Introduction to Main Terms

Tutor/a: Cristian Felipe Canon

Estudiante: Edinson Scarpeta Meneses.

Codigo: 1118362607

Grupo: 518017_75

Universidad Nacional Abierta y a Distancia UNAD

Escuela Ciencias de la Educación

Licenciatura en lenguas extrangeras con enfasis en ingles

Introduction to Linguistics 518017

Florencia- Caquetá

14/02/2020
Activities to Develop

1.Watch the video “Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain” By Steven

Pinker found in the Course Contents, UNIT 1, in the Knowledge Environment.
2.Once you have understood and internalized the contents, answer the following five
questions:
2.1. When people wants to define Language, it is common that they easily confuse it
with other concepts such as grammar, written language or thought; in the video,
Professor Pinker talks about it, please, explain in your words, how or why Language
is not exactly those other things.
Because, it is the characteristic that clearly distinguishes humans from other species, for
human cooperation; share knowledge or coordinate actions through words and not the set of
the words, phrases and sentences.

2.2. In a very concise form and according to the video, say what language is.
According to the video, the language used by Professor Pinker is English.

2.3. According to the video, please explain what concept is developed with the famous
Noan Chomsky’s phrase “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.
Any English speaker can instantly recognize that it conforms to English syntax patterns.

2.4. What is the basic explanation for the fact that a person speaks a foreign language
with a specific accent?
When someone acquires English as a foreign language or acquires a foreign language in
general, he transfers the phonology rules of his first language and applies it to his second
language and we have a word for that; We call it "accent."

2.5. Despite computational linguistics have had great advances, what have been some
typical linguistic difficulties to computers process human language?

Well, there are two main contributors. One of them is the fact that each false, each voice or
consonant actually sells very differently, phenomena of what comes before and what comes
after, a phenomenon sometimes called co-articulation and the other reason why the Voice
recognition is such a difficult problem is the lack of segmentation.
 3. Create three more questions and give their respective answers also based on the
video

° What about the flow of information in the other direction, that is, from the world to
the brain, the process of speech comprehension?
Speech comprehension turns out to be an extraordinarily complex computational process,
remembering every time you interact with a voicemail menu on a phone or use a dictation
on our computers. For example, a writer, using the latest generation of voice-to-text
systems, dictates the following words on his computer. He dictated "book tour," and came
on the screen as, "a cruelly good MC." is dead. "Now, the dictation systems have improved
better and better, but they still have a way to go before they can duplicate a human
stenographer."
° What is the evidence that children are born with a universal grammar?
Well, surprisingly, Chomsky did not propose this by actually studying children in the
laboratory or children at home, but through a more abstract argument called "Poverty of
entry." That is, if you look at what goes into a child's ears and look at the talent with which
they end up as adults, there is a great chasm between them that can only be completed
assuming that the child has a lot of knowledge of the way in which language it works now.
° Why do linguists insist that language should be composed of structural sentence
rules?
(1.) The rules allow open creativity. Well, for starters, that helps explain the main
phenomenon we want to explain, mainly the open creativity of language.
(2.) The rules allow the expression of an unknown meaning. It allows us to identify
unknown meanings.
(3.) The rules allow the production of a large number of combinations. In addition, the
number of different thoughts we can have through the combinatorial power of grammar is
not only huge, but, in a technical sense, it is infinite.
References

[Big Think]. (2012, October 6). Steven Pinker: Linguistics as a Window to Understanding
the Brain