Prussia, and Australia
- Pronominalization: by using simple expression (like pronouns) to stand for complicated ones (like full noun phrases)
Ex: a. After the very wily young English general won the battle, the very wily young English general became the talk of the town.
b. After the very wily young English general won the battle, he became the talk of the town.
- Ambiguous sentence: when some surface structures correspond to two or more underlying representation.
Ex: Visiting relatives can be tiring.
This sentence has two interpretations, or two readings.
1. Visiting relatives can be tiring
2. Visiting relatives can be tiring
• Grammatical relation:
- Word and their structure
1. Content and function of words
Content : carry the principal meaning of a sentence
Function : to glue the content of words
2. Morpheme and inflection
Morpheme : the smallest carries of language
Inflection : special important type of morpheme
- Sounds and their structure
1. Sounds consist of succession of sound called phonetic segment
2. Structure of sounds refers to how people are able to hear and produce these sounds so deftly

THE FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE
• Speech act is an act that a speaker performs when making an utterance.
There some kinds of speech act such as:
1. Performative Utterances are not true or false, that is, not truth evaluable
2. Declarative, Interrogatives, and Imperatives are the speech acts of English which normally do not require full performative construction, but only the shortened construction.
3. Direct and Indirect speech acts
The way to command someone not only can be done by using imperative form, but it can also be done indirectly and other special devices.
Example: Direct command : Move these books!
Indirect command : Can you move these books?
I don’t want to see these books are put on the table. These books should be moved.
• In performing speech acts, the speaker also convey propositional content. By the propositional content, the speaker’s ideas can be conveyed to the listener. The basic functions of propositions are to denote facts about states or events, or qualify parts of other propositions.
• Sentence become complex for several reasons:
- First, to enable listener to pick out the participants in a state or event accurately, speakers are often forced to expand on the noun phrases that denote the participants
- Second, in some events, one or more of the participants are themselves events or facts.
- Third, it is possible to slip one whole sentence inside another. For example, declarative sentence.
• Thematic structure is reflection of the speaker’s judgments about the listener’s current mental states. In order to make conversation to be effective. Thematic structure has 3 main functions:
- To convey given information and new information
- Subject and predicate
- Frame and insert
• The first particular phrase in the beginning of sentence can be called a frame and the remainder of the sentence an insert for the frame. It functions is the speakers deliberately of the trying to orient their listeners toward a particular area of knowledge – to give them a point of departure for the sentence.
• As far as we know that communication is an action that refers to speaking and listening. Communications that we mean here is the verbal communications which require the words to act it. In particular, it concerns the language as its instrument. Dealing with the instrument of communication, language is one way that mediates the between speaker and listener in communication. The process in the use of language here refers to how someone product the language and how someone receive the language.
• When we are going to utter something (speech act) it needs mental activity when performing it such as:
How do we plan it? How do we select the words? How do we retrieve the right words from memory and produce them in order that conforms to English syntax? How do we comprehend if someone utters something? Etc.
THE LINGUISTICS IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
• In behaviorist analysis of language, we refer to Staats’ statement that argues language behavior, all its complexity, is reducible to the simple principle of classical and instrumental conditioning which behavioristically oriented psychologists have found so valuable in analyzing many kinds of behaviors by animals at all phylogenetic levels in a variety of laboratory tasks. He argues that language can be explained only within a general learning framework that provides an analysis of the stimuli and responses and establishes causal relations between the two.
• In linguistic analysis of language, we refer to Bloomfield’s theory. He established the paradigm for linguistics by delineating the field, the important problem to be investigated, and the method for approaching those problems.
• The linguistics of Bloomfield made inductive generalizations about particular languages based in data obtained in an objective manner without historical or theoretical biases. Bloomfield would agree heartily with Staats’ description of the acquisition of syntax and, in particular, the acquisition of the meaning of the words.
• One problematic aspects of Bloomfieldian linguistics is about ambiguous sentences.
Example: You can’t imagine how good oysters taste.
There are several possible meanings such as: oysters taste good to someone, good oysters as opposed to bad oysters have a particular taste, and oysters themselves have a good sense of taste.
They were fascinating girl Ambiguous
Adherence to the type of science Bloomfield outlined for the field of linguistics appears to be inadequate to account for aspects language which are intuitively clear to any native speaker of the language, despite the fact that the data have pushed linguists of this persuasion to postulate abstract phrase structure types of analyses that are not directly observable in the data
• In Chomsky’s linguistics, we deal with transformational generative grammar to solve some inadequacies of the Bloomfieldian approach.
1. The sentence unit
Sentence is the largest basic unit of description with which the linguist is concerned.
Any language consists of an infinite number of these sentence units.
There is more to understanding a sentence than appears on the surface.
2. The grammar of language
The competence of a language user consists of the set of rules which allow the user to speak and understand the language by relating the meaning system to the sound system, semantic representation to phonological representation.
Competence is a description of the language code of the idealized speaker/listener of the language or an abstraction which describes a part of the mental equipment of the language user.
Performance refers to the actual behavior which means that how to act the language.
According to Chomsky, the grammar of a language consists of a tripartite system of rules pertaining to semantics or meaning, syntax or structure, and phonology or the sounds of the language.
3. Language Universal
a. Substantive universals refer to the nature of the phonological, syntactic, and semantic units of which language is composed.
b. Formal universals refer to the form of the rule which will appear in the grammar.
4. Transformational Generative Grammar.
Transformational refer to a particular type used in the generation of sentences. Transformational rules are those rules which relate or transform the deep structure of a sentence to the surface of a sentence.
Example: The delicate girl, who smoke a pipe, grows the mushrooms
The analysis of the sentence can be:
Matrix sentence : The girl grows the mushrooms
Embedded sentence : The girl is delicate
Embedded sentence : The girl smoke the pipe
In this case, we need rules that will delete two instances of “the girl” and replace it by “who” and move the word “delicate”.
In summary, the word “transformational” in transformational generative grammar refers to the rules which relate the terminal string of the base phrase marker to the final derived phrase marker which is the basis of the surface structure.
COMPREHENSION
• Comprehension has two common senses:
a. In its narrow sense, it denotes the mental processes by which listeners take in the sounds uttered by a speaker and use them to construct an interpretation of what they think the speaker intended to convey.
b. Comprehension in its broader sense, however, rarely ends here, for listeners normally put the interpretations they have built to work.
• There are two processes of comprehension:
a. Construction process which is concerned with the way listeners construct an interpretation of a sentence from the speakers’ words.
b. Utilization process which is concerned with how listeners utilize this interpretation for further purposes, for registering new information, answering questions, following orders, registering promises, and the like.
• When listeners interpret a sentence, their immediate goal is to build an underlying representation for the sentence. Yet when they hear The old man lit his awful cigar, they aren’t presented with its underlying representation directly.
• In the construction process, listeners must take a linear string of words and form it construct a hierarchical arrangement of proposition.
• The surface structure of a sentence, on the other hand, divides up into phrases and subphrases called constituent
• These preliminary remarks suggest that listeners construct the underlying representation for a sentence in roughly four steps they are: raw speech; organize the phonological representation into constituents, identifying their content and function; construct underlying proposition; and retain the propositions in working memory and at some point purge memory of the phonological representation. These four steps are probably not applied one after the other but are all in action at the same time.
• In the surface constituents, there are various viewpoints suggest that listeners:
a. feel constituents to be conceptually unified wholes
b. use them in the organization of speech
c. store them in working memory as units
d. purge them for memory when sentence has ended
• The subjective constituents generally coincided with the “objective”, or linguistically defined constituents. In means that each constituents larger than a single word is enclosed in a pair of parentheses.
• The constituents in working memory, once listeners have isolated constituents, they should hold them verbatim as constituents in working memory until they have no more need for them, until they have used them to construct the underlying propositions. Listeners must eventually purge their working memory of the verbatim contents of constituents.
• The unit of speech perception corresponds to the constituent.
• Click displacement could also plausibly occur during the encoding stage. To locate a click, listeners have to become conscious of other unit with respect to which they can locate the click; units like phonetic segments, syllables, words, phrases, and clauses.
• The main idea is that listeners try to isolate and identify surface constituents and build proposition

