MODULE 5

Psycholinguistics/History and Major Theories

Language is an integral part of our society, and the way we live our lives. It is an irreplaceable
aspect of every culture, and it helps make us unique as individuals. For these reasons, it is
important to learn and understand the long and detailed history and theories of psycholinguistics.
The works of Wundt, Gall, Lordat, Broca and Wernicke, as well as the groundbreaking
discoveries that they and many others made in the field of psycholinguistics have helped pave
the way for an extremely advanced knowledge on the subject.

Key Contributors

Wilhelm Wundt is known as the "father of experimental psychology" and the founder of the first
experimental psycholinguistic laboratory in Leipzig, Germany in 1879. Wundt claimed that there
is a special field of study dealing with the link between the mind and the body. Some scientific
methods that had been promising in German physiology could now be applied to some issue that
had been beyond the scope of experimental science. Wundt limited scientific psychology to only
those inner phenomena which can be studied using the methods of objective and experimental
science. Wundt used language as a means of studying the mind. He wrote at length about
language acquisition, comprehension, production, sign language, and reading, all of which
remain topics of interest today. Wundt developed a theory of speech production using the
sentence as the unit of analysis. He thought of production as a sequential process that begins with
a complete or whole thought that becomes sequentially organized and articulated. The
comprehension process was the same as production, but in reverse, proceeding from sound
segments to the complete thought.

Franz Joseph Gall made a notable contribution in psychology in that he helped push the
hypothesis that there was localization in the brain into the mainstream. Gall was a
neuroanatomist and physiologist and he came up with an idea known as cranioscopy, or what is
now commonly referred to as phrenology. Phrenology, a pseudoscience, was the idea of
assigning personality types based on physical characteristics. For example, a condition such as
hypertelorism (the abnormal separation of organs, such as the eyes being abnormally far apart)
could be attributed to homosexuality. For Gall, twenty-six or twenty-seven distinct areas, or
organs, were represented on the surface of the brain. His followers increased this number, but the
basic idea remained the same: Over or under development of any of these areas would,
obviously, alter the shape of the skull, making it possible for a skilled bump-reader to determine
the strengths and weaknesses of any particular individual's mind (Juckes, 126). This idea wasn't
particularly helpful, and gave people in higher classes the idea that people were "inferior" to
them based on disabilities, or other physical maladies. Nowadays, even though the idea of
phrenology has been dismissed by the academic mainstream, their basic claim of localization of
function in the brain has been vindicated (Clarke and O'Malley, 1968).

Jacques Lordat was a doctor and professor of anatomy and physiology at Universite Montpellier
in France. After a stroke at the age of 52, he reported that he could not get his words out. He
called his problem verbal amnesia, or alalia. This was also one of the first self-reports of what we
know now as aphasia. Since he was a doctor, which most likely allowed him to report in detail
what he was going through. During this period, Lordat elaborated on a theory of ten acts which
lead from thought to sound emission. Lordat defined alalia as a disorder of the material
transformation of ideas into sounds, corresponding to impaired remembering of previous sounds
stored into memory, together with a dysfunction of the syntactic organization of sounds. Lordat
also insisted on the integrity of his intelligence and the preservation of his inner thinking, and did
not need to speak. He eventually recovered from his aphasia, and died 45 years after his stroke,
at age 97. (Neurological Disorders in Famous Artists, Part 3).

Karl Wernicke was an influential neuropsychiatrist and dealt with all mental illnesses that
resulted from defects in brain physiology. He made major discoveries in brain anatomy and
pathology, but one of his major findings was that abnormalities could be localized to specific
regions of the cerebral cortex and thus could be used to determine the functions of those regions.
Wernicke was one of the first to conceive of brain function as dependent on neural pathways that
connected different regions of the brain, with each region contributing a relatively simple
sensory-motor activity. At the time, most scientists conceived of the brain as functioning as a
single organ. Wernicke also helped demonstrate dominance by either the right or left
hemispheres of the cerebrum. What Wernicke is most famous for is establishing what is now
known as Wernicke's area in the brain. He was examining a patient who had recently suffered a
stroke, and although the man could speak and his hearing was working perfectly fine, he could
not understand anything of what was being said to him, or written words. Unfortunately, the
patient later died. However, once he died, he examined his brain, and found that there was a
lesion in the rear parietal/temporal region of the his left hemisphere. Wernicke concluded that
this region played a vital role in speech comprehension, and that region of the brain is now called
Wernicke's area. Wernicke called the syndrome that the patient had sensory aphasia, however it
is now known as Wernicke's aphasia. (Encyclopedia of Psychology).

