Understanding Sentences

Two steps back: What is linguistic knowledge? Phonological Syntactical Morphological Lexical Semantic

One step back: What is a sentence? (part of) an utterance? Meaningful unit? Grammatical structure containing at least a subject and a verb? Working assumption: A well-formed structure built from syntactical units.

Syntactical “units” XP → (Spec) X’ YP* From phrase to sentence: –Inflection / IP (INFL) –Complementizer / CP Special role of verb arguments i.e. Sentence: CP that satisfies the verb arguments.

Argument structure of verbs Pattern of thematic roles - who is doing what to whom –Agent Entity that instigates an action –Theme / Patient The thing that is being acted on or being moved –Recipient

understanding The dog likes ice cream. –[ det the – NP [ det the N dog] – NP [ det the N dog] [ V likes – S [ NP [ det the N dog] VP [ V likes NP [ N icecream]]] Basic assumption –One structure built up at a time

complexity The dog the stick the fire burned beat bit the cat. The dog that the stick that the fire burned beat bit the cat. vs. The cheese that some rats I saw were trying to eat turned out to be rancid.

Time Flies The plastic –…rose. –…rose and fell. The plastic pencil marks –…were ugly. –…very clearly. My son has grown another foot. Time flies like an arrow. Ergo: Human parsing is also based on decision making skills. The brain is not a computer (although it does computations all the time)!

Up the garden path The horse raced past the barn fell. The horse raced. The horse raced past the barn. The horse race past the barn. fell. But: The landmine buried in the sand exploded.

Functional Logic Minimal attachment –Prefer the structure with the lower number of nodes. Late closure –Add to the current structure as long as possible.

Schematic of Speech Processing

Language and the brain Pinker 1994, 308 articulation Post-lexical phonological encoding monitoring ms Concept-based lexical selection 275 ms Lexeme access ms

How to locate language in the brain? Brain damages EEG – Electro-Encephalogram –ERPs – Event related brain potentials PET – Positron Emission Tomography fMRI – functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging MEG – Magneto-Encephalography

Forms of Aphasia Pinker 1994, 307

Broca’s Aphasia Syntactic processing impaired, not always completely gone The car pushes the truck The car is pushed by the truck Motor-control not affected Blowing out candles remains possible Writing impaired, but not handling objects Visuo-spatial abilities not affected –Evidence from sign language speakers: Left-hemispheric damage resembles Broca’s aphasics Right hemispheric damage impairs visuo-spatial tasks as e.g. copying patterns, recognizing faces Lasting aphasia results from deeper injuries!

Pinker 1994, 310

Wernicke’s Aphasia Fluent speech Producing grammatical speech Problems in naming objects High proportion of set phrases (severe) problems in comprehending speech

Other aphasic syndromes Anomia Story: “boy falling from a stool as he reaches into a jar on a shelf and hands a cookie to his sister” –Lesion in Wernicke’s and adjacent areas –Close to regions for processing visual, auditory, bodily sensations –Words and meaning separated by lesion? Connection between Broca and Wernicke regions disrupted (centralised aphasia): –Sentence repetition impaired Broca and Wernicke regions seperated from surrounding area (transcortical aphasia) –Sentence repetition without problems –Hardly any spontaneous speech –Strong difficulties in speech comprehension