SYNTACTIC APPROACHES TO THE CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

• In the syntactic approach, listeners are assumed to use the surface features of a sentence in coming to its interpretation. They identify sound, words, and larger constituents and from them build and connect proposition in an interpretation for the whole sentence. Listeners probably use some mixture of two approaches such as syntactic and semantic information.
• Listeners have at their command a battery of mental strategies by which they segment sentences into constituents, classify constituents, and construct semantic representation from them. These strategies rely on the fact that sentences contain elements listeners can use as clues to proper segmentation.
• There are some strategies that is used in building up constituents:
 Strategy 1: whenever you find a function of word, begin a new constituent larger than one word.
The function of words: determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, quantifiers, and the like.
This strategy reflects the observation that functions words are very reliable clues to constituent structure because in English each one signals the beginning of a major constituent. In other hands we can say it is a collection of specialized strategies for identifying and labeling constituents.
 Function of words should also help listeners classify neighboring content words. It refers to the strategy 2: after identify the beginning of a constituent, look for content words appropriate to that type of constituent.
 Listeners may also be helped by suffixes and prefixes. In this case, it refers to the strategy 3: use affixes to help decide whether a content word is a noun, verb, adjective, or adverb.
 Content words themselves limit what can occur around them. Among content words, verbs restrict their environments the most. It refers to the strategy 4: after encountering a verb, look for the number and kind of argumentation appropriate to that verb.
By the syntactic approach, strategies 1 through 4 seem not only sensible, but even necessary if listeners are to make full use of syntactic information
 Some sentences seem intrinsically difficult to understand. In this case, listeners try to minimize memory load according to Kimball which refers to the strategy 4: try to attach each new word to the constituent that came just before.
In this session, Kimball also proposed a principle of fixed structure and a principle of two sentences.
1. Principle of fixed structure: once listeners have parsed speech into constituents one way, it is very costly in processing capacity to go back in memory and reparse the constituents another way.
2. Principle of two sentences: it is very costly in memory capacity to parse more than two constituents labeled S at that time. Kimball used the principle of two sentences to explain why the notorious doubly self embedded sentence is so difficult.
 Although strategy 1 can be used to isolate and classify a constituent as a clause, there are probably additional strategies for identifying just how that clause functions in the current sentence. So, it deals with the strategy 6: use the firs word (or major constituent) of a clause to identify the function of that clause in the current sentence.
 Then Bever (1970) proposed a slightly different strategy to cover some of the same ground as strategy 6: assume the first clause to be a main clause unless it marked at or prior to the main verb as something other than a main clause. This strategy distinguishes main from non-main clauses by noting whether there is a special warning flag on a clause saying it is not a main clause.

