Chapter 11- Language Flashcards
Language
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. However, this definition doesn’t go far enough, because it could be used to describe forms of animal communication.
What is the main property of human language?
Creativity. Language uses spoken words, letters or written words, or physical signs to communicate. We can use words to communicate completely new ideas or sentences that have never been spoken before. This is because language has both a rule based and hierarchical structure. People can arrange the components however they want as long as they’re following the rules
Hierarchical nature of language
Language consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units (like words for phrases, then sentences).
Rule-based nature of language
The components of language can be arranged in certain ways, but not in other ways. Some components of language might only be used in certain contexts.
What is the main purpose of language?
To communicate, or have collaborative conversations with others. The need to communicate using language is universal because it occurs whenever there are people. Every culture has language, and all humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its rules, even if they aren’t aware of those rules. Language development is also similar across cultures, with babies starting to babble at 7 months old and begin speaking phrases by 2.
What are characteristics that are similar across languages?
Different languages use different sounds and have different rules for combining those sounds. However, all languages have words that act as nouns or verbs, and all languages have a system to make things negative, to ask questions, and to refer to the past and present.
Where did the modern scientific study of language begin?
With the work of Broca and Wernicke. Broca studied patients with brain damage and proposed that the frontal lobe (Broca’s area) is responsible for the production of language. Wernicke proposed that Wernicke’s area in the temporal lobe is responsible for the comprehension of language.
BF Skinner
Behaviorist, published a book called Verbal Behavior that proposed that language is learned through reinforcement. He suggested that children learn language through being rewarded for correct language and being punished/not rewarded for incorrect language.
Noam Chomsky
Published a book called Syntactic Structures, where he proposed that human language is genetic. Humans are genetically programmed to acquire and use language, and language is coded in the brain. He disagreed with behaviorists because he saw studying language as a way of studying the mind. He also argued that while learning language, children produce sentences that they have never heard before and that are not likely to be reinforced
Psycholinguistics
Linguistics is the academic study of language, and psycholinguistics is the psychological study of how people learn and use language. The goal is to discover psychological processes by which humans acquire and process language.
4 major concerns of psycholinguistics
- Comprehension
- Representation
- Speech production
- Acquisition
Comprehension
How people understand spoken and written language. Includes how people process spoken language and how they have conversations, and how they understand words and sentences
Representation
How language is represented in the mind. This includes how people group words together into phrases to create sentences and how make connections between parts of a story
Speech production
The physical processes of speech production as well as the mental processes that occur when a person is creating speech
Acquisition
How people learn language, including how people learn new languages later in life
Lexicon
All of the words we know, or our “mental dictionary”. We have about 75,000 words in our lexicon.
Semantics
The meaning of language. Words can have one or more meanings. The meanings of words is called lexical semantics.
Word frequency
The frequency with which words appear in a language. Some words occur more frequently than others, like “home” is more common than “hike” in English
Word frequency effect
The fact that we respond more rapidly to high frequency words, like “home”, than low frequency words
Lexical decision task
Participants decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters are words or nonwords. In this task, there are slower responses to low frequency words (reaction time increases).
Rayner and Duffy eye movement study
Measured participants’ eye movements and the duration of fixations that occurs during eye pauses. The number of frequencies was higher for high frequency words. The duration of the first eye fixation for lower frequency words was longer than the fixation for high frequency words. This could be because readers need more time to access the meaning of low frequency words.
How can pronunciation of words make understanding language challenging?
Not everyone pronounces words the same way. People speak at different speeds and with different accents. People are usually more relaxed about pronunciation when speaking naturally, and will pronounce words differently or combine two words.
How do we deal with differences in the pronunciation of words?
We use the context the word was spoken in. Spoken words are often very difficult to understand when presented on their own.
Speech segmentation
The perception of individual words, even though there are often no pauses between words. Because we are able to identify individual words, we expect that words are separated by periods of silence. This is often not the case, as words are spoken continuously.