chapter 11: language Flashcards
define psycholinguistics
study of linguistic behavior including how we learn, understand and produce language
what are the three main differences between communication within animals and the human language
- animal communication highly limited
- animals generally communicate concrete features
- lack of grammar in animals
why are tonal languages more rare in colder environments
dry air makes it harder to produce tonal sounds
name the two aspects that shape vocabulary
population: ↑ people, ↓ complex
environment (ex. Inuits have more words for snow)
explain the experiments done with Russian speakers and the color blue and the conclusion drawn from it
Russian speakers: 2 words for blue
- 10% faster to match colors
proves that since they have multiple names for the colors, they perceive the colors as more different
how does gender affect language
women use
- more adjectives
- more first-person plurals
- tend to ‘reverse-accent’
countries with higher gender inequality
how do you call the ability to combine words in novel ways
productivity (digital infinity)
what was the conclusion drawn from research on Alex the parrot and Washoe the chimp?
animals are unable to produce true language, even with extensive training
- true language is unique to humans
what is the nature/nurture debate about language acquisition?
nature: born with innate capacity to learn language
nurture: acquired through same mechanisms as skills learning
according to B.F. Skinner, name the 2 theoretical approaches that could account for language
- reinforcement
- modeling of other people’s language beh
what was Noam Chomsky’s alternative view to language acquisition
innate capacity to learn language
- not stimulus dependent
- no reinforcement
- no language experience prior
what is the language acquisition device (LAD)
abstracted entity that supports language
- universal grammar: rules for all languages
- children only learn language-specific aspects to put “on top” of UG
name 3 examples of people acquiring grammar without sufficient stimuli
- statement/question rule
- pidgin/creole
- deaf isolates
what is the poverty of the stimulus
phenomenon that states there is insufficient data for children to learn the rules of grammar based on experience alone
name evidence that proves the environment does provide information for children to learn
- adult reformulation
- children extract regularities from experiences
name the gene that supports the idea that grammatical ability emerged due to mutations in our brain
FOXP2
what is developmental verbal dyspraxia
disorder that affects the ability to pronounce syllables and words
what happens when the FOXP2 is knocked out in female mice? in songbirds?
mice: stop generating high-frequency vocalizations in response to their pups
songbirds: affects ability to learn and imitate characteristic songs
around what age does a child develop full complex multi-word speech?
around 3-4 years old
explain what child-directed speech (CDS) is and what motherese is
speech tailored to young infant or child
- motherese: use of sing-song like speech cadences, exaggerated vowel pronunciations and repetition
stretching out, exaggerating and repeating sounds help infants with…
- identifying the beginning and end of speech sounds
- draw their attention to important concepts and words
explain the head-turn task
behavioral task used to test infant language in which babies are conditioned to turn their heads when they hear a change in a speech sounds
name the three basic aspects of language that are necessary to understanding speech
phonological: within a sound
lexical: within a word
parsing: within a sentence
name and differentiate the two linguistic units
phonemes: sounds making up speech
morphemes: convey meaning either on their own or in combination with other units of speech
what are some challenges our brain confronts when trying to identify phonemes and morphemes
- sounds people make are often ambiguous
- use of context - speech segmentation
what is the McGurk effect
occurs when viewing visual articulations of one phoneme while hearing auditory signal consistent with different phoneme
define lexical processing
determining meaning to individual words
differentiate phonological and lexical ambiguity
phonological: too noisy, brain fills in
lexical: one word, multiple meanings
- homophones, homographs
explain the cross-modal priming task
Ps listen to sentences with ambiguous words
- one condition bias, another not
lexical decision task
using the lexical decision task, what did Swinney find about the activation of different meanings of a word
activate multiple meanings during short SOA
- after longer SOA, only context related meaning is retained
define parsing
breaking up a sentence into its constituent parts and identifying them as elements (nouns, articles, verbs, etc)
explain what a garden-path sentence is
a sentence that tends to induce wrong parsing
a clause is a …
group of words that express a full idea of someone or something
what is the syntax-first approach to interpreting syntactic structure of language
grammar alone is used to parse a sentence before considering other factors
define the late-closure principle
tendency when parsing to attach incoming words to current phrase
explain the constraint-based model
use to resolve ambiguity
- semantic and thematic context
- expectancy
- frequency
eye-tracking study
- longer reading time + back and forth eye mov
Tanenhaus et al. (1995) presented Ps with sentences about apples and towels. What kind of information did they find affected parsing behavior?
