Which of the following concepts refers to the fact that letters represent the sounds of a language?

Language in Dementing Diseases

Language impairment is commonly seen in patients with dementia. Despite considerable variability from patient to patient, two patterns of language dissolution can be described. The first, the common presentation of AD, involves early loss of memory and general cognitive deterioration. In these patients, mental status examinations are most remarkable for deficits in short-term memory, insight, and judgment, but language impairments can be found in naming and in discourse, with impoverished language content and loss of abstraction and metaphor. The mechanics of language—grammatical construction of sentences, receptive vocabulary, auditory comprehension, repetition, and oral reading—tend to remain preserved until later stages. By aphasia testing, patients with early AD have anomic aphasia. In later stages, language functions become more obviously impaired. In terms of the components of language mentioned earlier in this chapter, the semantic aspects of language tend to deteriorate first, then syntax, and finally phonology. Reading and writing—the last-learned language functions—are among the first to decline. Auditory comprehension later becomes deficient, whereas repetition and articulation remain normal. The language profile may then resemble that of transcortical sensory or Wernicke aphasia. In terminal stages, speech is reduced to the expression of simple biological wants; eventually, even muteness can develop. By this time, most patients are institutionalized or bedridden.

The second pattern of language dissolution in dementia, less common than the first, involves the gradual onset of a progressive aphasia, often without other cognitive deterioration. Auditory comprehension is involved early in the illness, and specific aphasic symptoms are evident, such as paraphasic or nonfluent speech, misnaming, and errors of repetition. These deficits worsen gradually, mimicking the course of a brain tumor or mass lesion rather than a typical dementia (Grossman et al., 1996; Mesulam, 2001, 2003; Mesulam et al., 2014). The syndrome is referred to as “primary progressive aphasia (PPA).” MRI or CT scans may show focal atrophy in the left perisylvian region, while EEG studies may show focal slowing. PET has shown prominent areas of decreased metabolism in the left hemisphere regions.

Three variants of PPA are commonly recognized (Gorno-Tempini et al.,2011). Progressive nonfluent aphasia involves deficits in speech production and grammar, resembling Broca aphasia. Semantic dementia (Hodges and Patterson, 2007; Snowden et al., 1989) is a progressive fluent aphasia with impaired naming and loss of understanding of even single words. In reading, these patients may have a surface alexia pattern. The third variant of PPA, logopenic progressive aphasia, involves anomia and some repetition difficulty, with intact single-word comprehension (Gorno-Tempini et al., 2008). These three patterns of PPA are associated with different patterns of atrophy on MRI and hypometabolism on PET: progressive nonfluent aphasia is associated with left frontal and insular atrophy; semantic dementia is associated with bilateral anterior temporal atrophy; logopenic progressive aphasia is associated with left posterior temporal and inferior parietal atrophy (Diehl et al., 2004; Josephs et al., 2010). Progressive nonfluent aphasia and semantic dementia usually reflect different forms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), whereas logopenic progressive aphasia is most commonly due to Alzheimer pathology with an atypical anatomical distribution. Progressive nonfluent aphasias are often tauopathies, in familial cases related to mutations on chromosome 17 (Heutink et al., 1997), while semantic dementia may be related to ubiquitin deposition and mutations in the progranulin gene, with production of TDP-43 (Baker et al., 2006; Cruts et al., 2006). Another neurodegenerative diseases that can present with language abnormalities or PPA is corticobasal degeneration (Kertesz et al., 2000,Litvan et al., 1998). Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease can present with a rapidly progressive aphasia.

Phonology deals with sound structure in individual languages: the way distinctions in sound are used to differentiate linguistic items, and the ways in which the sound structure of the ‘same’ element varies as a function of the other sounds in its context. Phonology and phonetics both involve sound in natural language, but differ in that phonetics deals with sounds from a language-independent point of view, while phonology studies the ways in which they are distributed and deployed within particular languages. Phonology originated with the insight that much observable phonetic detail is irrelevant or predictable within the system of a given language. This led to the positing of phonemes as minimal contrastive sound units in language, each composed (according to many writers) of a collection of distinctive features of contrast. Later work showed that a focus on surface contrast ultimately was misguided, and generative phonology replaced this with a conception of phonology as an aspect of speakers' knowledge of linguistic structure. Important research problems have involved the relation between phonological and phonetic form; the mutual interaction of phonological regularities; the relation of phonological structure to other components of grammar; and the appropriateness of rules vs. constraints as formulations of phonological regularities.

