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
Common ground
Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs (1986)
Pairs of participants arranging figures in
order
mutual shorthand and shared vocabulary developed
number of required turns decreased rapidly over trials
conversational partners become more
skilled in communicating efficiently
Directive
A sentence that requests someone to do something
Direct request
Resolves the interpersonal problem in a very obvious fashion
Indirect request
Uses subtle suggestion to resolve an interpersonal problem, rather than stating the request in a straightforward manner
Frame
Mental strugures that simplify reality
Framing
George Lakoff (2007, 2009, 2011)
Language can structure thinking
When people have different frames, it may be difficult to talk with others about many important contemporary issues
Language production and writing
Writing requires numerous cognitive process.
Researchers seldom study writing in college students, thought they have conducted studies on children’s writing.
Most adults write fairly often
Differences between writing and speaking
Writing:
is done in isolation
takes more time
uses more complex syntax is revised more
Speaking;
Refer to yourself, interact with listeners, common ground
Three phases of language production and writing
- planning
- sentence generation
- revising
Strains on attention
Role of practice
Emphasis on high-quality writing
Working memory
The brief immediate memory for the material that you are currently processing; working memory also coordinates your ongoing mental activities
Kellogg and colleagues
Phonological loop task
When the students were writing, they required significantly longer to remember the syllables.
Phonological processing during writing created demands on the phonological loop, thus making it more difficult to recall the syllables
Kellogg and colleagues
Visuospatial sketchpad tasks
visual information (remember the visual shape of an item):
When students were writing about concrete nouns, they required significantly longer to remember the item’s visual shape.
When writing about abstract nouns, no delay in remembering the item’s visual shape.
Kellogg and colleagues
Spatial information
(remember a particular location): Students’ reaction times not affected by the writing task.
Writing does not require us to emphasize locations (spatial information)
Central executive
integrates memory from phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer
plays a role in attention, planning, and coordinating other cognitive activities
active in virtually every phase of the writing process
Sentence Generation During Writing
translate the general ideas developed during planning into actual sentences of the text
hesitant phases and fluent phases
longer vs. shorter words
Writing errors are most likely to be spelling errors within a single word rather than between-word errors.
The revision phase of writing
Emphasize the importance of organization and coherence.
Reconsider whether the writing accomplishes its goals.
Revision should be time consuming.
Effective writers use flexible revision strategies, and they make substantial changes
College students typically devote little time for revising.
One reasons for lack of revision could be that many students start to write a paper right before it’s due.
Hayes and colleagues 1987
Experts vs novices
first-year college students vs. expert writers
revise a poorly written two-page letter
Novices revise sentence-by-sentence; focus on spelling and grammar
Experts work more on organization, focus, and transition between ideas.
Novices judge defective sentences as appropriate.
Experts are better able to diagnose the source of a problem in a sentence.
Daneman and Staintion
Proofreading
Difficult to proofread your own writing
Often overlook the errors in the text
Top-down processing
Bilingual speaker
A person who is fluent in two different languages
Multilingual speaker
A person who speaks more than two languages
Simultaneous bilingualism
Some bilinguals learn two languages simultaneously during childhood
Sequential bilingualism
Their native language is referred to as their first language, and the nonnative language that they acquire is their second language
-first language vs second language
Background on bilingualism
More than half of the people in the world are somewhat bilingual
For many people in North America, English is not the language most frequently spoken at home.
Danziger and Ward (2010)
Arab Israeli students fluent in both Arabic and Hebrew
Implicit Association Test (IAT)
The Arab students were more positive about Jewish individuals when the fluently bilingual researcher was speaking Hebrew, than when she was speaking Arabic.
Advantages of bilingualism
Slides 656 to 658
Disadvantage of bilingualism
People who use two languages extensively may subtly alter how they pronounce some speech sounds in both languages.
Bilingual individuals may also process language slightly more slowly, in comparison to monolinguals.
Bilingual children may have somewhat smaller vocabularies for words that are used in a home setting.
These disadvantages are far outweighed by advantages of being able to communicate effectively in two languages.
Meta-linguistics
Knowledge about the form and structure of a language
Second language proficiency
Vocabulary
When the measure of language proficiency is vocabulary, age of acquisition is not related to language skills.
Flege et al (1999)
Korean–Americans
degree of accent related to age of arrival
fairly smooth change over age rather than abrupt drop
judging English sentences on grammaticality
After controlling for years of education in the United States, age of acquisition was not related to an individual’s mastery of English grammar.
Translation
Converting a text written in one language into a second written language
Interpreting
Converting a message in on language into a second language
Simultaneous interpretation involves three working-memory tasks at the same time
Comprehension, transformation, and speaking
Christoffels, De Groot, and Krool (2006)
Dutch/English speakers
students, vs teachers of English, vs simultaneous interpreters
reading-span test and speaking-span test
All groups recalled more words in their native language (Dutch) than in their second language (English).
Simultaneous interpreters remembered significantly more Dutch and English words than the other two groups,
both in the reading span and in the speaking span tasks.
Christoffels, De Groot, and Kroll (2006)
Two Possible explanation
The experience of managing simultaneous tasks actually increased the working- memory skills for the simultaneous interpreters
Only people with superb working-memory skills can manage to survive in a profession that requires an extremely high level of proficiency in working memory.
Both of these explanations may be correct.
Age of acquisition
The age at which you learned a second language
Critical period hyphothesis
You ability to acquire a second language is strictly limited to a specific period of your life
