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PSY3377 - Cognition > Chapter 11 - Language > Flashcards

Chapter 11 - Language Flashcards

1
Q

Hierarchical Nature of Language

A

Language consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units.

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2
Q

Rule-Based Nature of Language

A

Components can be arranged in certain ways but not in others.

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3
Q

How do we know the need to communicate using language is universal?

A
  • When people are deaf and find themselves in environments where no one speaks sign language they will make their own.
  • All humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its complex rules, even though they are usually not aware of these rules.
  • Language is universal across cultures.
  • Language development is similar across cultures.
  • Even though a large number of languages are very different from one another, we can describe them as being “unique but the same”.
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4
Q

What did Paul Broca do for the study of language?

A
  • Studied patients with brain damage which led to the proposal that an area in the frontal lobe is responsible for the production of language.
  • We named this area the Broca’s area.
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5
Q

What did Carl Wernicke do for the study of language?

A
  • Proposed that an area in the temporal lobe is responsible for comprehension.
  • We named this area Wernicke’s area.
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6
Q

Skinner vs Chomsky Debate

A
  • Skinner believes that we learn language through reinforcement.
  • Chomsky believes that we are genetically programmed to learn behaviour.
  • Chomsky also saw studying language as a way to study the properties of the mind.
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7
Q

Why was Chomsky’s criticism of behaviorism so important to the cognitive revolution?

A
  • Began the discipline of psycholinguistics.
  • This field is concerned with the psychological study of language.
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8
Q

What are the four major concerns of psycholinguistics?

A
  • Comprehension: How do people understand spoken and written language?
  • Representation: How is language represented in the mind?
  • Speech Production: How do people produce language?
  • Acquisition: How do people learn language?
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9
Q

Lexicon

A
  • All the words we know.
  • Also called our mental dictionary.
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10
Q

Semantics

A
  • The meaning of language.
  • Important for words, because each word has one or more meanings.
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11
Q

Lexical Semantics

A
  • The meaning of words.
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12
Q

Word Frequency

A
  • The frequency with which a word appears in a language.
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13
Q

Word Frequency Effect

A
  • Refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words than to low-frequency words.
  • Important because a word’s frequency influences how we process the word.
  • Ex: Home is high-frequency and hike is low-frequency.
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14
Q

What is the lexical decision task?

A
  • A task used to illustrate processing differences between high- and low-frequency words.
  • The task is to decide as quickly as possible whether strings of letters are words or nonwords.
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15
Q

What has research using the lexical decision task demonstrated?

A
  • Slower response to low-frequency words.
  • Demonstrated by measuring people’s eye movements while reading.
  • Longer fixations on low-frequency words could be because readers need more time to access the meaning of low-frequency words.
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16
Q

What does the word frequency effect demonstrate?

A
  • Demonstrates how our past experience with words influences our ability to access their meaning.
  • As demonstrated in the lexical decision task.
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17
Q

How do we understand different accents and pronunciations?

A
  • Use the context in which the word appears.
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18
Q

Speech Segmentation

A

The perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words.

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19
Q

What are some ways our ability to hear and understand spoken words are affected?

A
  • How frequently we have encountered a word in the past.
  • The context in which it appears.
  • Our knowledge of statistical regularities of our language.
  • Our knowledge of the word’s meanings.
  • All of these things involve knowledge achieved by learning/experience with language.
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20
Q

Lexical Ambiguity

A
  • A situation where words have more than one meaning.
  • Ex: Bugging can mean bothering or installing a hidden listening device on someone.
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21
Q

What is lexical priming and what does its effect indicate?

A
  • Priming that involves the meaning of words.
  • Occurs when a word is followed by another word with a similar meaning.
  • Ex: Saying flower before saying the word rose makes people think of the flower more quickly, thus indicating that we think these words are connected. This does not happen when we say things like cloud before rose.
  • Its effect indicates that two words, like rose and flower, have similar meanings in a person’s mind.
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22
Q

How did Tanenhaus and coworkers measure lexical priming?

