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.
Which factors aid speech segmentation? (2)
- We use statistical properties of language automatically. In English, we have learned that some sounds are more likely to follow each other in a word than others
- We use our knowledge of the meanings of words (top-down processing). Individual words will stand out if we know a language. Therefore, knowing words helps us perceive them. In a foreign language, you might hear a word you know “pop out” of a continuous stream of words
Lexical ambiguity
Words can often have more than one meaning- “bug” can refer to insects, listening devices, or being annoying. We can use the context the word is presented in to determine its meaning
Lexical priming
Priming that involves the meaning of words. This occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning. Presenting the word “rose” primes a person to respond more quickly to “flower” as their meanings are related. Semantic relatedness will effect reaction times in lexical priming tasks. This suggests that semantically related words are activated in the mind
Tanenhaus lexical priming experiment
Showed that people quickly access multiple meanings of ambiguous words before context takes over. Participants were presented with audio recordings of short sentences using ambiguous words. The word was presented in a sentence as a noun, followed by a noun stimulus, or as a verb, followed by a noun stimulus. The time between the end of the sentences and the participants reading the word out loud was the reaction time. Auditory priming with a similar word caused a faster reaction time with a related probe. This occurred whether the word was presented as a noun or a verb. After a delay, there was no longer a priming effect for the verb form. This suggests that context is influential after a brief delay where meaning can be assessed. It supports the constraint based model because additional information helps determine what the sentence means
Meaning dominance
Describes the relative frequency of the meaning of ambiguous words. How frequently each meaning occurs determines how an ambiguous word is interpreted.
Biased dominance
When one meaning of an ambiguous word occurs more frequently than another
Balanced dominance
Ambiguous words where two meanings are equally likely
How do biased and balanced dominance influence the way people access the meanings of words as they read them?
As a person reads an ambiguous word with balanced dominance, both meanings of the ambiguous word are activated. The person looks longer at the ambiguous word than the control word with one meaning. Biased ambiguous words are read just as quickly as a control word because the dominant meaning is activated and accessed quickly
How does context play a role in accessibility of an ambiguous word?
When context activates the less frequent meaning of the word, the less frequent meaning is activated with increased strength, and the more frequent meaning is also activated. Because both meanings are activated, the person looks longer at the ambiguous word in this scenario. If context activates the more frequent meaning, the word is read rapidly
Syntax
The structure of a sentence. This involves discovering cues that language provides to show how words in a sentence relate to each other. For example, every sentences involves a sequence of words with meaning unfolding over time.
Parsing
The grouping of words into phrases. This is influential in understanding sentences, because comprehension of sentences is more than just “adding up” words.
Garden path sentences
Sentences that seem to mean one thing at the beginning but mean something else by the end. These sentences illustrate temporary ambiguity, because one organization is used first, then the person changes to the correct organization of the sentence when they realize their mistake.
The garden path model of parsing
Frazier- states that as people read a sentence, their grouping of words into phrases is regulated by processing mechanisms called heuristics. The model proposes that when heuristics result in the wrong decision, the person reconsiders the original parse and makes the necessary corrections. It states that the rules involved in parsing are based on syntax.
Heuristics
A rule that can be applied rapidly to make a decision. Heuristics are fast, which is important for language. However, they can result in the wrong decision
Principle of late closure
A syntax-based principle that states that when a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that this word is part of the current phrase, so each new word the person encounters is added to the current phrase for as long as possible. Eventually, late closure will add too many words to the phrase. This is when we reconsider and reparse the sentence to create the correct grouping.
