BioCog 9A language cognitive

Question 1

characteristics of language

Answer 1

• communicative
• arbitrary
• structured = grammatical
• dynamic = changing
• unlimited

Question 2

sentence level

Answer 2

• grammar adn other rules

Question 3

story level

Answer 3

• the story in our head

Question 4

universality of language

Answer 4

• every person can learn it
• same fundamental structure
• deaf children develop sign language
• development very similar across cultures

Question 5

phonemes

Answer 5

• smallest units
• no independent meaning
• different across languages

Question 6

allophones

Answer 6

• variations of one phoneme

Question 7

evidence for phonemes

Answer 7

• speaking erros

- preservation, anticipation, exchange

Question 8

0-6 months

Answer 8

• sensitive to all possible phonemes

Question 9

6-12 months

Answer 9

• increasing sensitivity to own language

Question 10

12 months

Answer 10

• start speaking and understanding own language

Question 11

24 months

Answer 11

• complete set of phonemes

Question 12

perceptual narrowing

Answer 12

= tuning

• by social interaction
• increasing

Question 13

sensitive perios

Answer 13

• 0 to 3 years

Question 14

synaptic pruning

Answer 14

• elimination of superfluous synaptic connections

Question 15

morphemes

Answer 15

• smallest units with meaning

Question 16

free morphemes

Answer 16

• have meaning on their own

Question 17

bound morphemes

Answer 17

• bind to free morphemes

- alter their meaning

Question 18

lexicon

Answer 18

• mental storage for all words we know

Question 19

lexicon capacity

Answer 19

• one when one year old

- 50.-60.000 in educated people

Question 20

phonemic restauration effect

Answer 20

• we can fill in a missing phoneme

Question 21

speech segmentation

Answer 21

• perception of words as single units

Question 22

word superiority effect

Answer 22

• we recognize letters quicker when they are in a word

Question 23

corpus

Answer 23

• large representative sample of words

Question 24

word frequency effect

Answer 24

• more frequent words are recognized quicker

Question 25

lexical ambiguity

Answer 25

• one word has several meanings
• fast meaning slows down slow meaning
• not vice versa

Question 26

semantics

Answer 26

• meaning

- Wernickes

Question 27

syntax

Answer 27

• grammar

- Brocas

Question 28

word chain grammar

Answer 28

• behaviourist approach

- language learning by reinforcement

Question 29

phrase structure grammar

Answer 29

• cognitive linguistic approach
• Chomsky
• generative
• innate grammar

Question 30

Chomsky’s arguments

Answer 30

• you can understand never encountered weird sentences
• no reinforcement is neede
• long distance dependecies

Question 31

garden path sentences

Answer 31

• first imply a different meaning than they actually have

- brain restructeres initial meaning only when proven wrong

Question 32

syntax first approach

Answer 32

• parsing done by grammar alone

Question 33

interactionist approach

Answer 33

• parsing by grammar and meaning

- evidence by visual world paradigm

Question 34

visual world paradigm

Answer 34

• ongoing understanding of displayed world

- using syntac and semantics

Question 35

anaphoric inference

Answer 35

• infering meaning of f.e. a pronoun

Question 36

instrument inference

Answer 36

• infering an instrument

Question 37

causal inference

Answer 37

• infering causes that are not stated

Question 38

situation model

Answer 38

• mind creates a visual representation of every story

- corresponds closely to implied content (-> orientation of the nail and the eagle)

Question 39

Saphir-Whorf hypothesis

Answer 39

• WRONG
• language determines thought
• No, because language and thought are different realms