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.
Constraint-based approach to parsing
The idea that information in addition to syntax participates in processing as a person reads/hears a sentence. Semantic plausibility is one type of information- which interpretation of the sentence makes more sense?
How can the meaning of words in a sentence influence parsing?
As a sentence unfolds, we are considering the meaning of the words. Sometimes, there’s only one possible meaning for the sentence after reading the first few words. Sometimes, reading the whole sentence is required to figure out the meaning
How does story context influence parsing?
Sentences that are considered confusing or ungrammatical on their own make sense when in the context of a story.
Visual world paradigm
Tanenhaus- a technique that involves determining how information in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed. Participants’ eye movements were measured as they saw objects on a table. They were told to put an apple on a towel in a box. Participants’ eyes shifted first to a towel outside the box because the sentence was ambiguous. As the sentence was completed, participants realized that “the towel” was where the apple was located, not where they were moving it to. With 2 apples, the sentence was no longer so ambiguous, and eye movements were the same for the ambiguous and non-ambiguous sentences. This shows that participants take non-linguistic information into account when parsing a sentence. This goes against the garden path model
Subject-relative construction
When the main clause and the embedded clause share a subject.
Object-relative construction
When the two clauses (embedded and main) have different subjects. This construction is more difficult to understand because it requires more of the participant’s memory to figure out who did what in the sentence. It is also more complicated, because we have more practice with subject-relative construction in English.
Why are predictions important?
Predictions can be wrong, but they are usually correct. We are constantly making predictions about what will happen next in a sentence, and this helps us keep up with the rapid pace of language.
Altmann prediction experiment
Measured eye movements to show that participants were making predictions as they read a sentence. Context influenced the participants’ eye movements toward objects in a scene as they predicted what would be happening in the scene.
Inferences
Determining what a story means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text. Participants will typically “remember” additional details that were not present in the text because they made inferences about the meaning of the text automatically. A role of inference is to create connections between parts of the story
Narrative
Refers to texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another
Coherence
The representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates a relationship between parts of the text and between the parts of the text and the main theme of the story. This is an important part of any narrative. It can be created by multiple different types of inference.
Anaphoric inference
We are able to determine who vague pronouns are referring to in a story. This is usually not difficult to do due to the structure of sentences, and we use our outside knowledge to determine the meaning
Instrument inference
We are able to determine which materials are used in a sentence even if they are not specifically mentioned. With the sentence “Sharon took an aspirin. Her headache went away”, we can infer that the aspirin caused Sharon’s headache to go away, although this is not explicitly stated in the sentence
Causal inference
When you infer that the events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in the previous sentence. This includes the Sharon’s headache example. This depends on how strongly the clauses are related. If the clauses are weakly related, we might conclude that there is no causal relationship between the sentences unless we have additional contextual information
What mental representations occur while reading a story?
The sentence “the runner jumped over the hurdle” creates a mental image of a runner on a track, jumping the hurdle. This is going beyond the actual text, but represents the situation in terms of people, objects, locations, and events in the story
Situation model
As people read a story, they create a situation model, which stimulates the perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects and the actions taken in the story
Stanfield situation model experiment
Participants read a sentence involving an object and indicate whether a picture shows the object in the sentence. Participants might be presented with sentences about hammering a nail and then presented with a picture of a vertical or horizontal nail, which matches only one of the scenarios mentioned. Participants responded that objects matched the picture more quickly when shown a picture of the nail with the appropriate orientation.
Metusalem mental representation study
Measured event related potentials as participants were reading a story. In an ERP, people experience a negative response called an N400 wave that occurs right after a word is read. The response is larger when a word is unexpected. For the expected word, the response is small. For a word that is related but doesn’t fit the passage, the response is still smaller than the unexpected word. Related words likely cause a response because they are activated by the scenario. We use our knowledge about different situations as we read a story. As we read, models of a situation are activated that include lots of details about a situation.
How do readers stimulate the motor characteristics of objects in a story?
Reading a story about a bike for example elicits perception about what a bike looks like but also properties associated with movement, like how a bike is propelled and the physical exertion involved with riding a bike in different conditions. This involves the idea that assigning an object to a category provides information about various properties of an object. We also know that with Hauk’s experiment, reading action words caused brain activity in the same areas that actually doing the action would.
