Language Flashcards

1
Q

What is language?

A
  • A shared symbolic system for purposeful communication
  • Symbolic: There are units to reference something else
  • Shared: It is common among a group of people
  • Purposeful: To communicate and translate thoughts
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2
Q

When does morphology (complexity) in language decrease?

A

With languages spoken by more people

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3
Q

What are lexical tones determined by?

A
  • partly determines by climate
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4
Q

What is the difference in language between warmer and colder climates?

A
  • Tonal languages spoken in warmer climates (meaning through differences in tone)
  • colder climates have more words for snow or ice
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5
Q

What is aphasia?

A
  • Impaired language function, usually from brain injury
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6
Q

What are the types of aphasia?

A
  • Broca’s non fluent aphasia
  • Wernicke’s fluent aphasia
  • Conduction aphasia
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7
Q

What is Broca’s aphasia?

A
  • Expressive aphasia
  • Intact language comprehension
  • Speech is halted and difficult to produce (mostly just nouns and verbs)
  • Typically writing is affected in a similar manner
  • problems generating all forms of language (depends on amount of damage)
  • Impaired speech production and articulation
  • problems expressing and producing speech
  • patient Tan
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8
Q

Who is patient Tan?

A
  • Broca’s aphasia
  • Could only speak one syllable (Tan)
  • Still tried to communicate via gestures, tone, inflection
  • Large lesion in the left inferior frontal gyrus (broca’s area)
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9
Q

What is Wernicke’s aphasia?

A
  • Posterior superior temporal lobe damage (typically left hemisphere)
  • Written and spoken comprehension is affected
  • Language content is not meaningful nor comprehensible
  • speech can be produced but content has no meaning
  • a symptom is the use of paraphasias
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10
Q

What are paraphasias?

A
  • language errors or misuse of words
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11
Q

What are the types of paraphasias?

A
  • verbal
  • phonemic (literal)
  • neologisms
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12
Q

What is verbal paraphasia?

A
  • substituting a word with something semantically-related
  • Shares meaning with intended word
  • ex: Swapping term brother with sister
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13
Q

What is phonemic paraphasia?

A
  • literal
  • swapping or adding speech sounds
  • Shares sounds with intended word
  • ex: Calling Crab Salad: Sad Cralad
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14
Q

What are neologisms?

A
  • using a made-up word
  • ex: mansplain, situantionship
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15
Q

What is conduction aphasia?

A
  • Neural pathway from between Broca’s and Wernicke’s area
  • Reminds us language depends on a network of brain regions
  • Speech production and comprehension intact
  • Impaired repetition
  • Load dependent
  • amount of damage determines problems
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16
Q

What is the brain lateralization for language?

A
  • Language is often considered left lateralized
  • Lateralization not fully understood nor linked to handedness
  • New data indicating up to 70% of left-handed people demonstrate left hemisphere language dominance
  • Broader aspects of language are supported by the right hemisphere
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17
Q

What is the right hemisphere’s role in language?

A
  • Prosody and pitch to convey intonation, mood, attitude, gestural communication and overall comprehension
  • Right hemisphere seems to be important for higher-order non-literal language use
  • Example: Speech prosody (the music of language) - the flow of how we say things
  • Right-hemisphere lesions disrupt ability to interpret and express prosody of speech
  • Problems understanding the emotion of a phrase
  • Problems understanding sarcastic speech
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18
Q

A patient comes to the clinic with some language problems. You ask this person to name some common items. For example, you point to a pair of shoes for them to name and they respond “feet-houses”. What type of aphasia would you think this person has?

a. None, they are simply using a cultural neologism
b. Broca’s
c. Wernicke’s
d. Conduction aphasia

A

c

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19
Q

Are we pre-equipped with language capabilities according to the nuturist/behaviourist view?

A
  • No. Language is acquired through the same mechanisms as skill learning.
  • Language acquisition is skill or associative learning
  • Explicit training of language
  • ## Trial and error reinforcement as well as modelling other people shapes language
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20
Q

Are we pre-equipped with language capabilities according to the naturist view?

A
  • Chomsky
  • Yes. We are born with the innate capacity to learn language.
  • Language is not stimulus dependent or determined by reinforcement
  • Language is complex and acquired rapidly and allows us to understand and speak what we have not heard before
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21
Q

What is the innateness hypothesis?

A
  • Grammar, syntactic structure, is separate from semantic meaning and cognition
  • Right grammar but no meaning
  • We are born with principles of grammar
  • Language Acquisition Device (LAD): Entity that supports language (hardwired into brain)
  • Universal Grammar: A part of the LAD that includes rules for all languages
  • Children only need to learn language-specific aspects to put “on top” of Universal Grammar
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22
Q

What are the support for the innateness hypothesis?

A
  • convergence
  • uniformity
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23
Q

What is convergence?

A
  • Children are exposed to different learning situations, yet converge on the same grammar
  • suggesting pre existing set of grammatical rules
24
Q

What is uniformity?

A
  • Go through same stages, in the same order, when learning language
  • 0-3 months: cooing
  • 4-8 months: babbling
  • 8 months-1 year: single words
  • 1-2 years: two word phrases
  • 2-3 years: explosion of word knowledge; 2-3 word telegraphic speech
  • 3-4 years: complex multiword speech
25
Q

What is the poverty of the stimulus argument?

A
  • The linguistic environment of a child is not sufficient enough to allow that child to learn a language via a reinforcement, rules or imitation
  • A child doesn’t hear enough language samples to acquire all language, doesn’t have enough opportunities to learn from mistakes
  • There must be something innate about language
  • Can’t be exposed enough to learn everything
26
Q

What is evidence that rules are not all innate?

