Seminar in Linguistics (L700) and Cognitive Science (Q700)
``What is Phonology?''
Robert
December 2, 2008
Problem: What does linguistics propose about
representation of language in memory?
What does experimental psychology propose for words in long-term
memory? Based on what evidence?
Why
are segments so unchallengeable as the correct unit? What are the
effects
on our intuitions of learning to read and write - using alphabetic and
nonalphabetic systems?
Course Requirements
Students
will take
turns
presenting papers for discussion in class. Each student
will also
write a term paper due the last week of class. The paper should address
some
specific problem by reviewing literature, formulating a descriptive
issue relevant to a
particular language or write a carefully reasoned experiment proposal.
Week 1-2. Traditional
foundation of linguistics.
Monday
Chomsky, Noam (1957) Syntactic
Structures. Mouton, The Hague. Read Introduction
and
pp. 1-25
Port, R.
(2008)
Notes on Syntactic
Structures.
Haugeland,
John (1985)
Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. (
Port, R. Note on Haugeland's definition of a formal symbol token
Wednesday
Halle, Morris
(1961) On the role of
simplicity in linguistic descriptions. Proceedings of Symposia in Applied
Mathematics XII, pp. 89-94
Chomsky, N.,
&
Monday
Week 4.
Problem of Variation: How can C-H features be sufficient without
phonetic detail?
Monday
Port,
Robert and Adam Leary (2005)
Against
formal phonology. Language 81,
927-964
Wednesday
Labov,
William (1964). "Phonological
correlates of social stratification," American Anthropologist 66,
164-176.
Foulkes,
P. and Docherty,
G. (2006) The
social life of phonetics and phonology. J. Phonetics 34, 409-438.
Hay, Jennifer and Katie Drager (2007). "Sociophonetics," Annual Review of Anthropology 36,
89-103.
Pierrehumbert,
Janet (2000) What
people know about the sounds of language. Unpublished mspt.
Week 5.
Long-term memory for words is much richer
than we thought.
Hintzman,
Palmeri,
T. J.,
Goldinger, S. D.,
& Pisoni, D. B. (1993). Episodic
encoding of voice
attributes and recognition memory for spoken words. Journal
of
Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory and Cognition, 19,
309-328.
O'Reilly,
Randall and Kenneth Norman (2005) Hippocampal
and neocortical contributions to memory: Advances in the complementary
learning systems framework. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences 6, 505-510.
Week 7. Why are letters (or phonemes) so ``right'' as the
units?
Monday
Olson, David
R. (1993) How
writing represents speech. Language and Communication 13.
1-17.
Faber,
Wednesday
Morais,
Jose, Luz Cary,
Jesus Alegria
and Paul Bertelson (1979) Does
awareness of
speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously?
Cognition
7,
323-331.
Read, Charles
Yun-fei
Zhang,
Hong-yin Niew and Bao-qing Ding (1986) The
ability to
manipulate speech sounds depends on knowing alphabetic writing.
Cognition 24, 31-44.
Abercrombie, David (1949) What is a `letter'? Lingua 2 , reprinted in D. Abercrombie (1965) Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics. (Oxford Univ Press, Oxford), pp. 76-85
Recommended: Hans
Henrich Hock and
Brian Joseph (1996) Language
History, Languae Change and Language Relationship: An Introduction to
Historical and Comparative Linguistics. (Mouton-de
Gruyter, New York) Chap3 Writing: Its history and its
decipherment.
Week 8. Reading acquisition
Monday
Port,
Robert (2005, in
press) The graphical
basis of
phones and
phonemes. In Murray Munro and OckeSchwen-Bohn (eds)
Second Language Speech Learning: The Role of Language Experience in
Speech
Perception and Production. Benjamins,
Week 9.
Toward language as a cultural institution.
Tomasello, Michael (1999) The human
adaptation for culture.
Ann. Rev. Anthropology 28,
509-529.
Wednesday
Tomasello,
Michael
(2003) What makes
human cognition unique? From individual to
shared to collective intentionality. Mind & Language 18, 121-147.
Tomasello, Michael (2000) The
item-based nature of children's early
syntactic development. Trends
in Cognitive Sciences 4, 156-163.
Week
10-11. Categorization
Monday. First discuss
paper topics, then begin Smith and Medin.
Wednesday
Guenther,
Frank
and Joseph Perkell (2004) A
neural model
of speech production and supporting experiments. Paper presented at
`From Sound to Sense', conference at MIT, June 2004.
Monday (November
24)
Guenther, Frank, A. Nieto-Castanon, S. Ghosh &J. Tourville
(2004) Representation
of sound categories in auditory cortical
maps. J. Speech, language
and
Hearing Res. 47, 46-57.
Lakoff,
George and Rafael Núñez (2004) Where does
Mathematics Come
From? (New York,
Basic Books). This excerpt includes Chaps 1, 2 & 3 (pp 15-77)
however the required reading is only Chapters 2 and 3 (pp.
27-77). Chapt 1 is recommended, however. (This Monday
discuss Chap 2, next Monday Chap 3.)
Recommended:
Goldstone,
Robert, David Landy and Yi Son (2007) A well-grounded
education: The role of perception in science and mathematics.
In M. de Vega, A. Glenberg and A. Graesser (eds.) Symbols, Embodiment and Meaning.
(New York, Oxford Press), pp. 327-355.
Monday (December 1)
Discuss Lakoff and Núñez Chapter 3.
Wednesday
de Boer, Bart
(2000) Emergence
of vowel systems through
self-organization. AI
Communications 13, 27-39.
Oudeyer, Pierre-Yves
(2005) The
self-organization of speech sounds. J. Theoretical Biology 233
435-449.