Given-new contract
States that a speaker should construct sentences so they include 2 kinds of information: given information (information the listener already knows) and new information (information the listener is hearing for the first time. The new information in one sentence is often the given information in the next sentence. Haviland and Clark showed that sentence pairs take longer to comprehend when the second of a pair of sentences was not provided with related given information in the first sentence.
Common ground
The mental knowledge and beliefs shared among the individuals in a conversation. This means that semantic information is coordinated. Each person has an idea about what the other person knows about what they’re discussing. As the conversation continues, the shared information increases. People are accumulating information about the topic and information about what the other person knows. Conversations usually go more smoothly if you know as much as possible about the other person.
Referential communication task
A task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation, when this information involves reference- identifying something by naming or describing it. This is described in Stellman’s and Brennan’s experiment, where participants have to communicate to determine which cards containing abstract pictures the other person has. The two people establish common ground by creating descriptive names as they communicate about the objects
Entrainment
Synchronization between two partners, created by the process of finding common ground. This can occur in terms of vocabulary, but also in terms of gestures, body language, pronunciation, and speaking rate
Syntactic coordination
How conversational partners can end up coordinating their grammatical construction. This makes speaking easier and frees up resources to deal with alternating between understanding and producing statements.
Syntactic priming
One person is more likely to copy the form/syntactic construction of another person’s sentence in a conversation. People will coordinate the grammatical form of their statements.
Theory of mind
The ability to understand what others think, feel, or believe, as well as the ability to interpret and react to the person’s gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, and other things that provide cues to meaning. This is part of understanding what another person means in a conversation.
Prosody
The pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language- this is how emotion is conveyed using language. Language also conveys emotion by using meaningful words for those emotions.
How does music create emotion?
Music has been called the “language of emotion” and people state that emotion is one of the main reasons that they listen to music. Music creates emotions through sounds that would have no meaning by themselves, but together create meaning and emotion. Emotion is elicited rather than indicated.
What is a similarity between music and language?
They both combine elements (tones for music, words for language) to create structured sequences. The sequences are organized into phrases and governed by syntax. However, notes are grouped by sound and words are grouped by meaning. There are also no equivalents to nouns and verbs in music
Expectations in music
Similar to language, listeners generate expectations in music. Notes of a melody are organized around the note associated with the composition’s key (the tonic). C is the tonic for the key of C and its associated scale. Organizing pitches around a tonic creates a framework where listeners generate expectations for what happens next. One common expectation is a song that begins with a tonic will end with a tonic (called return to tonic). This is the case in twinkle twinkle little star
Violations of musical syntax
If we pause right before the end of a tonic, it creates an unsettling effect that makes us want the final note to return to tonic. Also, syntax is violated when a note or chord is inserted into a melody that doesn’t “fit”. One experiment focused on the P600 that is a positive ERP occurring after the onset of a word and increases with violations of syntax. There is no P600 response when a phrase contains an in-key chord, but there are larger responses as the chords in the phrase get more out of key. Conclusion- music has a syntax that influences how we react to it. Even when listening to a song for the first time, we are using syntax to make predictions about what’s happening next
Broca’s aphasia study
Stroke patients who experienced difficulty in understanding sentences with complete syntax. The patients were given a language task that involved understanding syntactically complex sentences and a music task that involved detecting the off-key chords in a sequence of chords. Patients performed very poorly on the language task compared to controls, and they also performed more poorly on the music task. This suggests that there is a connection between the poor performance on language and music tasks, and that deficits in the music task were small compared to deficits in the language task. This supports a connection between the brain mechanisms involved in music and language, but not necessarily a strong connection
Congenital amusia
Patients who are born having problems with music perception. They have severe problems recognizing common tunes or discriminating between simple melodies. However, these individuals often have normal language abilities
How is language symbolic?
Language is a relationship between symbols and what the symbols represent. The symbols change depending on the language, a sequence of letters represents an object in English, but the same object might be represented by a character in Korean. In addition, there is typically no resemblance between a word/sentence and the object or idea it’s referring to (language is referent).
Types of rules in language (4)
- Phonological rules – rules of sounds- only certain sounds/letter combinations exist in English
- Syntactic rules – rules of sentence structure
- Semantic rules – relating the meaning of language
- Pragmatic rules – social conventions for language use (context-dependent and conversational)
Why can language be considered productive/generative?
