User:JordanAMSmith/sandbox

Work on Speech Article
'''NOTE: This is VERY much a work in progress: I'm currently mostly working on finding sources and thinking of how to clean up what's in the existing speech article - a lot of what's there seems irrelevant and nearly all of it is unsourced. Some stuff just looks plain wrong. Check the link to this page as I'll most likely be working on it more before Wednesday.'''

I'm planning on converting the existing article to this structure: good idea?

Proposed New Structure
Problems involving speech (Necessary?)
 * Intro (Condense to "What is speech" & Overview)
 * Is speech unique to humans? (seperate from intro)
 * Speech production.
 * Physiology
 * Brief description of articulation, etc. Evolution?
 * Neuroscience
 * Broca's area
 * Disorders
 * Expressive aphasia
 * Speech perception.
 * Neuroscience
 * Wernicke's area
 * Disorders
 * Receptive aphasia
 * Speech repetition
 * In speech repetition, speech that is being heard is quickly turned from sensory inputs into motor instructions needed for its immediate or delayed vocal imitation (in phonological memory). This type of mapping plays a key role in enabling children to expand their spoken vocabulary and hence the ability of human language to transmit across generations. Masur (1995) found that children's how often children repeat novel words versus those already in their lexicon predicts the size of their lexicon later on, and could facilitate the acquisition of this larger lexicon.
 * Speech errors
 * Speech errors occur when the realization of an utterance does not match it's intended (or apparently intended) form. This can occur in the form of accidental errors in pronunciation or syntax, or deliberately as part of wordplay or pun.
 * Speech errors are commonly exhibited during acquisition. For example, children may say 'pischetti' /pɪskɛtiː/ for 'spaghetii' /spəgɛtiː/.
 * A thought: is over-regularization a speech error or something else? E.g. "I eated the cake" for "I ate the cake". -- NO
 * Find some data on kids and speech errors

Move neuroscience parts into production/perception.

Possible Sources

NATO Advanced Study Institute on Dynamics of Speech Production and Perception, Divenyi, P., Greenberg, S., Meyer, G., & North Atlantic Treaty Organization. (2006). Dynamics of speech production and perception (NATO science series Series I : Life and behavioural sciences, vol. 374; NATO science series, Series I,5516788 Life and behavioural sciences ;5516788 v. 374). Amsterdam: IOS Press. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy0707/2006932184.

Kormos, J. (2006). Speech production and second language acquisition (Cognitive sciences and second language acquisition; Cognitive sciences and second language acquisition). Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0659/2005052184-t.html

Notes:

Traditional model: wernicke's area in perception, broca's in speech production -- "the underlying neural system is not organized along these lines and that multiple parallel processing streams are involved" -- Instead of lanauge processing being primary within a dorsal stream, strong evience that substantial ventral stream.

-- 199-220

--- Priming for regular forms basically followed the model of speech processing seen in wernicke-broca-lichtheim model. Irregular forms are more like lexical processing, acess superior parietal lobule, inferior p.l. and angular gyrus. When those three regions are damaged, patients develop symptoms reflective or wernicke's aphasia.

--- Damage to left perisylvian area results in difficulty with morphological processing. Temporal lobe ok, so can access lexical items, but can't piece together morphology

--- "potential suffxes" i.e. things that sound like -ed or -ing but aren't morphological suffixes still activate the morphological/syntactic processing area.

---

Intro
The introduction could really be more specific, and a lot of this appears very jargon-like. Would someone visiting the article immediately know what the 'faculty of language' is? A simple fix would be to link this to another article. I really don't have any clear idea of what biolinguistics is from this introduction. It's very vague sounding, presented as a "comprehensive schema" and including lots of natural sciences, but this just makes it sound like a giant umbrella-term for anything in linguistics that's not sociolinguistics or philology. Isn't "understanding the fundamentals of the faculty of language" the main goal of most of linguistics since the 60's or so?

Developments
What studies? By whom? When were they done? "Recent studies" are mentioned, but without date, clear author, or citation. It's not made clear at all what the minimalist program has to do with biolinguistics. Saying that Chomsky's "minimalist approach... led to the Minimalist Program" doesn't mean anything to me -- I'm no closer finding out what the minimalist approach is or how it's relevant. There is a brief (and somewhat confusing) explanation of embedding and recursion here. This could be much more well worded, maybe link to an article on embedding or subordination too.