Paul Broca was a French physician, anatomist and anthropologist, who worked on a whole host
of topics in the medical community such as the histology of cartilage and bone, cancer
pathology, the treatment of aneurysms, and infant mortality. However, Broca is most famous for
his work of speech research and the role that the brain plays in speech. Broca is most well known
for the establishment of the Broca's area in the brain. Broca was referred a patient by another
doctor. That patient could only say one word: "tan," and henceforth was known as Tan. Tan was
suffering from gangrene and was close to death. Broca invited another doctor to examine the
patient, and that doctor, Ernest Auburtin, concluded that this patient, along with other patients
with similar issues, should have a lesion or "softening of the anterior lobes" (Juckes). Tan died
shortly after, on April 17th, and the following day Broca presented Tan's brain at a meeting
amongst other experts. Broca, and a few other doctors, found that Auburtin's prediction of
lesions of the left frontal lobes were correct, and that part of the brain became known as Broca's
area. Nowadays, a person with Tan's symptoms is deemed to have Broca's aphasia (Juckes).
Essentially, patients suffering from Broca's aphasia know what they want to say but can't get it
out. However, there has been recent research that has questioned the importance of Broca's area,
since there are cases that have brought to light the fact that some people's speech is completely
unaffected after the removal of Broca's area. More importantly, Broca has left behind an
immense legacy and a footprint that will last forever in the psychological field. The discovery of
Broca's area revolutionized the understanding of speech production, and more recently, lesions in
that area are thought to cause stuttering and speech apraxia.

Jean Piaget was a French developmental psychologist who played an extremely influential role
in how we understand development in children. Piaget is most famous for introducing his four
stages of cognitive development. The first of the four stages is the sensorimotor stage, which
occurs from ages 0-2. According to Piaget, in this stage, infants construct an understanding of the
world by coordinating sensory experiences (such as seeing and hearing) with physical, motoric
actions. Infants gain knowledge of the world from the physical actions they perform on it. An
infant progresses from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought
toward the end of the stage (Santrock, 2010). The second stage is known as the preoperational
stage, which occurs from ages 2-7. In this stage, the child learns how to use and represent ideas
by words, drawings and images. They are able to do more advanced things than an infant,
however thinking is still egocentric. The third stage is known as the concrete operational stage,
which takes place from ages 7-11, and is known for the child's increased use of logic. Within this
stage, children learns the concepts of seriation, reversibility, and eliminates the egocentric
thinking that had previously been dominant. The 4th and final stage is known as the formal
operational stage, which starts at around age 11 (puberty), and ends at the beginning of
adulthood. The hallmark of this stage is that the child learns how to think abstractly and use
hypothetical and deductive reasoning. They begin to think the way adults would think (Santrock,
2010). This theory brought a whole new light to developmental thought, and made a big impact
in the field. Additionally, according to Piaget, language assists in the development of concepts
for a developing child.

Rudolf Carnap was an influential German philosopher, member of the Vienna Circle, and
advocate of logical positivism. He was famous for studying language, especially the study of
logical syntax. Carnap defines logical syntax as "the formal theory of the linguistic form of that
language-the systematic statement of the formal rules which govern it together with the
development of the consequences which follow from these rules" (Carnap, 1928). Additionally,
Carnap explained that the sentences, definitions and rules of that language are concerned with
the forms of that language. Carnap wondered how those sentences, definitions, and rules are to
be expressed? He wondered if we needed some kind of super language in order to do that. One of
this baseline questions was "is it possible to formulate the syntax of a language within that
language itself" Carnap was essentially concerned with two languages: the language that was the
object of his study, or investigation, which he called the object-language, and the language in
which we speak about the syntactical forms of the object-language- he called that syntax
language. Carnap used symbolic languages as his object-languages and he used the English
language as his syntax-language, with the help of a few Gothic symbols (Carnap, 1928). Carnap
was also interested in the technique of arithmetisation of syntax. This demonstrated that it was
possible to reason about languages without having to adopt a meta-language distinct from the
object language.

