8. Language Comprehension Flashcards
What is language?
A conventional system of communicative sounds and sometimes written symbols
What theory did Noam Chomsky propose about language acquisition?
Argued that linguistic input that children are exposed to is too limited to provide an answer of its own. Claimed that humans possess a language acquisition device consisting of innate knowledge of grammatical structure.
What evidence was there to support Noam Chomsky’s idea of universal grammar?
Consist of linguistic universals, which are features common to nearly every language
- Eg. distinction between nouns and verbs, word order (SVO, SOV) etc. (English has SVO structure.)
- 35% of languages have SVO structure. 44% have SOV structure
- Subject preceded object in 98% of languages. Makes sense because subject is of central importance and should hence precede the object.
What are two limitations of LAD theory?
1) Linguistic input to which children are exposed to is much richer than Chomsky assumed. Relatively easy for children to understand since mothers and other adults use child-directed speech when speaking to young children.
2) World’s languages differ much more from each other than Chomsky assumed
What are the features of child-directed speech?
involves very short, simple sentences, a slow rate of speaking, use of restricted vocabulary, and extra stress on key words
What does the language bioprogram hypothesis propose about language acquisition?
Proposes that children will create a grammar even if they aren’t exposed to a proper language during their early years.
Provide 2 examples in support of the language bioprogram hypothesis.
1) pidgin languages - Simple pidgin languages lack most grammatical structure. Offspring of pidgin speakers developed Creole, which is fully grammatical.
2) Deaf Nicaraguan children at special schools - Deaf children developed a new system of gestures that expanded into a basic sign language passed on to successive groups of children who joined the school.
What do the pidgin and deaf Nicaraguan children examples suggest about language acquisition in humans?
Suggest that humans have a strong innate motivation to acquire language (including grammatical rules) and to communicate with others.
What are the 4 types of language skills?
Visual: reading, writing
Auditory: speech perception, speaking
What processes does reading involve?
Reading involves perceptual and cognitive processes, as well as a good knowledge of language and grammar
Why is learning English so difficult compared to other languages?
Most languages have a consistent relationship between spelling and sound. So it is easy to predict how an unfamiliar word should be pronounced, and there are few irregular words
English – numerous irregular or exception words, including common words (eg. some, was)
What does the phonics approach involve when learning to read English?
Emphasis on forming connections between letters or groups of letters and the sounds of spoken English. Also involves learning to blend the sounds of letters together to pronounce unknown words.
What are the advantages of encouraging children to pronounce words letter by letter?
Ensures that children attend to the order and identity of letters when reading. This should improve ability to recognise words and spell them correctly.
What process occurs during reading/silent reading?
phonological recoding - important when learning word spellings. So you shouldn’t disrupt children from processing sounds of what they read. Children are often taught explicitly to pronounce each word out loud. Even adults often resort to inner speech when reading a demanding text.
What is a limitation of the phonics approach?
too narrow - only focuses on pronounciation and reading, but neglects processing of meaning, which is the goal of the ‘whole-language approach’. Developing readers must be encouraged to predict and guess the meanings of what they read based on the relevant sentence context.
Why is semantic knowledge important for reading?
Help us read exception words accurately.
Children with good semantic knowledge of words had greater reading accuracy. Especially the case of exception words that couldn’t be read accurately by relying solely on phonics (eg. chaos)
Briefly describe the stages of learning to read.
1) Learn connections between letters in words and sounds
2) learn to use context to assist in identifying individual words
3) learn to relate words to their meanings.
How do our eyes move when we are reading?
Move in saccades - rapid eye movements separated by eye fixations lasting about 250ms
Eyes move backwards in the text sometimes
Information is extracted from text only during each fixation but not during intervening saccades.
Readers typically fixate on about 80% of content words
Only fixate on 20% of function words.
Words not fixated tend to be common, short, or predictable. Words fixated for longer than average are generally rare or unpredictable in sentence context.
What does the E-Z reader model explain how and why people skip words?
Assume that next eye movement is programmed after only part of the processing of the currently fixated word has occurred. Greatly reduces the time between completion of processing on current word and eye movement to the next word.
Argues that readers can attend to two words during a single fixation. (as opposed to serial processing model)
Spare time is used to start processing the next word
Common words – more spare time
Rare words – less spare time
Fixation time on a word is longer when it is preceded by a rare word.
What are homophones?
different spellings but same pronunciation
eg. we BARE BEAR
Provide an evidence to support that we use phonological processing when we read.
“Is this part of a face?”
SNOBS vs KNOWS
Participants made more errors with ‘KNOWS’ because it is homophonic with ‘NOSE’ because they engaged in phonological processing of the words.
What is a phonological neighbourhood? When are two words considered phonological neighbours?
Two words are phonological neighbours if they differ in only one phoneme
(Eg. “gate” has “bait” and “get” as neighbours)
Words with many phonological neighbours have an advantage in visual word recognition tasks. why?
because phonology is used to process these words
How does priming work?
Prime word is presented very shortly before the target word. Prime word is related to target word in terms of spelling, meaning, sound etc. Investigate effects of priming on processing and response towards target word.
Target words were processed faster when preceded by phonologically identical primes (eg. ‘klip’ and ‘clip). What does this suggest?
Suggests that phonological processing occurred rapidly and automatically.
Under what circumstances can words be read without the involvement of phonological processing?
proofreading - visual task involving detecting spelling mistakes and other visual errors. On proofreading tasks, the use of phonology depended on the nature of the words and participants’ reading ability.
poor reading ability & rare words –> access phonology more
In the dual-route model, what are the 2 routes involved in reading?
Direct route (lexical) - Access information about the meaning and sound of the word in an internal lexicon Internal lexicon contains information about sounds, spellings, and meanings of words stored in LTM. Functions as a dictionary. Naming visually presented words typically depends mostly on direct rather than indirect route, because it operates faster. Indirect route (sublexical) - use various rules to convert graphemes to phonemes
What are regular words? What are irregular words?
Regular words – pronunciation is predictable from letters (eg. tint, cat)
Irregular words – pronunciation is not predictable from letters (eg. island, yacht, chaos)
Which route must we use for irregular words to pronounce them accurately?
direct route - need to access internal lexicon.
What happens when you see unfamiliar words/non-words?
Use both pathways.
Lexical pathway first – help u decide if its a word or nonword. After deciding it is a non word, you move to
Non-lexical pathway – look at the sounds to decipher meaning.
