Chapter 11

Question 1

What is psycholinguistics?

Answer 1

Sub Field of Psychology
It’s about how we learn understand and produce language

Question 2

What are the two things that make animal language different from human language?

Answer 2

1. Animal communication tends to be highly limited (American adult has a vocabulary of 42,000 words)
2. Kind of information the human language can convey.
   Humans can convey objects and abstract concepts like love
   We also have productivity (grammar and syntax)

Question 3

We tried to teach language to a parrot. he learned up to 200 words. what couldn’t he do?

Answer 3

He could do abstract words like shapes and colour
But was restricted to pairing words together
Example: blue square

Question 4

We also tried to teach language to chimps and gorillas (sign language). What couldn’t they do?

Answer 4

They also learned how to do combo words
Example . Dirty + good means toilet

Question 5

What do behaviourists say about language?

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What did Noam Chomsky say about our capacity to learn language? (hint: innate.)

Answer 6

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)

Question 7

What is poverty of the stimulus?

Answer 7

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

Question 8

If you have a bunch of deaf kids who never experienced language in a room, will they learn sign language?

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Explain motherese and why it’s useful

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What are the three parts of language comprehension?

Answer 10

Phonological
Lexical
Parsing

Question 11

What are phonemes ?

Answer 11

Smallest unit of speech that can change the meaning of a word

Question 12

What are morphemes?

Answer 12

Smallest meaningful units of speech
Pre-and suffixes

Question 13

Why is context, an important role in speech perception?

Answer 13

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

Question 14

What is the phonemic restoration effect?

Answer 14

Perceptual phenomenon in which sound that is missing, is still perceived, if highly predictable

Question 15

Explain the McGurk effect

Answer 15

We use lip reading, and sometimes value visual information over auditory

Question 16

What is speech segmentation?

Answer 16

We do not pause between words in a sentence
This makes speech segmentation difficult

Question 17

What is lexical processing?

Answer 17

Determining the meaning of individual words

Question 18

What are homophones

Answer 18

Words that sound the same

Reed and read

Question 19

What are homographs?

Answer 19

Words that are spelled identically, but have different meanings

Ex : bat and bat

Question 20

What is the lexical decision task? (LDT)

Answer 20

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

Question 21

How did we use a lexical decision task to see if homophones activated the other word in a context?

Answer 21

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 .

Question 22

What is parsing?

Answer 22

Breaking up language into its constituent parts

Question 23

What’s a garden path sentence?

Answer 23

When people almost always derive the incorrect parsing, leading to a sentence dead end

Question 24

What is the syntax first approach to interpreting the syntactic structure of language when it’s ambiguous?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

What is prosody?

Answer 25

The patterns of stress and intonation (change in pitch) of a speaker

Tumblr post : she said she did not take his money

Question 26

What is discourse processing?

Answer 26

Comprehension of naturalistic text, either spoken or written, made up of many sentences in a sequence

Question 27

What is an anaphoric inference ?

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

What’s a casual inference?

Answer 28

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

Question 29

What’s a backward inference?

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

What is an elaborative inference?

Answer 30

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

Question 31

What is instrumental influence?

Answer 31

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

Question 32

What is the role of existing knowledge in discourse processing?

Answer 32

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 .

Question 33

What does Wernicke area do and where is it?

Answer 33

Language comprehension
Temporal lobe

Question 34

What is brocas area do and where is it?

Answer 34

Language production
Frontal lobe of cortex

Question 35

Does language comprehension involve wernickes and Broca’s area as well as temporal lobe?

Answer 35

Yeah

Question 36

What is the Arcuate fasciculus?

Answer 36

Band of fibres that connect wernickes and Broca’s area

Question 37

What is hemisphere specialization?

Answer 37

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

Question 38

What is linguistic relativity?

Answer 38

The theoretical perspective that holds that language, someone speak, affects other areas of cognition

Question 39

What do linguistic universalists believe?

Answer 39

Language one speaks, doesn’t affect other areas of cognition

Examples for this is the Russian blue study