Schools of Thought

Structuralist

Structuralism emerged as the first school of thought. It focused on breaking down mental
processes into the most basic parts. A method known as introspection was used by structuralists
to understand the basic elements of consciousness. Structuralism also played a big role in
linguistics. One of the preeminent structuralists, Ferdinand de Saussure, argued in his book
Course in General Linguistics, (which was composed by colleagues after he died, based on notes
he composed), he analyzes not the use of language but the underlying system of language.
Saussure claimed that linguistic signs were made up of two parts: the first is the signifier, which
is the action when somebody says or thinks of a word. The second is the signified, which is the
meaning or the concept of a word. One of the most important examples of structuralism in
language comes from the Prague school of structuralism, which sought to explain why and how
certain sounds of a language are connected, rather than simply coming up with a list of sounds
through the practice of phonemics. For example, Japanese speakers have trouble differentiating
the /l/ sound from the /r/ sound, because there is no contrast of those two sounds in the Japanese
language. Wilhelm Wundt, who is known as the father of psychology, was one of the first people
to propose the ideas of structuralism. However, structuralism only found its name under one of
Wundt's students, Edward Titchener, who coined the term structuralism and also described some
of its main tenets. Titchener was influenced by some of Wundt's ideas about voluntarism, as well
as his theories about Association and Apperception, helped form the Titchener's theories about
structuralism.

Functionalist
Shortly after the school of thought in a structuralism context was founded, another school of
thought came along. Started by one of the preeminent American psychologists, Dr. William
James, the functionalist school of thought was based around studying what people do with
language and thoughts, rather than the structure of the mind. Functionalists such as James were
pragmatic thinkers and they believed that the value of knowledge depended on its usefulness. In
that way, functionalists were more able to gloss over some ideas that were not entirely useful for
their purposes, whereas structuralists preferred to consider everything. Functionalism was also
important because it could be applied to practical problems like those children face when
learning how to read. Another prominent functionalist figure, Edmund Burke Huey came up with
what might now be considered a modern theory of reading from a functionalist perspective.
Huey refined the use of an important laboratory device known as the tachistoscope, which was
designed to present text materials very rapidly to human subject in order to record reaction time
(RT). The processes underlying reading can be explained by assuming that longer RTs reflect the
difficulty or complexity of the reading material. However, one flaw with functionalism was that
for some people it was not enough of a rigorous science, and some changes would be made to
include more scientific aspects.

Behaviorist

In the early 1900's, after the inception of structuralism and functionalism, another school of
thought was introduced called behaviorism. Behaviorists tried to establish psychology as an
empirical science with all the requisite tools of the scientific method but devoid of mental
constructs like mind, thought, and imagery. Famous behaviorists such as John Watson and B.F.
Skinner wanted a psychology based on observable behavior, and not mental constructs. This is
where behaviorism diverges from schools of thought such as structuralism. Structuralism
somewhat failed because of its reliance on introspection, because we could not trust our
objective skills of introspection. Behaviorism reacted against this interest in consciousness, and
behaviorists said we cannot accurately measure what is subjective and is inside your head. They
claimed that psychology cannot be measured as a science. According to behaviorists, if
psychology, wants to be a science, it has to study fields that are measurable. They argued that
they should look at behavior instead, which is what they did. Behaviorism became firmly
established in America due to the work of Watson and in Russia due to the work of Ivan Pavlov,
famous for his work in classical conditioning of dogs. As part of that work, Pavlov demonstrated
how an originally neutral stimulus, in this case a bell, when frequently paired with a reflex, in
this case salivating to meat powder, would elicit the reflective response. In the 1950s, classical
conditioning was used to account for how words acquired emotional meaning. Behaviorism
helped change the way experts viewed language, however that would change at the beginning of
the cognitive revolution.

Cognitive

In the past 20-30 years, a new point of view has emerged. The cognitive science school of
thought is a multidisciplinary effort that integrates research from linguistics, psychobiology,
artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience perspectives to better
understand how humans think and communicate. Cognitive neuroscience is a field of research
that links the brain and nervous system to cognitive processing. Psycholinguists are currently
incorporating research on language from, and contributing research to, cognitive psychology,
cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. The cognitive and neuroscience frameworks for
language have set the agenda for research in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, cognitive
science became the study of how people perceive, organize, remember, and use information.
Cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics converged to study how people produce and
comprehend language.

