Chapter 11 Flashcards
What is psycholinguistics?
Sub Field of Psychology
It’s about how we learn understand and produce language
What are the two things that make animal language different from human language?
- Animal communication tends to be highly limited (American adult has a vocabulary of 42,000 words)
- Kind of information the human language can convey.
Humans can convey objects and abstract concepts like love
We also have productivity (grammar and syntax)
We tried to teach language to a parrot. he learned up to 200 words. what couldn’t he do?
He could do abstract words like shapes and colour
But was restricted to pairing words together
Example: blue square
We also tried to teach language to chimps and gorillas (sign language). What couldn’t they do?
They also learned how to do combo words
Example . Dirty + good means toilet
What do behaviourists say about language?
All of languages learn, based off of some kind of mechanisms, as as all other kinds of skill learning
We learn through trial and error and modelling our parents
What did Noam Chomsky say about our capacity to learn language? (hint: innate.)
Basics of language, don’t need to be learned (words, syntax, and tense)
Only details of one’s language (which words, which syntax, and which tense)
What is poverty of the stimulus?
Insufficient data for children to learn the rules of grammar based on experience alone
Kids fall for similar faults in grammar because they assume based on previous experience
If you have a bunch of deaf kids who never experienced language in a room, will they learn sign language?
They will invent a shitty sign language
It’ll use basics to convey meaning
This shows that humans are different from the apes in the previous mention study
Kids often follow language learning stages
Explain motherese and why it’s useful
Speech that’s tailored to a young child
Using sing song like speech cadences, exaggerated, vowel, pronunciations, and repetition
Language abilities, correlated with mothers use of motherese
It might help baby with building blocks of language
Not necessarily, though
What are the three parts of language comprehension?
Phonological
Lexical
Parsing
What are phonemes ?
Smallest unit of speech that can change the meaning of a word
What are morphemes?
Smallest meaningful units of speech
Pre-and suffixes
Why is context, an important role in speech perception?
It lets the brain combine what words are likely
Even if you’re missing a word, the brain can usually fill the gap with context
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
Perceptual phenomenon in which sound that is missing, is still perceived, if highly predictable
Explain the McGurk effect
We use lip reading, and sometimes value visual information over auditory
What is speech segmentation?
We do not pause between words in a sentence
This makes speech segmentation difficult
What is lexical processing?
Determining the meaning of individual words
What are homophones
Words that sound the same
Reed and read
What are homographs?
Words that are spelled identically, but have different meanings
Ex : bat and bat
What is the lexical decision task? (LDT)
String of letters, and you must determine if it’s a real word or not
They found that we are faster at identifying common words
How did we use a lexical decision task to see if homophones activated the other word in a context?
Used a sentence such as: she swung her baseball bat (will this activate the animal)
It did, but the effect was short-lived only 200 ms after the context is activated .
What is parsing?
Breaking up language into its constituent parts
What’s a garden path sentence?
When people almost always derive the incorrect parsing, leading to a sentence dead end
What is the syntax first approach to interpreting the syntactic structure of language when it’s ambiguous?
Theory of language, parsing that holds the grammar alone, is used to parse a sentence before considering other factors
Lake closure is a tendency when parsing used to attach incoming words to the current phrase .
But it’s shown that people use the meaning of the word not just syntax they tested this with eye tracking on the garden path sentences
What is prosody?
The patterns of stress and intonation (change in pitch) of a speaker
Tumblr post : she said she did not take his money
What is discourse processing?
Comprehension of naturalistic text, either spoken or written, made up of many sentences in a sequence
What is an anaphoric inference ?
Guess about which word is being referenced by a pronoun
Ex. in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally.
What’s a casual inference?
An inference about casual relationship between information in one sentence regarding information and another
This depends on general knowledge of the way the world works
Ex. a person hearing piano music and concluding that someone nearby is playing the piano
What’s a backward inference?
A kind of inference in the discourse processing in which previous information is needed to process current information
starts from a hypothesis (or question) we want to prove, and traces back to known facts.
What is an elaborative inference?
I kind of inference in discourse processing which the inferred information is not necessary in order to properly understand the text
Example:
Katy dropped the vase. She ran for the dustpan and brush to sweep up the pieces’.
The reader would have to draw upon life experience and general knowledge to realise that the vase broke to supply the connection between these sentences
What is instrumental influence?
A form of elaborative inference in discourse processing in which the tool or instrument that is typically used to perform a task is inferred from the text
For example, he cut the bread
This assumes he has a knife
What is the role of existing knowledge in discourse processing?
In some sentences we assume based on our prior knowledge that we need to re-process the sentence.
For example, something that doesn’t make sense or conflict with our understanding of reality .
What does Wernicke area do and where is it?
Language comprehension
Temporal lobe
What is brocas area do and where is it?
Language production
Frontal lobe of cortex
Does language comprehension involve wernickes and Broca’s area as well as temporal lobe?
Yeah
What is the Arcuate fasciculus?
Band of fibres that connect wernickes and Broca’s area
What is hemisphere specialization?
Right hemisphere seems to be involved in higher order processing required in discord processing
Might be involved in elaborative processing, which is like a proceeding sentence, predicts word in the next next sentence
What is linguistic relativity?
The theoretical perspective that holds that language, someone speak, affects other areas of cognition
What do linguistic universalists believe?
Language one speaks, doesn’t affect other areas of cognition
Examples for this is the Russian blue study
