Category Archives: Language & Cognition

The acquisition of noun classes: Phonology wins

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Annie Gagliardi, Jeffrey Lidz. (2014). Statistical Insensitivity in the Acquisition of Tsez Noun Classes. Language. PDF.

http://ling.umd.edu/~acg/

Annie Gagliardi. Source: University of Maryland

This article looks “at the acquisition of noun classes, a problem that allows us to differentiate between the input, or the information available to a learner in the environment, and the intake, the information that a learner makes use of in constructing a grammar” . . . “In the acquisition of Tsez noun classes we find that input and intake do differ. While Tsez-acquiring children appear to make use of both noun-external and noun-internal distributional information, their use of noun-internal distributional information is selective. Instead of using semantic cues, which both adults and statistical models find to be the most reliable information, children use less reliable phonological information.”

Oxford Bibliographies: Classifiers and noun classes (Alexandra Aikhenvald). Gender (Jenny Audring). The Tsez language.
ScienceDaily: Sound trumps meaning in first language learning.

The neural code that makes us human

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From Science : Yosef Grodzinsky and Israel Nelken comment on Nima Mesgarani’s et al. recent finding about phonetic feature encoding in the human superior temporal gyrus.

Access from Hebrew University Website. 

“Speech representation in the auditory cortex … is governed by acoustic features, but not by just any acoustic features—the features that dominate speech representation are precisely those that are associated with abstract, linguistically defined distinctive features. Mesgarani et al., who base their investigation on linguistic distinctions, further demonstrate that features are distinguishable by the degree of the neural invariance they evoke, forming an order that is remarkably in keeping with old linguistic observations: Manner of articulation (manifesting early in developing children) produces a neural invariance that is more prominent than that related to place of articulation (manifesting late in children). A hierarchy noted in 1941 for language acquisition is now resurfacing as part of the neural sensitivity to speech sounds.”

What is so interesting about Mesgarani’s et al. finding is that they identified neural correlates of the very same phonetic features that had been posited by linguists who were stating generalizations about the sound patterns of natural languages. The pioneers in this field were Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoi. Jakobson and Trubetzkoi worked from their armchairs. But, with their razor-sharp analytic minds, they saw abstract patterns in natural languages. Since the patterns were so abstract, it is unlikely that they would have been discovered by neuroscientists alone. Experts on languages needed to see the patterns and develop theories of how they could be generated by a combinatorial mechanism of features. At that point, the question of neural correlates for the representation of speech sounds could be asked in a meaningful way. To be sure, Mesgarani et al. did NOT find the neural code that makes us human. That’s exaggerated. But their work is a model of how insights from linguistics might be ‘transferred’ to cognitive neuroscience.

Phonology and the brain: it’s all in the features. By Itziar Laka.

Paris Forum of the Cognitive Sciences

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13th Forum of the Cognitive Sciences

http://forumsciencescognitives.com/

Source: Forum des Sciences Cognitives

Depuis trois ans, le forum s’est ouvert au grand public avec succès : au vu de l’importance grandissante des sciences cognitives dans la société actuelle, il semble de plus en plus nécessaire d’apporter aux non spécialistes un regard critique sur ce domaine. Durant la journée, des chercheurs renommés et spécialistes sont invités à intervenir lors de conférences tout public tandis qu’en parallèle auront lieu des conférences plus spécialisées données par des doctorants et jeunes chercheurs.

Vous pouvez télécharger le programme complet, en cliquant ici.

How to read … a mind

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A short (2-week) MOOC from the University of Nottingham: How to read … a mind

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/how-to-read-a-mind

Source: Future Learn

“This is a short course that tries to explain what happens when you read a novel or a short story – or in fact any sort of narrative – and you meet the people who live within those pages. How can it be that sometimes we are drawn into the world of the fiction almost as if it’s real? How can we be so immersed in that imaginary world that we can be emotionally affected by what goes on in there? How can we sometimes be so absorbed in the fictional world that we can’t hear when people back in the real world talk to us while we are distracted?

These are questions for anyone who has ever picked up a book and enjoyed it. For the answers, we must look to our best current understanding of how mind and language works – and that means entering into the field of cognitive poetics. Simply, this is a discipline that draws on linguistics and cognitive science to provide explanations for literary reading. The beauty of cognitive poetics is that it addresses questions that are interesting and familiar to all readers, not just professional academics, literary critics and theorists. And it is based on some simple principles so that the journey from introduction to complex understanding is actually very short.”

A way with words

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Karin Stromswold: A way with words

“Stromswold’s research on how prenatal and neonatal factors interact with genetic factors to influence linguistic and non-linguistic development suggests that the more formal aspects of language (syntax, morphology, and phonology) may have a stronger genetic component than, for example, vocabulary or discourse and pragmatics (the social aspects of language), each of which is more influenced by the postnatal environment.”

The cognitive neuroscience of language acquisition.

Paul Bloom: The pleasures of imagination

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The Pleasures of Imagination

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Developmental psychologists have long been interested in children’s appreciation of the distinction between pretense and reality. We know that children who have reached their fourth birthday tend to have a relatively sophisticated understanding, because when we ask them straight out about what is real and what is pretend, they tend to get it right. What about younger children? Two-year-olds pretend to be animals and airplanes, and they can understand when other people do the same thing. A child sees her father roaring and prowling like a lion, and might run away, but she doesn’t act as though she thinks her father is actually a lion. If she believed that, she would be terrified. The pleasure children get from such activities would be impossible to explain if they didn’t have a reasonably sophisticated understanding that the pretend is not real.”

Elizabeth Spelke: Language is the secret ingredient

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From the New York Times: Insights from the youngest minds

“Dr. Spelke has proposed that human language is the secret ingredient, the cognitive catalyst that allows our numeric, architectonic and social modules to join forces, swap ideas and take us to far horizons. “What’s special about language is its productive combinatorial power,” she said. “We can use it to combine anything with anything.” … She points out that children start integrating what they know about the shape of the environment, their navigational sense, with what they know about its landmarks — object recognition — at just the age when they begin to master spatial language and words like “left” and “right.” Yet, she acknowledges, her ideas about language as the central consolidator of human intelligence remain unproved and contentious.”