Modern Contributors

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is one of the preeminent linguists, as well as scholars in the academic field
today. Among the many things that Chomsky is known for, he is arguably best known for his
critical review of B.F. Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior" (1957). Skinner argued for the
behaviorist position, and his book was predicated by the principles of operant conditioning,
developed two decades earlier during the behaviorist domination of American experimental
psychology. Skinner viewed that speech was a product of operant learning processes such as
reinforcement, extinction, and generalization. Chomsky however, famously, and successfully
challenged Skinner's assumptions and claims. Chomsky's rationalist argument was that the
potential for language was an inborn or innate mental capacity. He argued that children's patterns
of language acquisition were too systematic to be the product of parents' operant conditioning.
Chomsky's perspective changed how scholars defined language: the potential for language was
universal and innate, not the product of operant conditioning. Infants were predisposed to acquire
language with a built-in language acquistion device (LAD). Comparing these two accounts is
referred to as the Skinner-Chomsky debate. Chomsky is also well known for his contributions to
other parts of language, such as his book Syntactic Structures (1957), which challenged
structural linguistics. His approach took sequences of words and he characterized them with a
context free, formal grammar. Chomsky is also known for his theory of generative grammar,
where he claimed that much of our knowledge of grammar was innate, and this innate knowledge
of grammar came to be known as Universal Grammar.
George Lakoff

George Lakoff is a famous American linguist who has been a Professor at University of
California at Berkeley since 1972. He is particularly famous for his work on the centrality of
metaphor in the English language, as well as his writings on the embodied mind, which he has
applied to the field of mathematics. In his book Metaphors We Live By (1980), Lakoff claimed
that metaphors are conceptually constructed, and are central to the development of thought.
According to Lakoff, the only time non-metaphorical thought is possible is when one is talking
about or considering only physical reality. Another of Lakoff's famous theories is that of the
embodied mind. When Lakoff says embodied mind, he means that even as we are conducting our
most complex thinking and reasoning, we are still heavily relying on our lower level systems. He
rejects that human thinking can be explained without first beginning at the lower level details.
More recently, Lakoff has put more of his time into the political scene. He founded and ran a
now defunct progressive think tank called Rockridge Institute. In a 2003 article, he explained
why he believed the conservative Republicans were able to hold such a majority in the three
chambers of government, Senate, House of Representatives and the White House. He believes
that conservatives have spent decades carefully framing their ideas to sound appealing to voters,
and building an infrastructure to communicate them. He claims that the way politicians frame
words and phrases can go a long way to getting people on their side and to vote for them. Lakoff
was a colleague of Noam Chomsky's, and helped him develop his theories of grammar.
However, there was a falling out between Chomsky and some his students including Lakoff,
when they disagreed over whether syntax is independent of meaning and logic. These disputes
came to be known as linguistics wars.

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive scientist, experimental psychologist, and

linguist who is a Professor at Harvard University's Department of Psychology. Pinker is known
for writing a number of bestselling books such as The Language Instinct (1994), and The Blank
Slate (2002). In The Language Instinct (1994) Pinker argues that humans have an innate ability
of language and somewhat agrees with Chomsky that there is a type of universal grammar. Also,
in the book, Pinker seeks to debunk certain claims about language, such as that our society's
grammar is going down in quality, children must be taught language in order to use it, and that
language has an influence of people's thoughts. He thought all those ideas were false. Instead,
Pinker views language as something that has developed through evolution in order to solve the
communication barriers that early humans had difficulties with. He also suggests that language is
instinctual, and that it is not a man made invention, and cites evidence such as deaf babies using
sign language based on real grammar, as well as the fact that language develops without formal
instruction or by parents trying to correct the child's grammar. He cites this as evidence for the
innateness of language (The Language Instinct, 1994).
The Cognitive Revolution

The work by Noam Chomsky, and other influential experts such as George Miller at Harvard led
to a revolution in psychology in which a transition began to occur from behaviorism to the
cognitive perspective. This transition came to be known as the cognitive revolution. The
cognitive revolution was crucial to the birth of psycholinguistics, and it turned attention away
from behaviorism toward language and mental processes. Cognitive psychology became the
study of how people perceive, organize, remember and use information. Cognitive psychology
and psycholinguistics converged to study how people produce and comprehend language. There
were a number of contributors the cognitive revolution in addition to Chomsky and Miller. In
1961, Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry did very important work in studying and initiating
human split-brain research. Claude Elwood Shannon and Norbert Weaver developed their
information theory which involved quantifying information. Eric Lenneberg also made a
contribution, in his book, Biological Foundations of Language (1967), he advanced the theory
that there is a critical period of language. David Rumelhart and James McClelland came out with
a book called Parallel Distributed Processing (1986), in which they made models of cognition
testable by using computer based connectionist models.

