LANGUAGE DIVERSITY
There are about 6-7000 different languages worldwide, however, more than half of those languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. Some people estimate that perhaps 90% of these languages will be gone within 100 years.
LANGUAGE CHARACTERISTICS
Communicative
Semanticity
Must stand for something other than itself. A grunt has no semanticity for example.
Arbitrary
Relation between sound and reference is unimportant. Different languages have different mappings.
Structured
Pattern of symbols is not arbitrary
Generative
The basic units can be used to build a limitless number of utterances.
Dynamic
Language is always evolving.
In general all languages share a few more characteristics; children can learn them, adults can speak and understand each other, they capture the ideas that people normally communicate, and they enable communication amongst groups.
So lets say that Dr. Kirwan is a super nerd and has learned to speak Na'vi. He goes to a convention and speaks Na'vi with another nerd there. Does this then qualify as a language under these conditions? Maybe, it does allow communication between adults and groups but children probably don't learn this very often and it also lacks a certain amount of vocabulary.
SEMANTICS
Semantics is the study of meaning and, in this case, how people mentally represent the meaning of for words and sentences. A related concept is a morpheme which is the smallest unit of speech used to code a specific meaning (e.g., s at the end of the word changes the meaning so s is a morpheme). Phonemes build up to Morphemes which build up to Mental Lexicons. Mental Lexicons is what assigns meaning to all your different utterances. Syntax is the grammatical rules that specify how words and morphemes are arranged to yield acceptable sentences.
PHONEMES
Why is phonemes differentiation so hard? Part of the reason is that we produce them so quickly. We did a quick activity were he played different people with differing accents speaking the same paragraph then asked us to guess where they were from. The dialect for each person was different but what made it possible for us to differentiate between a southerner, a northeaster, and a scottish speaker was the accent created by the different phonemes.
Coarticulation
"Vowel" vs "Vole." You start to form the vowel before you start the buzzing noise with your lips that produces the v sound.
Perception of Phonemes
They found that we automatically fill in some phonemes based on the context of the phoneme when part of the word is indistinguishable due to a cough. People will not even notice when they are filling in for words that they didn't entirely hear. For example, the *eel was on the axle and the *eel was on the shoe sound the exact same but when we hear them we know that the first one is wheel and the second is heel without even realizes we are hearing the same word in both situations.
The McGurk Effect
What you hear can be very influenced by what you are seeing. Youtube the McGurk effect and you will find some pretty cool videos. An interesting application of the McGurk effect is that when you speak to someone in person and then on the phone you will understand that person better than if you only spoke to them on the phone.
The Phonetic Boundary
From about 0-30 ms people reliably identified the sound as da then there is a dramatic decrease in response reliability (called the phonetic boundary) until around 50-80 ms people would reliably identify the sound as ta instead of da.
There are about 6-7000 different languages worldwide, however, more than half of those languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people. Some people estimate that perhaps 90% of these languages will be gone within 100 years.
LANGUAGE CHARACTERISTICS
Communicative
Semanticity
Must stand for something other than itself. A grunt has no semanticity for example.
Arbitrary
Relation between sound and reference is unimportant. Different languages have different mappings.
Structured
Pattern of symbols is not arbitrary
Generative
The basic units can be used to build a limitless number of utterances.
Dynamic
Language is always evolving.
In general all languages share a few more characteristics; children can learn them, adults can speak and understand each other, they capture the ideas that people normally communicate, and they enable communication amongst groups.
So lets say that Dr. Kirwan is a super nerd and has learned to speak Na'vi. He goes to a convention and speaks Na'vi with another nerd there. Does this then qualify as a language under these conditions? Maybe, it does allow communication between adults and groups but children probably don't learn this very often and it also lacks a certain amount of vocabulary.
SEMANTICS
Semantics is the study of meaning and, in this case, how people mentally represent the meaning of for words and sentences. A related concept is a morpheme which is the smallest unit of speech used to code a specific meaning (e.g., s at the end of the word changes the meaning so s is a morpheme). Phonemes build up to Morphemes which build up to Mental Lexicons. Mental Lexicons is what assigns meaning to all your different utterances. Syntax is the grammatical rules that specify how words and morphemes are arranged to yield acceptable sentences.
PHONEMES
Why is phonemes differentiation so hard? Part of the reason is that we produce them so quickly. We did a quick activity were he played different people with differing accents speaking the same paragraph then asked us to guess where they were from. The dialect for each person was different but what made it possible for us to differentiate between a southerner, a northeaster, and a scottish speaker was the accent created by the different phonemes.
Coarticulation
"Vowel" vs "Vole." You start to form the vowel before you start the buzzing noise with your lips that produces the v sound.
Perception of Phonemes
They found that we automatically fill in some phonemes based on the context of the phoneme when part of the word is indistinguishable due to a cough. People will not even notice when they are filling in for words that they didn't entirely hear. For example, the *eel was on the axle and the *eel was on the shoe sound the exact same but when we hear them we know that the first one is wheel and the second is heel without even realizes we are hearing the same word in both situations.
The McGurk Effect
What you hear can be very influenced by what you are seeing. Youtube the McGurk effect and you will find some pretty cool videos. An interesting application of the McGurk effect is that when you speak to someone in person and then on the phone you will understand that person better than if you only spoke to them on the phone.
The Phonetic Boundary
From about 0-30 ms people reliably identified the sound as da then there is a dramatic decrease in response reliability (called the phonetic boundary) until around 50-80 ms people would reliably identify the sound as ta instead of da.
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