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
Syntax
The structure of a sentence
Semantics
Meanings of words and sentences
Wernicks’s Aphasia
- produced speech that was fluent and grammatically correct but tended to be incoherent
- Wernicke’s patients have more widespread difficulties in understanding and would have difficulty in understanding both sentences. Wernicks’s area in the temporal lobe is thus involved in semantics – understating meaning
Broca’s Aphasia
- the Apple was eaten by the girl (no trouble)
- the boy was pushed by the girl (trouble)
- modern researchers have concluded that damage to Broca’s area in the frontal lobe causes problems in syntax – creating meaning based on word order
Parsing
How strings of words create meaning is to consider how meaning is created by the groupings of words into phrases
Syntactic ambiguity
more than one possible structure, more than one meaning
- So what is the parsing mechanism
- there are two proposals: syntax-first approach and interactionist approach
Garden-path sentences (
Illustrate temporal ambiguity - because first one organization is adopted and then, the error is realized, the person shifts to the correct organization
Syntax First Approach - Garden-path model
States that as people reads sentence, their groupings of words into phrases is governed by a number of processing mechanisms called heuristics (rules that can be applied to rapidly make a decision)
-grammatical structure of sentence determines parsing
Late-closure
States that when a person encounters a new word, the person’s
parsing mechanisms assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible
Constraint-based approach to parsing (interactionist approach)
- semantics and syntax both influence processing as one reads a sentence
- word meaning
- story context
- scene context
- memory load and prior experience
Influence of meaning of word
Two sentences structured the same but with one word changed can drastically influence the overall meaning and understanding of the sentence
Influence of story context
Context can influence how the sentence is perceived
-Tanenhaus and Trueswell (1995) - influence of scene context
- Visual word paradigm, the context of a scene
- eye movement s change when information suggests revision of interpretation of sentences is necessary
- linguistic and non-linguistic information used simultaneously
- take into account not only information provided by the syntactic structure of the sentence but also by what they called non-linguistic information - information provided by the scene as an example
Visual world paradigm
Involves determining how information in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed
Influence of memory load and prior experience with language
Less familiar with a language, the longer it can take to recognize a complicated sentence
Subject-relative construction
When something is the subject of both the main clause and the embedded clause
Object-relative construction
When something is the subject of the main clause, but it replaced by a who in the embedded clause, but is not the object of this clause
How do we predict sentence outcomes
During experiments we use words already given to us to make a decision of where the sentence may go and changes as we get more words
-Coherence:
representation of the text in one’s mind so that information from one part of the text can be related to information in another part of the text
-most of the coherence in text is created by inference
Inferences
Determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text
Anaphoric inference
connecting objects/people
-inferences that connect an object or person in one sentence to an object or person in another sentence
Instrument inference
- inferences about tools or methods
- Shakespeare wrote Hamlet while he was sitting at his desk. We can infer than he was using a quill pen
Causal inference
- events caused by events in previous sentence
- Sharon took and aspirin. Her headache went away
Situation model
- mental representation of what a text is about
- represent events as if experiencing the situation
- simulates the perceptual and motor (movement) characteristics of the objects and actions in a story
-Morrow et al, (1987) reported
that verifying whether two objects were in the same room was easier when two objects were in the room where the protagonist was
-physiology of simulations
- approx. the same areas of the cortex are activated by actual movements and reading related action words
- the activation is more extensive for actual movements
-Semantic Coordination
good participants have shared knowledge
Given-new contract
speaker constructs sentences so they include
- given information - information that the listeners already knows
- new information - information that the listeners is hearing for the first time
- new, can then become given information
Producing Language: Conversations
- two or more people talking together
- Dynamic and rapid
- ways to make is easier for the listeners to understand
Common-ground
Is the mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties
-can be established during conversation
Referential communication task
A task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation, when this information involves a reference, identifying something by naming or describing it
Entrainment
Synchronization between two partners (part of common-ground)
Syntactic coordination
-using similar grammatical constructions
Syntactic Priming
- production of a specific grammatical construction by one person increases chances other person will use that construction
- reduces computational load on conversation because it’s easier to copy the form of the others sentence than it is to create your own
-Theory of mind:
being able to understand what others feel, think, or believe
-Non-verbal communication:
being able to intercept and react to the person’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice and other cues for meaning
Turn taking
Waiting for your turn in the conversation
Cultures, Language & Cognition
-Sapir -Whorf Hypothesis: language influences thought
- two cultures had difference in how participants assigned names (categories) to color chips
- categorical perception
- stimuli in the same categories are more difficult to discriminate from one another than stimuli in two different categories
- English discriminated more easily between blue and green then Breinmo. But Berinmo discriminated more easily between wor and not than English
- differences in the way names were assigned to colors affect the ability to tell the difference between colors
- Winawer and cowor
-Winawer and coworker (2007)
-two cultures had difference in how participants responded to blue squares based on how they were categorized (Russians had longer reaction time in both, but faster in different categories, English was faster in both but faster with same category)
Music and Language
- music as the ‘language of emotion’
- music created emotion through sounds that have no meaning
- language , on the other hand, creates emotions using meaningful words
-Prosody:
the pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language
- often created emotion in the spoken language (a speaker’s ‘soaring oratory’) - language combines words and music combines tones to create structures sequences that unfold over time
Music and language Task Broca’s aphasia
They performed poorly in both categories
Music and language processing
There is some overlap, but there are some separate functions