Conclusion

Overall, many important people contributed to the history of psycholinguistics. Many important
theories were put forth, and much progress was made regarding the understanding we have about
language and how we think about it. The different schools of thought provided a framework for
how thinkers shaped their thoughts and ideas. While the thinkers did not always agree with each
other, there was always stimulating discussions and we furthered our knowledge of the subject as
a result of these debates. Brilliant men such as Wundt, Piaget, Chomsky and many others have
changed the way we think about language in a psychological context. The cognitive revolution
was a time of the breakthrough of many fresh ideas that enlightened us even more. In the future,
there will surely be many more breakthroughs that we have not even pondered yet.

Computational linguistics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the statistical or rule-based

modeling of natural language from a computational perspective, as well as the study of
appropriate computational approaches to linguistic questions.
Traditionally, computational linguistics was performed by computer scientists who had
specialized in the application of computers to the processing of a natural language. Today,
computational linguists often work as members of interdisciplinary teams, which can include
regular linguists, experts in the target language, and computer scientists. In general,
computational linguistics draws upon the involvement of linguists, computer scientists, experts
in artificial intelligence, mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, cognitive scientists, cognitive
psychologists, psycholinguists, anthropologists and neuroscientists, among others.
Computational linguistics has theoretical and applied components. Theoretical computational
linguistics focuses on issues in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science, and applied
computational linguistics focuses on the practical outcome of modeling human language use. [1]
The Association for Computational Linguistics defines computational linguistics as:
...the scientific study of language from a computational perspective. Computational linguists are
interested in providing computational models of various kinds of linguistic phenomena.[2]
Orgin

Computational linguistics is often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually
was present before the development of artificial intelligence. Computational linguistics
originated with efforts in the United States in the 1950s to use computers to automatically
translate texts from foreign languages, particularly Russian scientific journals, into English.

When machine translation (also known as mechanical translation) failed to yield accurate
translations right away, automated processing of human languages was recognized as far more
complex than had originally been assumed. Computational linguistics was born as the name of
the new field of study devoted to developing algorithms and software for intelligently processing
language data. The term "computational linguistics" itself was first coined by David Hays,
founding member of both the Association for Computational Linguistics and the International
Committee on Computational Linguistics.[6] When artificial intelligence came into existence in
the 1960s, the field of computational linguistics became that sub-division of artificial intelligence
dealing with human-level comprehension and production of natural languages.[citation needed]
In order to translate one language into another, it was observed that one had to understand
the grammar of both languages, including both morphology (the grammar of word forms)
and syntax (the grammar of sentence structure). In order to understand syntax, one had to also
understand the semantics and the lexicon (or 'vocabulary'), and even something of
the pragmatics of language use. Thus, what started as an effort to translate between languages
evolved into an entire discipline devoted to understanding how to represent and process natural
languages using computers.[7]

Applications
Modern computational linguistics is often a combination of studies in computer science and
programming, math, particularly statistics, language structures, and natural language processing.
Combined, these fields most often lead to the development of systems that can recognize speech
and perform some task based on that speech. Examples include speech recognition software,
such as Apple's Siri feature, spellcheck tools, speech synthesis programs, which are often used to
demonstrate pronunciation or help the disabled, and machine translation programs and websites,
such as Google Translate.[36]
Computational linguistics can be especially helpful in situations involving social media and
the Internet. For example, filters in chatrooms or on website searches require computational
linguistics. Chat operators often use filters to identify certain words or phrases and deem them
inappropriate so that users cannot submit them.[36] Another example of using filters is on
websites. Schools use filters so that websites with certain keywords are blocked from children to
view. There are also many programs in which parents use Parental controls to put content filters
in place. Computational linguists can also develop programs that group and organize content
through Social media mining. An example of this is Twitter, in which programs can group tweets
by subject or keywords.[37] Computational linguistics is also used for document retrieval and
clustering. When you do an online search, documents and websites are retrieved based on the
frequency of unique labels related to what you typed into a search engine. For instance, if you
search "red, large, four-wheeled vehicle," with the intention of finding pictures of a red truck, the
search engine will still find the information desired by matching words such as "four-wheeled"
with "car".[38]

