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psyc 213 - cognition > chapter 11: language > Flashcards

chapter 11: language Flashcards

1
Q

define psycholinguistics

A

study of linguistic behavior including how we learn, understand and produce language

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2
Q

what are the three main differences between communication within animals and the human language

A
  1. animal communication highly limited
  2. animals generally communicate concrete features
  3. lack of grammar in animals
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3
Q

why are tonal languages more rare in colder environments

A

dry air makes it harder to produce tonal sounds

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4
Q

name the two aspects that shape vocabulary

A

population: ↑ people, ↓ complex
environment (ex. Inuits have more words for snow)

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5
Q

explain the experiments done with Russian speakers and the color blue and the conclusion drawn from it

A

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

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6
Q

how does gender affect language

A

women use
- more adjectives
- more first-person plurals
- tend to ‘reverse-accent’
countries with higher gender inequality

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7
Q

how do you call the ability to combine words in novel ways

A

productivity (digital infinity)

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8
Q

what was the conclusion drawn from research on Alex the parrot and Washoe the chimp?

A

animals are unable to produce true language, even with extensive training
- true language is unique to humans

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9
Q

what is the nature/nurture debate about language acquisition?

A

nature: born with innate capacity to learn language
nurture: acquired through same mechanisms as skills learning

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10
Q

according to B.F. Skinner, name the 2 theoretical approaches that could account for language

A
  1. reinforcement
  2. modeling of other people’s language beh
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11
Q

what was Noam Chomsky’s alternative view to language acquisition

A

innate capacity to learn language
- not stimulus dependent
- no reinforcement
- no language experience prior

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12
Q

what is the language acquisition device (LAD)

A

abstracted entity that supports language
- universal grammar: rules for all languages
- children only learn language-specific aspects to put “on top” of UG

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13
Q

name 3 examples of people acquiring grammar without sufficient stimuli

A
  1. statement/question rule
  2. pidgin/creole
  3. deaf isolates
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14
Q

what is the poverty of the stimulus

A

phenomenon that states there is insufficient data for children to learn the rules of grammar based on experience alone

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15
Q

name evidence that proves the environment does provide information for children to learn

A
  • adult reformulation
  • children extract regularities from experiences
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16
Q

name the gene that supports the idea that grammatical ability emerged due to mutations in our brain

A

FOXP2

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17
Q

what is developmental verbal dyspraxia

A

disorder that affects the ability to pronounce syllables and words

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18
Q

what happens when the FOXP2 is knocked out in female mice? in songbirds?

A

mice: stop generating high-frequency vocalizations in response to their pups
songbirds: affects ability to learn and imitate characteristic songs

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19
Q

around what age does a child develop full complex multi-word speech?

A

around 3-4 years old

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20
Q

explain what child-directed speech (CDS) is and what motherese is

A

speech tailored to young infant or child
- motherese: use of sing-song like speech cadences, exaggerated vowel pronunciations and repetition

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21
Q

stretching out, exaggerating and repeating sounds help infants with…

A
  • identifying the beginning and end of speech sounds
  • draw their attention to important concepts and words
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22
Q

explain the head-turn task

A

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

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23
Q

name the three basic aspects of language that are necessary to understanding speech

A

phonological: within a sound
lexical: within a word
parsing: within a sentence

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24
Q

name and differentiate the two linguistic units

A

phonemes: sounds making up speech
morphemes: convey meaning either on their own or in combination with other units of speech

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25
Q

what are some challenges our brain confronts when trying to identify phonemes and morphemes

A
  1. sounds people make are often ambiguous
    - use of context
  2. speech segmentation
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26
Q

what is the McGurk effect

A

occurs when viewing visual articulations of one phoneme while hearing auditory signal consistent with different phoneme

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27
Q

define lexical processing

A

determining meaning to individual words

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28
Q

differentiate phonological and lexical ambiguity

A

phonological: too noisy, brain fills in
lexical: one word, multiple meanings
- homophones, homographs

29
Q

explain the cross-modal priming task

A

Ps listen to sentences with ambiguous words
- one condition bias, another not
lexical decision task

30
Q

using the lexical decision task, what did Swinney find about the activation of different meanings of a word

A

activate multiple meanings during short SOA
- after longer SOA, only context related meaning is retained

31
Q

define parsing

A

breaking up a sentence into its constituent parts and identifying them as elements (nouns, articles, verbs, etc)

32
Q

explain what a garden-path sentence is

A

a sentence that tends to induce wrong parsing

33
Q

a clause is a …

A

group of words that express a full idea of someone or something

34
Q

what is the syntax-first approach to interpreting syntactic structure of language

A

grammar alone is used to parse a sentence before considering other factors

35
Q

define the late-closure principle

A

tendency when parsing to attach incoming words to current phrase

36
Q

explain the constraint-based model

A

use to resolve ambiguity

  • semantic and thematic context
  • expectancy
  • frequency

eye-tracking study
- longer reading time + back and forth eye mov

37
Q

Tanenhaus et al. (1995) presented Ps with sentences about apples and towels. What kind of information did they find affected parsing behavior?

