Communication
Behaviours that convey information
- Turn-taking
- Intonation
- Gesture (body language)
- Eye gaze control
- Touch
Language
a communication system that has symbols (words) and rules for ways to assemble the symbols (grammar)
- thinking and processing is made possible
- intangible ideas (truth, virtue, freedom)
Linguistics
the study of language structure, variation and change
- Phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics
psycholinguistics
the psychology of our language as it interacts with the mind
- perception (speech, reading) and production (speaking, writing, signing)
Ferdinand de Saussure
the pairing between a sound and meaning is arbitrary as different languages use different sound to convey the same meaning
Iconicity
resemblance between form and meaning
- ‘teeny’ conveys a sense of smallness through the high-front vowel
- bouba-kiki effect: round and sharp shapes, respectively
Systematicity
any statistical regularity between phonological structure and meaning
- phonesthemes: in english gl- frequently occurs in words referring to shiny visual phenomena, like, glitter, glimmer, glisten, glitz
What are the two ways to represent sound patterns in speech?
phonemes
smallest unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another
- ~44 phonemes are made up of our 26 vowels and consonants
- phonemes may be represented by different letters e.g. cat, kit, school
- allophones are different representations of the same phoneme e.g. lips, slip, spill, pills and lisp
phonetics
the physical properties of speech sounds and how they are produced and perceived in different contexts
- international phonetic alphabet (IPA)
language-specific phonemic charts
Prosody
what is prosody characterised by?
Morphology
free morpheme
stands alone as a single word e.g. cat
bound morphemes
derivational: prefixes and suffixes e.g. re- charge -able
inflectional: suffixes e.g. plural -s and regular past tense -ed
Syntax
Subject-verb-order (SVO) word order languages
Rule: subject - verb - object
Correct: the boy - throws - a ball
incorrect: the boy - a ball - throws
Structural ambiguity
Semantics
lexical ambiguity
Pragmatics
Visual-gestural langues
Speech perception