Subfields
Computational linguistics can be divided into major areas depending upon the medium of the
language being processed, whether spoken or textual; and upon the task being performed,
whether analyzing language (recognition) or synthesizing language (generation).
Speech recognition and speech synthesis deal with how spoken language can be understood or
created using computers. Parsing and generation are sub-divisions of computational linguistics
dealing respectively with taking language apart and putting it together. Machine translation
remains the sub-division of computational linguistics dealing with having computers translate
between languages. The possibility of automatic language translation, however, has yet to be
realized and remains a notoriously hard branch of computational linguistics.[39]

Approaches
Just as computational linguistics can be performed by experts in a variety of fields and through a
wide assortment of departments, so too can the research fields broach a diverse range of topics.
The following sections discuss some of the literature available across the entire field broken into
four main area of discourse: developmental linguistics, structural linguistics, linguistic
production, and linguistic comprehension.
Developmental approaches
Language is a cognitive skill which develops throughout the life of an individual. This
developmental process has been examined using a number of techniques, and a computational
approach is one of them. Human language development does provide some constraints which
make it harder to apply a computational method to understanding it. For instance,
during language acquisition, human children are largely only exposed to positive evidence.
[14]
This means that during the linguistic development of an individual, only evidence for what is
a correct form is provided, and not evidence for what is not correct. This is insufficient
information for a simple hypothesis testing procedure for information as complex as language,
[15]
and so provides certain boundaries for a computational approach to modeling language
development and acquisition in an individual.
Attempts have been made to model the developmental process of language acquisition in
children from a computational angle, leading to both statistical grammars and connectionist
models.[16] Work in this realm has also been proposed as a method to explain the evolution of
language through history. Using models, it has been shown that languages can be learned with a
combination of simple input presented incrementally as the child develops better memory and
longer attention span.[17] This was simultaneously posed as a reason for the long developmental
period of human children.[17] Both conclusions were drawn because of the strength of
the artificial neural network which the project created.
The ability of infants to develop language has also been modeled using robots[18] in order to test
linguistic theories. Enabled to learn as children might, a model was created based on
an affordance model in which mappings between actions, perceptions, and effects were created
and linked to spoken words. Crucially, these robots were able to acquire functioning word-to-
meaning mappings without needing grammatical structure, vastly simplifying the learning
process and shedding light on information which furthers the current understanding of linguistic
development. It is important to note that this information could only have been empirically tested
using a computational approach.
As our understanding of the linguistic development of an individual within a lifetime is
continually improved using neural networks and learning robotic systems, it is also important to
keep in mind that languages themselves change and develop through time. Computational
approaches to understanding this phenomenon have unearthed very interesting information.
Using the Price Equation and Pólya urn dynamics, researchers have created a system which not
only predicts future linguistic evolution, but also gives insight into the evolutionary history of
modern-day languages.[19] This modeling effort achieved, through computational linguistics,
what would otherwise have been impossible.
It is clear that the understanding of linguistic development in humans as well as throughout
evolutionary time has been fantastically improved because of advances in computational
linguistics. The ability to model and modify systems at will affords science an ethical method of
testing hypotheses that would otherwise be intractable.
Structural approaches
In order to create better computational models of language, an understanding of language's
structure is crucial. To this end, the English language has been meticulously studied using
computational approaches to better understand how the language works on a structural level. One
of the most important pieces of being able to study linguistic structure is the availability of large
linguistic corpora, or samples. This grants computational linguists the raw data necessary to run
their models and gain a better understanding of the underlying structures present in the vast
amount of data which is contained in any single language. One of the most cited English
linguistic corpora is the Penn Treebank.[20] Derived from widely-different sources, such as IBM
computer manuals and transcribed telephone conversations, this corpus contains over 4.5 million
words of American English. This corpus has been primarily annotated using part-of-
speech tagging and syntactic bracketing and has yielded substantial empirical observations
related to language structure.[21]
Theoretical approaches to the structure of languages have also been developed. These works
allow computational linguistics to have a framework within which to work out hypotheses that
will further the understanding of the language in a myriad of ways. One of the original
theoretical theses on internalization of grammar and structure of language proposed two types of
models.[15] In these models, rules or patterns learned increase in strength with the frequency of
their encounter.[15] The work also created a question for computational linguists to answer: how
does an infant learn a specific and non-normal grammar (Chomsky Normal Form) without
learning an overgeneralized version and getting stuck?[15] Theoretical efforts like these set the
direction for research to go early in the lifetime of a field of study, and are crucial to the growth
of the field.
Structural information about languages allows for the discovery and implementation of similarity
recognition between pairs of text utterances.[22] For instance, it has recently been proven that