A

visual information

38
Q

define prosody

A

patterns of stress and intonation (change of pitch) of a speaker

39
Q

define Broca’s aphasia

A
  • expressive aphasia
  • intact language comprehension
  • impaired speech production and articulation (writing can be affected)
  • left inferior frontal gyrus damage
40
Q

explain the case of patient Tan

A

could only speak one syllable: Tan
could understand everything
large lesion in Broca’s area

41
Q

define Wernicke’s aphasia

A
  • receptive/fluent aphasia
  • posterior superior temporal lobe damage
  • speech can be produced, but meaningless (“word salad”)
  • people on unaware of it
42
Q

name the three types of paraphasias

A
  • verbal: substituting words with something semantically related
  • phonemic: swapping or adding speech sounds
  • neologism: using made-up words
43
Q

what is the arcuate fasciculus

A

neural pathway between Broca’s and Wernicke’s area

44
Q

what is conduction aphasia

A
  • damage to arcuate fasciculus
  • disconnection between comprehension and production of speech
  • deficits↑, complexity of sentences to be repeated↑
45
Q

is language left or right lateralized

A

left,
right supports: prosody, pitch, gesture (mood, attitude, intonation)

46
Q

define surface dyslexia

A

impaired at producing irregular words (“comb” or “thought”)
- reading happens letter-by-letter
- difficulty matching words to mental dictionary

47
Q

define phonological dyslexia

A

impaired at reading non-words or new words
- reading happens by comparing whole words to mental dictionary (lexicon)
- difficulty reading letter-by-letter

48
Q

what is the dual route model of reading

A
  1. access mental dictionary (whole word) → speech sound
    - impaired in surface dyslexia
  2. grapheme-phoneme (letter-by-letter) → speech sound
    - impaired in phonological dyslexia
49
Q

define the nativist view of language and thought

A

independent
- mentalese: innate non-spoken to represent all conceptual content and propositions to create thought
- why children without spoken language can think

50
Q

define the linguistic relativity view of language and thought

A

interconnected
- language changes how we think
- language determinism: language controls our thoughts

51
Q

what do linguistic universalists believe

A
  • differences among languages are superficial
  • all express same basic ideas
52
Q

define discourse processing

A

ability to understand language that is at least several sentences long

53
Q

define anaphoric inference

A

guess which word in a first sentence (antecedent) is being referenced by another word (anaphor)

54
Q

define causal inference

A

assumption that something mentioned at one stage of the sequence leads to something later on

55
Q

define backward inference

A

when previous info is needed to process current info

56
Q

define elaborative inference

A

inferred info is not necessary to understand the text

57
Q

differentiate between offline and online discourse processing

A

online: inferences generated while people are listening to or reading text
offline: occurs in memory after initial encoding, during memory consolidation or retrieval

58
Q

name 2 behavioral techniques that can be used to measure online processing

A

reaction time
eye movements

59
Q

What did Clark (1974) find in his experiment regarding the reaction time to reading sentence sequences?

A

sequences requiring backward inferences took more time to progress through
- proof of online inferential reasoning

60
Q

What did Just & Carpenter (1978) find in his experiment regarding eye movements of participants while reading sentence sequences?

A

Ps spent longer fixating a word that required backward inferences

61
Q

define instrumental inference

A

instrument or tool that is likely to be used for a task is inferred from the text

62
Q

define neurolinguistics

A

branch of linguistics concerned with the relationship between linguistics beh and structures of the brain

63
Q

Broca’s area is responsible for … while Wernicke’s area is responsible for…

A

language production;
language comprehension

64
Q

with the advance of neuroimaging, why is the role of Broca’s area in language production unclear

A
  • damage to Broca’s area doesn’t always lead to severe speech deficits
  • patients can have deficits without damage to it
65
Q

describe the deficits in patients with right-hemisphere damage that led people to believe the right hemisphere may be involved in higher-level processing

A
  • patients could speak same number of words
  • speech less informative and coherent
66
Q

what is the field of natural language processing (NLP)

A

subfield fo AI specifically concerned with machines understanding and producing languge

67
Q

explain the Turing test

A

testing a computer’s ability to fool a human into thinking it’s a human

68
Q

define sequence-to-sequence learning

A

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

69
Q

what is parallel activation

A

both languages are active regardles of the requirement to use one language alone

psyc 213 - cognition (13 decks)

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