Chapter 11 -Language Flashcards
What is language
- System of communication using sounds or symbols
- Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
-Hierarchical system
- components that can be combine to form larger units
- letter to word sentence to text
- consists of a series of small components that can be combined to fomr larger units
-Governed by rules
-specify ways components can be arranged
-“what is my cat staying” it’s permissible in English
“My cat is saying what” is not permissible in English
-But “my cat is saying what” is permissible in Chinese
-“What is may cate saying” is not permissible in Chinese
The Universality of Language
- Deaf children invent sign language that is all their own
- All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its complex rules
- Language is universal across cultures
- Language development is similar across cultures
- Language are “unique, but the same”
- different words, sounds, and rules
- all have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense
-B.F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behaviour
-language learned through reinforcement
-Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures
- human language coded in the genes
- underlying basis of all language is similar
- Children produces sentences they have never heard and the have never been reinforced
- just like we genetically programmed to walk, we are programmed to acquires and use language
- Children produce sentences they have never heard before and that have never been reinforced
- Against the viewpoint of reinforcement, is “I hate you, Mommy”
- That led to the development of psycholinguistics
-Psycholinguistics-
discover psychological process by which humans acquires and process language
- Comprehension: understand spoken and written language - Speech production: psychological processes of speech production - representation: how is language represented in the mind? - acquisition: learning language including the 2nd language
Lexicon
Is all the words we know, which has been called our ‘metal dictionary’
Semantics
Is the meaning of language
Lexical semantics
The meaning or words
-Phonemes:
shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word
- Bit contains the phonemes b / I / t - Different from letters: one letter can have two phonemes, ‘e’ in ‘we’ and ‘wet’ - The ‘e’ in some is silent, ‘e’ in ‘home’
-Morphemes:
smallest unit of language that has meaning or grammatical function
- ‘table’ contains a single morpheme. ‘Bed room’ contains two, bed and room
- endings such as ‘s’ and ‘ed’ are morphemes. So tables contains two morphemes table and s
Word frequency
How often a word appears in that language
Word frequency effect
Refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words than to low
What is one reason that may lead to longer eye gazing on a world during a lexical decision task
Readers needed more time to access meaning off the low-frequency word
Word superiority effect
people perceive a letter better when the letter is in a word that when the other is presented a low frequency, or in a non-word
Speech segmentation
The perception individuals words even though there are no breaks or pauses between words
Our ability to each and understand spoken words is affected by
- the context in which the words appear
- how frequently we have encountered the words int he past
- our knowledge of statistical regularities of our language
- out knowledge of word meanings
Lexical ambiguity
- words have more than one meaning
- context clears up ambiguity after all meanings of words have been briefly discussed
- bugs could be insects or hidden listening devices
- my mother bugging me can clear the ambiguity
-Phonemic Restoration Effect
- ‘fill-in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion or word presented
- Warren (1970) replaced the first /s/ in ‘legislatures’ with a sound of cough when reading the sentence “the state governors met with their respective legislature conveying in the capital city’
- no participants can notice it even when they were informed it was missing
-Saffran and colleagues (1996)
- 8-month-old infants heard string of 4 artificial ‘words; in random order
- then hear pair of words ‘whole’ and ‘part’
- transitional probabilities of pa followed by Doris is 1 but it is followed by bids is 0.33
-context effects
-the meaning of sentence affects our ability to access words in the sentence
-walrus is easy to understand in:
-the Eskimos were scared of the Walrus
Than in:
-the bankers were frightened by the walrus
-Meaning Dominance:
the fact that some words are used more frequently than others
- when words have two or more meanings with different dominance - Balanced dominance - when words have two or more meanings with the same amount of dominance
-Lexical priming:
- heard ambiguous word have priming effect the words relevant to both meanings
- priming that involved the meanings of words
How did Tanenhaus measure lexical priming
Noun-noun condition - word is presented as a a noun, followed by a noun probe stimulus
- verb-noun condition - presented as a verb and followed by a noun probe stimulus
- delays in words lost the priming effect
- flower primed ‘rose’ and ‘rose as noun and verb
-Swinney (1979) demonstrated
that although the context clears the ambiguity, participants accessed both meanings right after hearing the word
-reported that he. The lexical prime effect (for the context word) vanished if the best word was presented two or three syllable after the presentation of the prime
Meaning dominance
Relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words
Biased dominance
When one meaning of a word appears more often than the others