The last sentence bothers me:

"If this is true, then the objective of biolinguists is to find out as much as we can about the principles underlying mental recursion."

This seems odd to imply that discovering the principles underlying recursion is the sole purpose of biolinguistics (while mentioning this to be a broad interdisciplinary field in the intro). Surely people care about more than just recursion (we've seen a few articles in class that weren't about recursion but were still about the biology of language). The introduction makes biolinguistics seem very broad, like an umbrella-term, in the second paragraph it's narrowed down to evolution/oriign, but here it's narrowed down solely to recursion? What's the definition of biolinguistics being used here?

Hypothesis
The hypothesis section is speculation, and sounds a bit flowery or like a sensationalized version of language's relation to other natural things. This is certainly not the only hypothesis in biolinguistics, nor I think the main ones being looked at? This section itself is useless in a encyclopedia article: "what if our minds were fibonacci like a snail!?" doesn't help me understand biolingusitics. More specific hypotheses, including those with more mundane claims would be nice here. I would propose a revised section with some central arguments and counterarguments that are the focus of recent literature, with citations!

Critique

Is this saying that Poepell things Neurscience and Linguistics should remain seperate disciplines because of conflict? Conflict between two fields or disciplines within a field studying the same phenomenon is hardly a new problem. I think it would be better to focus on arguments and critiques of those arguments within biolinguistics. Though if a general critique of the discipline is kept, it should be clearer than this.

People in Biolinguistics, Citations, bigger revisions.

 * 1) It would be nice if these people and their contributions were mentioned in the article somewhere.
 * 2) Citations need a lot of work. I don't know who "linguists at MIT" are or when their "recent research" was published.
 * 3) Clarify what biolinguistics is. Is it a broad term with many sub-studies? Or is it being used synonymously with the minimalist program? At certain points this article seems to define biolinguistics as looking for the origins or language, at other times as an umbrella term, and in the "developments" section as being purely about recursion.
 * 4) Mention current literature, arguments and counterarguments, with authors and dates. It's not clear where the field is or who's working in it from this article.
 * 5) Clean up the language. The "Hypothesis" section in particular sounds sensationalist/not encyclopedia-appropriate.

Pinker on syntactic bootstrapping draft
Steven Pinker presents his theory of semantic bootstrapping, which hypothesizes that children use the meaning of words to start to learn the syntax of their language. The idea is that the linguistic input children receive from their environment will help them make connections to their abstract mental grammar. Gleitman (1990) counters Pinker’s ideas by asserting that word meaning can be rather ambiguous, with one context allowing for multiple interpretations of an uttered sentence. She explains that simply observing objects and events in the world does not provide sufficient information from which meaning can be made. Pinker, however, argues that semantic bootstrapping and syntactic bootstrapping aren't conflicting ideas, and that semantic bootstrapping makes no claims about learning word meanings. He argues that since semantic bootstrapping is a hypothesis about how children acquire syntax, while syntactic bootstrapping is a hypothesis about how children acquire word meanings, the opposition between the two theories does not necessarily exist.

Pinker agrees that syntactic categories are in fact used by children to learn syntax and accepts syntactic bootstrapping, but criticizes Gleitman's claims about syntactic bootstrapping, arguing that Gleitman applies the hypothesis too broadly, when there is insufficient evidence to account for all of Gleitman's claims. Pinker argues that while children can use syntax to learn certain semantic properties within a single frame, like the number of arguments a verb takes or the types of arguments such as agent and patient, there are serious problems with the argument that children pick up on these semantic properties from the syntax when a verb is found in a wide range of syntactic frames. For example, the same verb can have very different semantic uses when found in very similar syntactic environments: the expectation would be that the similar syntax would lead children to infer a convergence in meaning, when in fact the semantic properties of the verb could be very different in each case. Furthermore, Pinker disagrees with Gleitman's claim that the ambiguities in the situations where a word is used could only be solved through subcategorization frames learned through syntactic bootstrapping.