based on the structural information present in patterns of human discourse, conceptual recurrence
plots can be used to model and visualize trends in data and create reliable measures of similarity
between natural textual utterances.[22] This technique is a strong tool for further probing the
structure of human discourse. Without the computational approach to this question, the vastly
complex information present in discourse data would have remained inaccessible to scientists.
Information regarding the structural data of a language is available for English as well as other
languages, such as Japanese.[23] Using computational methods, Japanese sentence corpora were
analyzed and a pattern of log-normality was found in relation to sentence length.[23] Though the
exact cause of this lognormality remains unknown, it is precisely this sort of intriguing
information which computational linguistics is designed to uncover. This information could lead
to further important discoveries regarding the underlying structure of Japanese, and could have
any number of effects on the understanding of Japanese as a language. Computational linguistics
allows for very exciting additions to the scientific knowledge base to happen quickly and with
very little room for doubt.
Without a computational approach to the structure of linguistic data, much of the information
that is available now would still be hidden under the vastness of data within any single language.
Computational linguistics allows scientists to parse huge amounts of data reliably and efficiently,
creating the possibility for discoveries unlike any seen in most other approaches.
Production approaches
The production of language is equally as complex in the information it provides and the
necessary skills which a fluent producer must have. That is to say, comprehension is only half
the problem of communication. The other half is how a system produces language, and
computational linguistics has made some very interesting discoveries in this area.
In a now famous paper published in 1950 Alan Turing proposed the possibility that machines
might one day have the ability to "think". As a thought experiment for what might define the
concept of thought in machines, he proposed an "imitation test" in which a human subject has
two text-only conversations, one with a fellow human and another with a machine attempting to
respond like a human. Turing proposes that if the subject cannot tell the difference between the
human and the machine, it may be concluded that the machine is capable of thought.[24]Today
this test is known as the Turing test and it remains an influential idea in the area of artificial
intelligence.
One of the earliest and best known examples of a computer program designed to converse
naturally with humans is the ELIZA program developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966.
The program emulated a Rogerian psychotherapist when responding to written statements and
questions posed by a user. It appeared capable of understanding what was said to it and
responding intelligently, but in truth it simply followed a pattern matching routine that relied on
only understanding a few keywords in each sentence. Its responses were generated by
recombining the unknown parts of the sentence around properly translated versions of the known
words. For example, in the phrase "It seems that you hate me" ELIZA understands "you" and
"me" which matches the general pattern "you [some words] me", allowing ELIZA to update the
words "you" and "me" to "I" and "you" and replying "What makes you think I hate you?". In this
example ELIZA has no understanding of the word "hate", but it is not required for a logical
response in the context of this type of psychotherapy.
Some projects are still trying to solve the problem which first started computational linguistics
off as its own field in the first place. However, the methods have become more refined and
clever, and consequently the results generated by computational linguists have become more
enlightening. In an effort to improve computer translation, several models have been compared,
including hidden Markov models, smoothing techniques, and the specific refinements of those to
apply them to verb [Link] model which was found to produce the most natural
translations of German and French words was a refined alignment model with a first-order
dependence and a fertility model. They also provide efficient training algorithms for the models
presented, which can give other scientists the ability to improve further on their results. This type
of work is specific to computational linguistics, and has applications which could vastly improve
understanding of how language is produced and comprehended by computers.
Work has also been done in making computers produce language in a more naturalistic manner.
Using linguistic input from humans, algorithms have been constructed which are able to modify
a system's style of production based on a factor such as linguistic input from a human, or more
abstract factors like politeness or any of the five main dimensions of personality.[27] This work
takes a computational approach via parameter estimation models to categorize the vast array of
linguistic styles we see across individuals and simplify it for a computer to work in the same
way, making human-computer interaction much more natural.
Text-based interactive approach
Many of the earliest and simplest models of human-computer interaction, such as ELIZA for
example, involve a text-based input from the user to generate a response from the computer. By
this method, words typed by a user trigger the computer to recognize specific patterns and reply
accordingly, through a process known as keyword spotting.
Speech-based interactive approach
Recent technologies have placed more of an emphasis on speech-based interactive systems.
These systems, such as Siri of the iOSoperating system, operate on a similar pattern-recognizing
technique as that of text-based systems, but with the former, the user input is conducted
through speech recognition. This branch of linguistics involves the processing of the user's
speech as sound waves and the interpreting of the acoustics and language patterns in order for the
computer to recognize the input.
Comprehension approaches
Much of the focus of modern computational linguistics is on comprehension. With the
proliferation of the internet and the abundance of easily accessible written human language, the
ability to create a program capable of understanding human language would have many broad
and exciting possibilities, including improved search engines, automated customer service, and
online education.