Language

Language is one of the most critical and complex cognitive functions and can be broadly divided intoreceptive (auditory comprehension/understanding) and expressive (speech and language production and/or communication) functions. Children who primarily experience receptive language problems may have difficulty understanding verbal information, following instructions and explanations, and interpreting what they hear. Expressive language weaknesses can result from problems with speech production and/or problems with higher-level language development.Speech production difficulties include oromotor problems affecting articulation, verbal fluency, and naming. Some children have trouble with sound sequencing within words. Others find it difficult to regulate the rhythm or prosody of their verbal output. Their speech may be dysfluent, hesitant, and inappropriate in tone. Problems with word retrieval can result in difficulty finding exact words when needed (as in a class discussion) or substituting definitions for words (circumlocution).

The basic components of language includephonology (ability to process and integrate the individual sounds in words),semantics (understanding the meaning of words),syntax (mastery of word order and grammatical rules),discourse (processing and producing paragraphs and passages),metalinguistics (ability to think about and analyze how language works and draw inferences), andpragmatics (social understanding and application of language). Children who evidence higher-level expressive language impediments have trouble formulating sentences, using grammar acceptably, and organizing spoken (and possibly written) narratives.

To one degree or another, all academic skills are taught largely through language, and thus it is not surprising that children who experience language dysfunction often experience problems with academic performance. In fact, some studies suggest that up to 80% of children who present with a specific learning disorder also experience language-based weaknesses. Additionally, the role of language in executive functioning cannot be understated, since language serves to guide cognition and behavior.

Introduction

Phonology refers to the sound system of a language. In general, the basic unit of phonology is the phoneme, which is an individual speech sound (such as /p/) that can often be represented by a single grapheme, or letter (such as the letter p). There are, however, exceptions, such as the sound /sh/, which is represented by two graphemes (sh). Each natural language has a different set of possible sounds that can be combined to create words. Early in speech and language development, children's vocalizations are indistinguishable, regardless of their linguistic environment. Ultimately, however, they develop a repertoire of sounds and rules for their combination that are specific to the language to which they are predominantly exposed. Phonological processing is necessary for both comprehension and production of speech and language. It is also critically involved in processing written word forms for reading and spelling. Thus, individuals with phonological processing disorders may present with impaired spoken as well as written language skills.

Stage III: Grammar and Phonology

Grammar and phonology are the basis for the structure of spoken language. Grammar is the ordering of words into normal sentence structure, that is, subject and predicate. It also includes the use of function words such as prepositions and conjunctions. Phonology refers to the selection of individual sounds and syllables to form spoken words. Agrammatism leads to telegraphic speech, composed of single words or phrases, often omitting connector words. Phonologic errors lead to errors in particular sounds within words, also known as phonemic paraphasic errors. For example, saying “aminal” for “animal,” or “nucular” for “nuclear.” These types of errors are common in progressive nonfluent aphasia.

12.1 Introduction

Phonology is typically defined as “the study of speech sounds of a language or languages, and the laws governing them,”1 particularly the laws governing the composition and combination of speech sounds in language. This definition reflects a segmental bias in the historical development of the field and we can offer a more general definition: the study of the knowledge and representations of the sound system of human languages. From a neurobiological or cognitive neuroscience perspective, one can consider phonology as the study of the mental model for human speech. In this brief review, we restrict ourselves to spoken language, although analogous concerns hold for signed language (Brentari, 2011). Moreover, we limit the discussion to what we consider the most important aspects of phonology. These include: (i) the mappings between three systems of representation: action, perception, and long-term memory; (ii) the fundamental components of speech sounds (i.e., distinctive features); (iii) the laws of combinations of speech sounds, both adjacent and long-distance; and (iv) the chunking of speech sounds into larger units, especially syllables.

To begin, consider the word-form “glark.” Given this string of letters, native speakers of English will have an idea of how to pronounce it and what it would sound like if another person said it. They would have little idea, if any, of what it means.2 The meaning of a word is arbitrary given its form, and it could mean something else entirely. Consequently, we can have very specific knowledge about a word’s form from a single presentation and can recognize and repeat such word-forms without much effort, all without knowing its meaning. Phonology studies the regularities of form (i.e., “rules without meaning”) (Staal, 1990) and the laws of combination for speech sounds and their sub-parts.