visual information
define prosody
patterns of stress and intonation (change of pitch) of a speaker
define Broca’s aphasia
- expressive aphasia
- intact language comprehension
- impaired speech production and articulation (writing can be affected)
- left inferior frontal gyrus damage
explain the case of patient Tan
could only speak one syllable: Tan
could understand everything
large lesion in Broca’s area
define Wernicke’s aphasia
- receptive/fluent aphasia
- posterior superior temporal lobe damage
- speech can be produced, but meaningless (“word salad”)
- people on unaware of it
name the three types of paraphasias
- verbal: substituting words with something semantically related
- phonemic: swapping or adding speech sounds
- neologism: using made-up words
what is the arcuate fasciculus
neural pathway between Broca’s and Wernicke’s area
what is conduction aphasia
- damage to arcuate fasciculus
- disconnection between comprehension and production of speech
- deficits↑, complexity of sentences to be repeated↑
is language left or right lateralized
left,
right supports: prosody, pitch, gesture (mood, attitude, intonation)
define surface dyslexia
impaired at producing irregular words (“comb” or “thought”)
- reading happens letter-by-letter
- difficulty matching words to mental dictionary
define phonological dyslexia
impaired at reading non-words or new words
- reading happens by comparing whole words to mental dictionary (lexicon)
- difficulty reading letter-by-letter
what is the dual route model of reading
- access mental dictionary (whole word) → speech sound
- impaired in surface dyslexia - grapheme-phoneme (letter-by-letter) → speech sound
- impaired in phonological dyslexia
define the nativist view of language and thought
independent
- mentalese: innate non-spoken to represent all conceptual content and propositions to create thought
- why children without spoken language can think
define the linguistic relativity view of language and thought
interconnected
- language changes how we think
- language determinism: language controls our thoughts
what do linguistic universalists believe
- differences among languages are superficial
- all express same basic ideas
define discourse processing
ability to understand language that is at least several sentences long
define anaphoric inference
guess which word in a first sentence (antecedent) is being referenced by another word (anaphor)
define causal inference
assumption that something mentioned at one stage of the sequence leads to something later on
define backward inference
when previous info is needed to process current info
define elaborative inference
inferred info is not necessary to understand the text
differentiate between offline and online discourse processing
online: inferences generated while people are listening to or reading text
offline: occurs in memory after initial encoding, during memory consolidation or retrieval
name 2 behavioral techniques that can be used to measure online processing
reaction time
eye movements
What did Clark (1974) find in his experiment regarding the reaction time to reading sentence sequences?
sequences requiring backward inferences took more time to progress through
- proof of online inferential reasoning
What did Just & Carpenter (1978) find in his experiment regarding eye movements of participants while reading sentence sequences?
Ps spent longer fixating a word that required backward inferences
define instrumental inference
instrument or tool that is likely to be used for a task is inferred from the text
define neurolinguistics
branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship between linguistics beh and structures of the brain
Broca’s area is responsible for … while Wernicke’s area is responsible for…
language production;
language comprehension
with the advance of neuroimaging, why is the role of Broca’s area in language production unclear
- damage to Broca’s area doesn’t always lead to severe speech deficits
- patients can have deficits without damage to it
describe the deficits in patients with right-hemisphere damage that led people to believe the right hemisphere may be involved in higher-level processing
- patients could speak same number of words
- speech less informative and coherent
what is the field of natural language processing (NLP)
subfield fo AI specifically concerned with machines understanding and producing languge
explain the Turing test
testing a computer’s ability to fool a human into thinking it’s a human
define sequence-to-sequence learning
neural networks that have been trained to take in a sequence of text as an input and produce a string of text as an output
what is parallel activation
both languages are active regardles of the requirement to use one language alone