Second Language Learning

Second language learning is a conscious process where the learning of another language other
than the First Language (L1) takes place. Often confused with bilingualism and multilingualism,
the process has to take place after the first language(s) has already been acquired. Having said
that, Second language learning could also refer to the third, fourth, or fifth (so on and so forth)
language the learner is currently learning.
L1 versus L2
The First Language (L1) refers to the language you learn since you were born (not literally, of
course). It is commonly known as the language(s) of your parents or caregivers, basically, the
person(s) you spend time with the most from you were in your mother’s womb till you are about
5 years old. It is possible to have more than one L1. The Second Language (L2), on the other
hand, refers to the language learned after the L1 has been acquired. A language can only be
referred to as your L2 if the learning occurs after you have acquired your L1.

Language teaching methodologies [important]

The Direct Method

In this method the teaching is done entirely in the target language. The learner is not allowed to
use his or her mother tongue. Grammar rules are avoided and there is emphasis on good
pronunciation.

Grammar-translation

Learning is largely by translation to and from the target language. Grammar rules are to be
memorized and long lists of vocabulary learned by heart. There is little or no emphasis placed on
developing oral ability.

Audio-lingual

The theory behind this method is that learning a language means acquiring habits. There is much
practice of dialogues of every situations. New language is first heard and extensively drilled
before being seen in its written form.

The structural approach

This method sees language as a complex of grammatical rules which are to be learned one at a
time in a set order. So for example the verb "to be" is introduced and practiced before the present
continuous tense which uses "to be" as an auxiliary.

Suggestopedia

The theory underlying this method is that a language can be acquired only when the learner is
receptive and has no mental blocks. By various methods it is suggested to the student that the
language is easy - and in this way the mental blocks to learning are removed.

Total Physical Response (TPR)

TPR works by having the learner respond to simple commands such as "Stand up", "Close your
book", "Go to the window and open it." The method stresses the importance of aural
comprehension.

Communicative language teaching (CLT)

The focus of this method is to enable the learner to communicate effectively and appropriately in
the various situations she would be likely to find herself in. The content of CLT courses are
functions such as inviting, suggesting, complaining or notions such as the expression of time,
quantity, location.

The Silent Way

This is so called because the aim of the teacher is to say as little as possible in order that the
learner can be in control of what he wants to say. No use is made of the mother tongue.

Community Language Learning

In this method attempts are made to build strong personal links between the teacher and student
so that there are no blocks to learning. There is much talk in the mother tongue which is
translated by the teacher for repetition by the student.

Immersion

This corresponds to a great extent to the situation we have at our school. ESL students are
immersed in the English language for the whole of the school day and expected to learn math,
science, humanities etc. through the medium of the target language, English.

Immigrant students who attend local schools find themselves in an immersion situation; for
example refugee children from Bosnia attending German schools, or Puerto Ricans in American
schools. .

Task-based language learning

The focus of the teaching is on the completion of a task which in itself is interesting to the
learners. Learners use the language they already have to complete the task and there is little
correction of errors.

(This is the predominant method in middle school ESL teaching at Frankfurt International
School. The tasks are subsumed in a major topic that is studied for a number of weeks. In the
topic of ecology, for example, students are engaged in a number of tasks culminating in a poster
presentation to the rest of the class. The tasks include reading, searching the internet, listening to
taped material, selecting important vocabulary to teach other students etc.)

The Natural Approach

This approach, propounded by Professor S. Krashen, stresses the similarities between learning
the first and second languages. There is no correction of mistakes. Learning takes place by the
students being exposed to language that is comprehensible or made comprehensible to them.

The Lexical Syllabus

This approach is based on a computer analysis of language which identifies the most common
(and hence most useful) words in the language and their various uses. The syllabus teaches these
words in broadly the order of their frequency, and great emphasis is placed on the use of
authentic materials.