Any account needs to address the fact that speech is produced by one anatomical system (the mouth) and perceived with another (the auditory system). Our ability to repeat new word-forms, such as “glark,” is evidence that people effortlessly map between these two systems. Moreover, new word-forms can be stored in both short-term and long-term memory. As a result, phonology must confront the conversion of representations (i.e., data structures) between three broad neural systems: memory, action, and perception (the MAP loop; Poeppel & Idsardi, 2011). Each system has further sub-systems that we ignore here. The basic proposal is that this is done through the use of phonological primitives (features), which are temporally organized (chunked, grouped, coordinated) on at least two fundamental time scales: the feature or segment and the syllable (Poeppel, 2003).

Conclusion

The study of phonology provides a better understanding of the correlation between the motor cortex, cranial nerves, and the articulatory organs. The motor cortex is the control center for speech production, and if there is an insult to this area then controlled speech production will be difficult to retain. This also holds for the cranial nerves, which provide the connection from the motor cortex to the articulatory organs. If speech disorder is the result of a damaged articulatory system, then controlled speech production may be restored to a certain degree.

Tests have been developed to help diagnose probable speech disorder and locate problematic areas of speech production. Neurologists use these tests to diagnose speech disorders such as dysarthria in patients with dementia. Phonology is one of the more concrete areas of language and language problems.

Historical Background and Relationships to Other Approaches

Dependency phonology (DP) is an approach to phonological representations. In the paradigmatic dimension of phonological representations (‘segmental structure’), DP offers proposals for a set of ultimate primes or ‘features’ (i.e., the basic building blocks of phonological segments) and for their relationships within segments. In the syntagmatic dimension, DP proposes a set of structures ranging from the syllabic to the utterance level. As such, DP covers the full range of phonological structure, both at the segmental level and the suprasegmental (often called prosodic) level. DP originates from proposals developed in response to Chomsky and Halle (1968) and first published in Anderson and Jones (1974), the goal being to lay the foundations for a dependency-based approach to phonology, which would form a counterpart to Anderson's dependency-based work in syntax and morphology (see Dependency Grammar). As such, DP falls within the realm of dependency grammar, adding a novel perspective in that varieties and applications of this type of grammar are or have been mostly (perhaps almost exclusively) limited to morphosyntax (i.e., constructions with meaning). The idea that phonological and morphosyntactic structure should both be analyzed in terms of a particular construal of dependency relations reflects what Anderson (1985, 1992) has called the structural analogy hypothesis or assumption, viz., the idea that, all things being equal, both articulations of language make use of the same set of formal relations and principles.

The fullest statement of DP to date can be found in Anderson and Ewen (1987), a work that summarizes and elaborates more than a decade and a half of theoretical extensions and case studies of the original proposals. The corpus of work in DP both before 1987 and after is not large, the numbers of DP researchers being small compared to those in ‘mainstream generative phonology,’ to be characterized as work that has emerged from, or adopted by Morris Halle and his students and followers. DP work has failed to penetrate this mainstream and has thus been largely ignored. Ironically, many of the leading ideas that transformed linear generative phonology (as in Chomsky and Halle, 1968) into nonlinear generative phonology in the 1970s and 1980s were anticipated in the original DP conception. DP also bears a close resemblance to a model that emerged in the mid-1980s, viz., government phonology (see Government Phonology), which differs from DP in two ways. First, DP, in its explorations of alternative implementations of its basic ideas, has not put as much emphasis as government phonology has put on developing a narrowly defined, restrictive theory of primes and (segmental and suprasegmental) constellations; thus DP is more open ended, often considering alternatives. Second, in the treatment of phonological alternations, DP adopts the perspective of Chomsky and Halle's model in which language-specific (possibly extrinsically ordered) phonological rules map underlying representations into surface representations, whereas government phonology, rejecting language-specific, extrinsically ordered rules, attempts to derive alternations from the interplay between enriched underlying representations and universal principles and parameters.

Phonology – What Is It About?

