语言学概论06Chapter 6_cognition.ppt

Chapter SixLanguage and Cognition 1. What is Cognition? Mental processes, information processing Mental process or faculty of knowing, including awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment. The formal approach: structural patterns, including the study of morphological, syntactic, and lexical structure. The psychological approach: language from the view of general systems ranging from perception, memory, attention, and reasoning. The conceptual approach: how language structures (processes patterns) conceptual content. 2. Psycholinguistics Psychological aspects of language. Psychological states and mental activity with the use of language. Language acquisition, language production comprehension. Related fields Structural linguistics Cognitive psychology Anthropology Neurosciences Six subjects of research Language acquisition (L1 / L2) Language comprehension Language production Language disorders Language and Thought Neurocognition 2.1 Language Acquisition Holophrastic stage Language’s sound patterns Phonetic distinctions in parents’ language. One-word stage: objects, actions, motions, routines. Two-word stage: around 18m Three-word-utterance stage Give doggie paper. Put truck window. Tractor go floor. Fluent grammatical conversation stage Embed one constituent inside another: Give doggie paper. ? Give big doggie paper. Use more function words: missing function words and inflection in the beginning but good use (90%) by the age of 3, with a full range of sentence types. All parts of all language are acquired before the child turns four. 2.2 Language comprehension Mental lexicon: information about the properties of words, retrievable when understanding language For example, we may use morphological rules to decompose a complex word like rewritable the first few times we encounter it and after several exposures we may store and access it as a unit or word. It means that frequency of exposure determines our ability to recall stored instances. Connectionism: re