A
  • They used two conditions and a control group:
    1. The noun-noun condition: a word is presented as a noun followed by a noun probe stimulus.
    2. The verb-noun condition: a word is presented as a verb followed by a noun probe stimulus.
  • Concluded that all of an ambiguous word’s meanings are activated immediately after the word is heard.
  • So the context provided by a sentence helps determine the meaning of a word, but context exerts its influence after a slight delay during which other meanings of a word are briefly described.
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23
Q

Meaning Dominance

A
  • The relative frequency of the meanings of ambiguous words
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24
Q

Biased Dominance

A
  • When one meaning of a word occurs more often than another meaning of the same word.
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25
Q

Balanced Dominance

A
  • When the meaning of a word is equally likely.
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26
Q

How does the context of a sentence help us understand words?

A
  • Deal with the variability of word pronunciations.
  • Perceive individual words in a continuous stream of speech.
  • Determine the meanings of ambiguous words.
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27
Q

Syntax

A

The structure of a sentence.

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28
Q

The Study of Syntax

A
  • Involves discovering cues that languages provide that show how words in a sentence relate to one another.
29
Q

Parsing

A

The grouping of words into phrases.

30
Q

Garden Path Sentences

A

Begin appearing to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else

31
Q

What do garden path sentences illustrate?

A
  • Temporary ambiguity
  • This means that at first one organization is adopted and then when the error is realized the person shifts to the correct organization.
32
Q

What is the garden path model of parsing?

A
  • One of the early proposals to explain parsing and garden sentences.
  • Proposed by Lynn Frazier.
  • States that as people read a sentence their grouping of words into phrases is governed by a number of processing mechanisms called heuristics.
  • These rules are based on parsing and syntax.
33
Q

Heuristics

A

A rule that can be applied rapidly to make a decision.

34
Q

What are the properties of heuristics?

A
  • Positive: They allow us to make fast conclusions and decisions.
  • Negative: They could lead to inaccurate/wrong decisions.
35
Q

What does the garden path model of parsing about heuristic mistakes?

A
  • We reconsider the initial parse (sentence) and make the appropriate corrections.
36
Q

The Principle of Late Closure

A
  • Principle that states when a person encounters a new word, the person’s parsing mechanism assumes that his word is part of the current phrase, so each new word is added to the current phrase for as long as possible.

-

37
Q

Constraint-Based Approach to Parsing

A
  • The idea that information in addition to syntax participates in processing as a person reads or hears a sentence.
38
Q

How do we make predictions about how a sentence should be parsed?

A
  • Influence of word meaning - fewer options makes it easier.
  • Influence of story context - the story helps us understand even if the grammar is difficult.
  • Influence of scene context - scenes help us understand
39
Q

The Visual World Paradigm

A
  • Used to investigate how observing objects in a scene can influence how we interpret a scene.
  • Involves determining how information in a scene can influence how a sentence is processed.
40
Q

Results of the visual world paradigm study?

A
  • The participant’s eye movements occur as they are reading the sentence and are influenced by the contents of the scene.
  • Showed that participants take into account not only information provided by the syntactic structure of the sentence but also non-linguistic information.
  • Argues against the garden path model that syntactic rules are the only thing taken into account as a sentence is initially unfolding.
41
Q

What are the two main types of sentence constructions? Which is easier and which is harder to understand and why?