Phonology is that part of language which comprises the systematic and functional properties of sound in language. The term ‘phonology’ is also used, with the ambiguity also found with other terms used for the description of languages, for the study of those systematic features of sound in language. In this sense, it refers to a subdiscipline of linguistics. It was the first such subdiscipline in which the view of language as an object with particular structural properties was developed successfully. Phonology seeks to discover those systematic properties in the domain of sound structure, and find the regularities and principles behind it both for individual languages and for language in general. More recently, phonology has become considerably diversified and has found a number of applications.

The emphasis on systematicity in the definition above derives from the observation that behind the infinitely varying properties of each token of speech there is an identifiable set of invariant, recurring, more abstract properties. The hypothesis that such a phonological system exists is largely due to Saussure (see Saussure, 1916) and to the phonologists of the early structuralist school, both in Europe (the Prague school and the British school) and in the United States (American structuralism); see the survey by Anderson (1985).

Phonology, from its beginnings, has stood in a close, but sometimes strained, relation to the other science of linguistic sounds, phonetics. Phonetics studies the concrete, physical features of sound in language, often called speech. As the function of phonology is to make linguistic items, which are represented by rather abstract symbols, pronounceable and understandable, it is intimately related to phonetics. But while phonetics is interested in the concrete, continuously varying features of articulation, sound transmission (acoustics), and auditory perception, the subject of phonology is thought to be a set of discrete, symbolic categories which belong to the cognitive, and not the physical, domain. This distinction can be interpreted either as a rather strict and principled one, or as one which is gradual and of less importance.

Generative Phonology

Generative phonology was discussed in several essays since the late 1950s and found its systematic presentation in Chomsky and Halle (1968). The starting point of generative phonology is that phonology is ‘not-autonomous’ from syntax: some phonological processes depend on morphological and syntactic structure. For example, the falling stress contour of blackboard is opposed to the rising one of black board because the former is a compound, hence belongs to the syntactic category N, whereas the latter is a Noun Phrase. Therefore the rules of assignment of stress contour must refer to syntactic surface structure (cf. Chomsky-Halle, 1968: chap. 2.1.). This is the reason why the phonological component is said to ‘interpret’ the syntactic component (see previous section). This strict interrelation assumed between the phonological and the syntactic level is quite contrary to the prohibition of mixing levels typical of post-Bloomfieldian structuralism (cf. section on this topic; Pike had already criticized this principle). Generative phonology considered the autonomous approach as a basic flaw of structuralistic phonology, both European and American, labeled ‘autonomous phonemics’: the notion itself of phoneme as conceived in such frameworks was rejected. Generative phonologists, on the one hand, took advantage from some difficulties in assigning which variants to which phonemes that had already been remarked upon within structuralistic phonology; on the other hand, they maintained that the assumption of an autonomous phonemic level often produces a loss of significant generalizations (the classical case was that of voicing of Russian obstruents, brought forward by Halle). Hence, generative phonology does not assume a phonemic level, but only a phonological representation and a phonetic representation. The former representation is derived from syntactic surface structure by means of readjustment rules; the latter is derived from the phonological representation by means of phonological rules, which apply in a given order. Both phonological and phonetic representations are strings of word and morpheme boundaries and of feature matrices. In such matrices, columns are segments, and rows indicate the value of features. Features of generative phonology only partly overlap with Jakobson's ones (see section on Prague School): their number is higher (about two dozen vs. 12 or 14), and they are mainly defined on an articulatory rather than on an acoustic basis. Features are ‘by definition’ binary at the level of phonological representation, whereas they are not necessarily binary at the phonetic one. An essential part of generative phonology is the so-called theory of markedness (developing, but also essentially modifying, insights of Prague phonology): features, segments and rules are not on the same plane, but some of them are more natural in the sense that they are more frequent, are acquired by the child earlier than others, etc. This greater or lesser naturalness is accounted for in terms of unmarkedness vs. markedness of the concerned entities and rules.

Since the 1970s, alternative approaches to the strictly segmental or linear model of Chomsky–Halle (1968) have been developed. For example, feature values and segments were no more seen as necessarily in one-to-one correspondence, but it was assumed that in some cases a single feature can extend over more than one segment, and, vice versa, a single segment can subsequently take two opposite values of the same feature (autosegmental phonology). It was also assumed that the domain of application of phonological rules is not only determined by the syntactic surface structure and readjustment rules, but also that the phonological representation has a hierarchic structure of its own, not necessarily coinciding with the syntactic one (prosodic phonology).