A
  • the environment is not so impoverished
  • Adult reformulations of children’s speech target the structure but not meaning
  • Children extract regularities from experiences to form rules
27
Q

A supporter of the innateness hypothesis of language would consider a behaviorist is incorrect in thinking that
language ______.

a. is learned through feedback for “correct” or “incorrect” language
b. cannot be learned through reinforcement for “correct” or “incorrect” language
c. is an innate capability
d. only developed in humans

A

a

28
Q

What are psycholinguistics?

A
  • The building blocks of language
  • phonemes
  • morphemes and words
  • syntax
  • semantics
29
Q

What are phonemes?

A
  • smallest linguistic unit
  • d, o, g
  • english has a few dozen phonemes to produce morphemes
30
Q

What are morphemes?

A
  • the smallest meaningful units of language
  • dog
31
Q

What is syntax?

A
  • rules that govern how words are arranged in a sentence
  • grammar
32
Q

What are semantics?

A
  • the meaning
33
Q

What is language comprehension?

A
  • Understanding the message – semantics – from language
  • Resolving types of linguistic ambiguity
  • Use context and top-down processing
34
Q

What are the types of linguistic ambiguity?

A
  • phonological
  • lexical
  • syntactic or parsing
35
Q

What is phonological ambiguity?

A
  • within sounds
  • phonemes
  • Determining phonemes depends on audio signal, which is often noisy
  • You use context and internal knowledge of speech sounds to “hear”
  • We use more than just auditory input for language comprehension
36
Q

What is lexical ambiguity?

A
  • within a word
  • A single word form can refer to more than one different concept
  • homophone
  • > 80% of common English words have more than one dictionary entry
  • Basis of puns
37
Q

What are homophones?

A
  • words that sound the same with different meanings
  • The correct meaning is resolved by sentence context
38
Q

What is the cross modal priming task?

A
  • When did lexical decision SHORTLY after (short SOA) hearing the word bug: both meanings were active: Bug primes spy (context inappropriate) and ant (context related)
  • When did lexical decision at a DELAY (long SOA) from hearing the word bug: only context biased meaning active: Bug primes only ant (context related)
  • Both meanings initially retrieved, Contextually inappropriate meaning is quickly discarded
39
Q

What is syntactic and parsing ambiguity?

A
  • within a sentence
  • Sentence parsing: dividing a sentence into words and identifying them as nouns, articles, verbs
  • Ambiguity can come because we hear sentences incrementally or There is often more than one way parse a sentence (words can be nouns and verbs)
  • garden path sentence
40
Q

What is a garden path sentence?

A
  • Sentences with multiple syntax structures
  • Interpreting a word one way leads to faulty interpretation
41
Q

What are the 2 theories of sentence parsing?

A
  • syntax fist
  • constraint based model
42
Q

What is the syntax first (garden path) approach?

A
  • We use grammatical rules to interpret a sentence as we are hear/read it
  • Local or specific
  • We parse with only grammar principles, in one direction, may get to the end and “oops” wrong meaning, so must go back
43
Q

What are the constraint based models?

A
  • We use non-grammatical information to help interpret sentences and resolve any ambiguity
  • Global or holistic
  • We use more than grammar to parse sentences
  • Non-grammatical information can be used (semantic and thematic context, expectation, frequency)
44
Q

What are linguistic universalists?

A
  • Language and thought are independent
45
Q

What is linguistic relativity?

A
  • Language and thought are interconnected
  • Sapir Whorf Hypothesis
  • Language changes how we think and perceive
  • People who speak different languages think differently
46
Q

Does grammatical gender affect thoughts?

A
  • when an object is “female” people describe it with more stereotypical words
47
Q

Colours across languages

A
  • Russian language discriminates between lighter (“goluboy”) and darker (“siniy) blues, not English
  • English and Russian speakers performed a color discrimination task with blue colors
  • Task with no memory or language demands
  • Russian speakers faster for colors that fell into different blue categories than those from the same blue category. English speakers showed no effect
  • Language affects perception
48
Q

Inconsistent findings

A
  • English Language speakers: 11 words for color
  • Dani tribe in Indonesia: 2 words for color
  • Test 1: Named color patches: two groups performed this differently
  • Test 2: Match /categorize learned color patches, no group difference
  • Suggests accessing color category without language labels does not change across language
49
Q

Reading

A

printed word –> mental dictionary (lexicon) –> speech

50
Q

What are the types of dyslexia?

A
  • surface
  • phonological
51
Q

What is surface dyslexia?

A
  • Reads letter-by-letter, sounds out words
  • Difficulty matching words to a mental dictionary
  • Impaired at producing irregular words (25% of English words), like ‘Comb” or “Thought”
52
Q

What is phonological dyslexia?

A
  • Reads by comparing whole words to mental dictionary (lexicon)
  • Difficulty reading letter by letter, sounding out words
  • Impaired at reading non-words or new words
53
Q

What route does phonological dyslexia use?

A

printed word –> mental dictionary (lexicon) –> speech

54
Q

What route does surface dyslexia use?

A

printed word –> grapheme-phoneme conversion (letter by letter) –> speech

55
Q

Cheugy is a newer word in the English language, meaning “the opposite of trendy”. Francis encounters this word whilst scrolling through Tik Tok and has a very difficult time reading it. If Francis had dyslexia, he would likely have _____ and have problems with the ___ route to reading.

a. Surface; grapheme-phoneme
b. Surface; mental dictionary
c. Phonological; grapheme-phoneme
d. Phonological; mental dictionary

A

c