A
  • Subject-relative construction: More prevalent since it is easier to understand. We also have more exposure to this kind which makes it easier to understand.
  • Object-relative construction: More difficult to understand as it demands more of the reader’s memory. It is more complicated. This higher memory load slows down processing. So it is less common in English.
42
Q

Inferences

A
  • Determining what the text means by using our knowledge to go beyond the information provided by the text.
  • Can be conscious or unconscious.
43
Q

Narrative

A
  • Refers to text in which there is a story that progresses from one part to another.
  • Inferences help us create the link between parts of the story.
44
Q

Coherence

A
  • The representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and the main part of the story.
  • Very important for the narrative.
  • Created by many types of inferences.
45
Q

Anaphoric Inferences

A
  • Infering who he/she/they… is in a second sentence based on the information in the first.
46
Q

Instrument Inferences

A
  • Being able to decide what a scene looks like based on previous knowledge.
47
Q

Causal Inferences

A
  • When you infer that events described in one clause or sentence were caused by events that occurred in a previous sentence.
48
Q

Situation Model

A
  • An approach to understanding how people read or hear a story.
  • Creating this model stimulates the movement characteristics of the objects and actions in a story.
  • Ex: They picture a nail horizontally if it is going into the wall and vertically if it is going into the ground.
49
Q

What did Hauk’s ERP results show?

A
  • The link between action words and activation of action areas in the brain suggests a physiological mechanism that may be related to creating situation models as a person reads a story.
50
Q

How do people understand stories?

A
  • Dynamic process
  • How words/phrases are organized
  • Relationships between sentences
  • Inference to link sentences
  • Creating mental representations or simulations.
51
Q

Conversation

A
  • Two or more people talking with one another.
52
Q

The Given-New Contract

A
  • States that a speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of information - Given the information that the listener already knows - New information that the listener is hearing for the first time.
53
Q

Common Ground

A
  • The mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties.
54
Q

What does Herbert Clark think the central parts of understanding language are?

A
  • Collaboration
  • Common ground
55
Q

What is the referential communication task?

A
  • A way of studying how common ground is established.
  • A task in which two people are exchanging information in a conversation when this information involves reference
56
Q

What is the process of creating common ground called?

A
  • Entrainment
  • This is the synchronization between two conversational partners.
57
Q

Syntactic Coordination

A
  • How conversational partners can end up coordinating their grammatical constructions
58
Q

Syntactic Priming

A
  • Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction.
59
Q

What happens during a syntactic priming experiment?

A
  • Two people engage in a conversation.
  • The experimenter determines whether a specific grammatical construction used by one person causes the other person to use the same construction.
  • If the syntax does match we can conclude that priming has occurred.
60
Q

Theory of Mind

A
  • The ability to understand what others feel, think, or believe.
61
Q

What is an important similarity between music and language?

A
  • They both combine elements to create structured sentences.
  • Tones for music
  • Words for language
62
Q

How do Broca’s aphasia patients respond to music compared to language? What does this demonstrate?

A
  • They perform very poorly on music and language tasks.
  • This demonstrates support for a connection between the brain mechanisms involved in music and language. This connection is not necessarily strong.
63
Q

Congenital Amusia and what does it show us about the mechanisms of language and music in the brain?

A
  • Have severe problems with tasks such as discriminating between simple melodies or recognizing common tunes. Yet they still have normal language abilities.
  • This shows us that there is evidence for separate brain mechanisms between music and language in the brain.
64
Q

Do we think music and language overlap in the brain?

A
  • They may have similar mechanisms but they do not overlap.
65
Q

What are some key characteristics of language?

A
  • Regular: Systems of rules.
  • Generative: Use symbols or markers to create new ideas.
  • Arbitrary: Sound/Writing does not psychically remember what we are trying to represent.
  • Discrete: The system has parts that can be broken down into smaller or bigger units.
  • Recursive: We can combine and embed symbols to make messages more and more complex.
66
Q

What are Grice’s ways to communicate effectively?

A
  • Quantity: Must be informative
  • Quality: Must be truthful
  • Manner: Must be clear
  • Relation: Must be relevant
67
Q

What are the components of language?

A
  • Pragmatics: The meaning
  • Morphology: Forms of words
  • Semantics: The meaning of words/sentences
  • Phonology: Social rules of language
  • Syntax: Rules of language
68
Q

Who is our closet’s cousin?

A

Chimps:)

PSY3377 - Cognition (4 decks)

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