Some linguistic properties that have been argued to be learned through syntactic bootstrapping might be learned instead through other means. For example, Gervain et al. (2008) looked at whether high-frequency function words could lead children to learn the head-directionality parameter of a language, as function words tend to appear near the head of a constituent, e.g. a strongly head-initial language such as English tends to put function words at the beginning of phrases, whereas a head-final language like Japanese tends to put them at the end of phrases. However, since head-directionality is also related to prosody, with head-final languages putting primary stress at the beginning of constituents and vice-versa, it is possible that children learn head-directionality through recognizing prosodic patters instead of (or in addition to) syntactic bootstrapping.

Possible sources
http://portal.uni-freiburg.de/cognition/lehre/archiv/lehre-ws-13-14/mat-erstsprache/syntax/Predicted%20errors.pdf
 * Gertner, Yael, and Cynthia Fisher. "Predicted Errors in Children’s Early Sentence Comprehension." Cognition 124.1 (2012): 85-94. Web.
 * Source for evidence against: Tomasello, Michael. "Do Young Children Have Adult Syntactic Competence?" Cognition 74.3 (2000): 209-53. Web.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027799000694 -knowlin4

https://www.academia.edu/661174/How_could_a_child_use_verb_syntax_to_learn_verb_semantics_1
 * Pinker, Steven (1994). "How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics?". Lingua. 92: 377–410.

This is a criticism by Pinker of Gleitman. He argues that syntactic categories are used in acquisition but are insufficient to account for everything Gleitman claims. He mentions some solutions to the problems he sees with Gleitman's theory: he is convinced of syntactic bootstrapping to a point, but not convinced it's as widely applicable as Gletiman claims. It's an older source but it provides an example of direct criticism. JordanAMSmith (talk) 03:28, 7 October 2016 (UTC) Can't provide a link here as it's accessed through the library system. This article is a followup of Lee and Naigles 2005 work with syntactic bootstrapping & Mandarin (the one that's cited in the "Challenges to the validity of syntactic bootstrapping across languages" section. The conclusion drawn by this article is that infants learning Mandarin categorize verbs based on the number of NP arguments, addition of another NP results in a causative understanding of the verb. JordanAMSmith (talk) 03:52, 7 October 2016 (UTC) The arguments in this paper support syntactic bootstrapping but identify some ways in which it is limited. The focus is on how verbs are understood and manipulated by children and adult English speakers. -LiaK 10/07/16 In this article, Roger Brown discusses different types of nouns and verbs and that children can understand how to use novel words when they have figured out their part of speech. We may be able to use this source to provide background of first discoveries of syntactic bootstrapping, before the term was coined. -LiaK 10/07/16
 * Lee, Joanne N.; Naigles, Letitia R. (2008). "Mandarin learners use syntactic bootstrapping in verb acquisition". Cognition. 106 (2): 1028–1037.
 * Lidz, J., Gleitman H., and Gleitman, L. (2001). Kidz in the 'Hood: Syntactic Bootstrapping and the Mental Lexicon. Retrieved from http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1018&context=ircs_reports
 * Brown, R. W. (1957). Linguistic Determinism and the Part of Speech. Retrieved from http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1317532.files/10-22/Brown-1957.pdf

Necessary Edits for Syntactic Bootstrapping Page

 * Add a source from Gleitman because she seems important to this theory
 * Gleitman 1990, “The Structural Source of Verb Meanings” (?) for definitions
 * Determine whether to credit Roger Brown 1957 or Gleitman 1990.
 * Include direct source/research from Brown and Gleitman
 * Direct research is good, but probably we don't need to cite who coined the term. (From the meeting today, it sounds like it's unclear who).
 * Add descriptions of specific experiments to the Evidence section
 * Make it less vague
 * Cite sources
 * Add a section about the controversy/debate between semantic (Pinker) and syntactic bootstrapping.
 * Include specific people who challenged the idea of syntactic bootstrapping, and their perspectives and evidence against syntactic bootstrapping
 * Discuss other types of bootstrapping.
 * Specify actual controversy against syntactic bootstrapping versus cross-linguistic syntactic bootstrapping.