Chapter 10 Flashcards
How do college educated people produce words
Three words a second
Vocabulary of 75,000 words
Word selection
grammatical, semantic, and phonological accuracy
van Turennout and colleagues (1998)
Dutch speakers
presented pictures of objects and animals
ERP technique
grammatical gender accessed about 40
milliseconds before phonological properties
Suggests that not all information accessed
at once; split-second timing
Slip of the tongue errors
Errors in which sounds or entire words are rearranged between two or more different words
Types of slip of the tongue errors
Sound errors
Morpheme errors
Word errors
Characteristics of slip of the tongue errors
Errors create a word, rather than a non- word.
Errors reveal our extensive language knowledge.
Errors tend to occur across items from the
same category.
Words we are currently pronouncing are
influenced by both the words we have already spoken and the words we are planning to speak.
Explanations for speech errors
Dell and colleagues
comprehensive theory for speech errors
similar to connectionist approach
spreading activation
Planning activates sound elements.
Each sound can be activated by several different words.
High activation can cause the incorrect sound to be produced.
Stages of sentence production
Message planning- plan the gist
Grammatical encoding- choose specific words, morphology, and grammatical form.
Phonological encoding- convert these intention into speech
Discourse
Language units larger than a sentence
Narrative
Thyme of discourse in which someone describes a series of actual or fictional events
Narrative structure
- Brief overview
- Summary of characters and setting
- Complicating action
- Point
- Resolution
- Final signal that the narrative is complete
Iconic gestures
Gestures that represent the concept about which a speaker is talking
Deictic gestures
Pointing to an object or location
Beat gestures
Occur in rhythm that matches the speech rate and prosodic content
Frick-Horbury and Guttentag (1998)
identifying target word from definition
hand movements restricted or unrestricted
Participants with unrestricted hand movements identified more words than those with restricted hand movements.
When our verbal system cannot retrieve a word, a gesture can sometimes activate the relevant information.
Using gestures: embodied cognition
Some concepts are easier to describe with body movements than with words.
People are more likely to produce a gesture when they have had previous experience with the relevant physical activity.
Hostetter (2011)—meta-analysis
Do gestures actually help us in communicating a message?
Gestures actually do increase the listener’s understanding, especially when the speaker is describing concrete actions.
Cook and Tanenhaus (2009)
Tower of Hanoi puzzle
Conditions of “real life” version (with heavy discs) vs. computerized version
Participants then became teachers of the task
Results of Cook and Tanenhaus (2009)
Teachers who lifted the heavy discs produced higher gestures when explaining the puzzle than those who just had to slide the cursor across the screen.
Learners taught by “real-life” teachers made higher and more arched movements while moving the discs around the computer display.
The content of speech did not differ
Embodied cognition
People use their bodies to express their knowledge.
ongoing connection between motor system and processing spoken language
importance of concrete physical actions, rather than abstract meaning
Language as a social instrument
Speakers must;
consider their conversation partners coordinating turn-taking
agreed meanings
intentions
Pragmatics
Social rules and world knowledge that allow speakers successfully communicate messages to other people
common ground
occurs when conversationalists share similar background knowledge, schemas, and perspectives necessary for mutual understanding
Common ground allows us to
collaborate
pay attention
assess background knowledge clarify misunderstandings