In the syntactic approach, once listeners have isolated and labeled constituents, they are still not through. They must use these labeled constituents to construct an interpretation for sentence-a hierarchy of underlying propositions.
The syntactic approach, of course, has not been worked out very far. Ultimately, it must provide strategies that take care of every detail described in the grammar of a language (like English).


SEMANTIC APPROACHES TO THE CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

• The basic premise behind the semantic approach is that listener’s goal is to determine how each sentence was meant to be utilized. In practice listeners achieve this by following two working principles: the reality principle and the cooperative principle. The reality principle is concerned with the substance of a sentence, and cooperative principle is concerned with the way ideas are expressed. According to the reality principle, listeners interpret sentences in the belief that the speaker is referring to a situation or set of ideas they can make sense of. While according to the cooperative principle, listeners interpret sentences in the belief that the speaker is trying to tell the truth, tell them all they need to know and no more, say things that are relevant, and use sentences clearly and unambiguously.
 The first strategy to be considered which is suggested by Bever (1970) is as strategy 8: using words content alone, build propositions that make sense and parse the sentence into constituents accordingly. Here, listeners assume, in line with the cooperative principle, that speakers intend their sentences to make sense.
 More generally, to express verb-centered might use the strategy 9: look for constituents that fit the semantics propositional function that underlies ach verb, adjective, adverb, prepositions, and noun.
 Listeners are especially anxious to make sense of a sentence in the circumstances they are in at the time. It refers to the strategy 10: look for definite noun phrases that refer to entities you know and replace the interpretation of each noun phrase by a reference to that entity directly.
 By strategy 10, listeners actively anticipate references to known entities, yet many facts in its support can as easily be accounted for by strategy 11: on finding a definite noun phrase, search memory for the entity it was meant to refer to and replace the interpretation of the noun phrase by a reference to the entity directly.
 The order of words and clauses within sentences has considerable consistency, both in English and many other languages, and listeners could make good use of that consistency. In this case, it refers to the strategy 12: look for the first noun-verb sequence to be an agent, action, and object unless the sequence is marked otherwise.
 Then, there is also the strategy 13: look for the first or two clauses to describe the first of two events, and the second clause the second event, unless they are marked otherwise.
 When new information comes before given information, special syntactic devices are often needed. So, it refers to the strategy 14: look for given information to precede new information, unless the sentence is marked otherwise.
• Semantic approach has its good and bad point. Its advantages are obvious. Whereas the syntactic approach exploits mostly function words and the classification of content words as noun, verbs, and the like, the semantic approach exploits the real meat of a sentence: the content words and their meaning.
• Ambiguity ought to be the bane of comprehension because many probably most sentences have more than one interpretation, or reading.
• Many investigators have proposed the Garden Path or One Meaning that is the Theory of ambiguity. The Garden Path theory has two points in its favor.
1. It solves the paradox. It claims that the reason people do not see a sentence as ambiguous is that they never compute more than one reading.
2. It explains why people are startled when they are “led down the garden path”.
• MacKay suggests a combination of the many meanings and garden path theory that most popularly goes like:
1. When listeners encounter an ambiguous construction, they compute multiple readings
2. Using the context, listeners then attempts to select the most plausible reading
3. If the ambiguity has not been resolved by the end of the clause, they select one reading and stick to it
4. If later context contradicts the selected reading, they try to retrieve the surface structure of the prior clause and compute a new compatible reading
By the mixed theory, listeners are influenced by ambiguities as they go along: each one consumes extra times.
• In the mixed theory, listeners compute more than one reading for each ambiguity and resolve it immediately: if there is enough information.
• In the mixed theory clause boundaries are critical. When listeners cross one, they should mix on one reading and behave from then on as if the clause were ambiguous.