There is an infinite amount of novel combinations using components of the English languages. We can come up with a new phrase that hasn’t been used before
Example of how language is creative and dynamic
Language evolves and new words come into use over time, like using TikTok as verb. Emojis are also a new way to express ideas.
Perception
Allows us to read words and hear speech (involves recognition of visual and auditory patterns)
Attention
Allows us to allocate appropriate amount of processing resources that is required for a particular language-related task (You will need more time to comprehend a matrix algebra lecture than a chat with a friend)
The role of short term memory in language
Allows to maintain words in your STM long enough to process and interpret them.
The role of long term memory in language
(declarative and procedural) allows to retrieve word meanings from semantic memory and grammatical rules from procedural memory to make sense of word arrangements.
Koko the gorilla
Studied by Penny Patterson, she learned ~1000 signs and 2000 English words. However, Koko never mastered sign language. She never used full syntactic structure
Alex the parrot
Studied by Irene Pepperburg. Used a 2-way communication code. He did have rudimentary syntax, as he was able to create new words for objects he had never seen before, using his previous knowledge. He could also understand simple quantities, like zero. However, he was not fully generative in language capability
With spoken language, what are the goals of the people involved?
Goal of the speaker- to communicate an idea by translating it into spoken sounds. Goal of the listener- translating sounds into intended meaning
Phonology
The study of sounds as abstract elements in the speaker’s mind that distinguish meaning
Phoneme
The most basic or smallest units of sound in language that can change meaning. These can be combined with other phonemes to form meaningful units (words). Ex- /r/ and /l/ in English (royal vs. loyal). there are 200 different phonemes across all known languages, but no language uses all. The same phoneme/sound can be expressed using different letters- the ‘k’ sound in cat, kite, and school are the same phoneme in English
Invariance problem
Speech is extremely variable and no speech sounds are ever exactly the same. Many variables, such as having a stuffy nose, changing speaking volume, and height influences how speech sounds
Categorical perception
Inability to hear differences between members of a category, where category = phoneme. For example, variants of /t/ with different voice onset times. The ability to hear differences of the same size is much more accurate when the sounds are members of different categories. Ex- /t/ vs /d/
Categorical perception is crucial in the identification of phonemes. Without it, we would hear combinations of frequencies in every phoneme and have extreme difficulty understanding speech. When listening, we can hear one frequency or the other, but not both
Phonemic restoration effect
Warren- listeners can restore the distortions in speech to a correct pronunciation if the word is highly predictable. The missing phoneme is able to be filled in based on the context of the sentence. This also requires top-down processing. It demonstrates the effect of context on perception
How do we perceive written words?
Comprehension of written language requires translating symbols into something meaningful. Due to the word superiority effect, we know that words are first perceived as a whole rather than as individual letters
Word superiority effect
Participants were flashed either an actual word or a non-word. This is followed by a random pattern, and then followed by two letters: one that appeared in the original
stimulus and another that did not. Subjects are faster and more accurate when the letter is presented in the context of a word vs. in isolation or as part of a non-word. This shows that perception of words precedes perception of individual letters.
Phonological priming
Phonological relatedness, or how many phonemes two words share, affects reaction times. For example, ‘still’ would prime ‘smoke’ but not ‘dream’.
How does lexical priming work in terms of semantic networks?
Example- hearing “rose” à spread of activation to both the flower rose and the verb rose-related nodes.
How are lexicons organized in our minds? (3 ways)
- Based on word frequency
- Based on semantics
- Meaning dominance
Syntactic ambiguity
Sometimes the most appropriate way in which to group (parse) words is unclear, because they have more than one meaning
Temporary Ambiguity
The initial words of a sentence can lead to more than one meaning. These sentences can be considered “garden path” sentences, because it brings the reader down a misleading path.
Strengths of the garden path model (2)
- Considers our working memory capacity
- Speed achieved by only considering one interpretation. You don’t consider all possible interpretations at once- you start from the simplest option first.
Selectional restrictions
Verbs impose restrictions on the semantic properties of
their arguments. Some verbs will only make sense in certain contexts, like when specific nouns are being used.
Morrow situation model experiment
Participants memorized a diagram of a map, read a narrative about people moving about the space, and were asked whether a pair of objects (sink, furnace) are located in the same room. Listeners were faster to respond to objects that are in the same room as the main character. The further away the room was from the protagonist, the longer it took for participants to respond. This provides evidence that we create a mental representation of a story that we’re reading. We constantly update the model based on the narrative.
