Chapter 11: Language Flashcards
Language
A system of communication using sounds or symbols that enables us to express our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
Creativity of Human Language: The Hierarchical Nature of Language
- Language consists of a series of small components that can be combined to form larger units
- Words - Phrases - Sentences - stories
Creativity of Human Language: The Rule-Based Nature of Language
- Components of language can be arranged in certain ways, but not others
Studying Language: Skinner, Chomsky, & Psycholinguistics
- Psycholinguistics: The field concerned with the psychological study of language
- Skinner thought it was all behaviour & conditioning (classic) but Chomsky believed it was more generative and therefore a part of the mind
Studying Language: The 4 Main Concerns of Psycholinguistics
- Comprehension
- Representation
- Speech Production
- Acquisition
Language Comprehension: Lexical Semantics
- The meaning of specific words
- Combines lexicon (words you know) with semantics (meaning of language in general)
Language Comprehension: The Word Frequency Effect
- Refers to the fact that we respond more rapidly to high-frequency words
- A words frequency influences how we process it!
Language Comprehension: Lexical Decision Task
- P’s are asked to decide as quickly as possible whether or not they see a word or nonword
- Higher-frequency words are typically way faster
Language Comprehension: Speech Segementation
- The perception of individual words even though there are often no pauses between words
- Largely dictated by our understanding of the context (i.e., big girl vs big earl)
Language Comprehension: Lexical Ambiguity
- Words can often have more than one meaning!
- When ambiguous words come around, we gotta look to the context or we’re fucked!
Language Comprehension: Lexical Priming (experiment)
- Priming a participant by showing them a word that is similar in meaning to another one (rose & flower)
- Tanenhaus did this by showing p’s 2 sentences with rose as a noun or a verb, and p’s responded way faster to the word flower after seeing rose as a noun than as a verb
Language Comprehension: Meaning Dominance
- The meaning of a word can also be influenced by how often the word is used with one meaning vs. another
- i.e., higher frequency words are more likely to be used
Language Comprehension: Biased Dominance vs Balanced Dominance
- Biased dominance occurs when one meaning is used way more frequently than another (dog as animal rather than dog as sex fiend)
- Balanced dominance occurs when meanings are equally frequent (balls as golf balls vs testicles)
Understanding Sentences: Syntax
The structure of a sentence
Understanding Sentences: Parsing
- The process of grouping words within a sentence to understand the meaning of the sentence as a whole
- I.e., (Asher went home after a long day) – (and then drank himself under the table)
Understanding Sentences: Garden Path Sentences
- Sentences which appear to mean one thing but then end up meaning something else
Garden Path Sentences: Temporary Ambiguity
- These sentences lead to temporary ambiguity by misleading the reader, who must then correct their parsing of the sentence
Understanding Sentences: The Garden Path Model of Parsing
- Posits that people parse words into phrases based on processing mechanisms called ‘heuristics’
The Garden Path Model of Parsing: Heuristics
- Heuristics are rules that are rapidly applied to make a decision, and can sometimes lead to errors because they’re so fast and largely unconscious
Understanding Sentences: Late Closure
- A parsing mechanism where every new word a person reads is added to the current phrase
- Explains why we garden path ourselves - keep adding words until it becomes clear that our parsing has been done incorrectly
Understanding Sentences: The Constraint-Based Approach to Parsing
- The idea that information in addition to syntax participates in processing as a person reads or hears a sentence
- Garden path model was pure syntax all day, while this one includes information
The Constraint-Based Approach to Parsing: Visual World Paradigm (technique)
- Shows how visual information can affect the parsing of a sentence
- Measured the eye movements of p’s and found that their eyes moved along with the sentence, actually making errors when the sentence misled them!
Understanding Stories: Narrative
- Texts in which there is a story that progresses from one event to another, although stories can also include flashbacks of events that happened earlier
Understanding Stories: Coherence
- The representation of the text in a person’s mind that creates clear relations between parts of the text and the main topic of the story
Understanding Stories: Inferences
We use our knowledge to go beyond the information in the text to determine its meaning
Understanding Stories w/ Inferences: Anaphoric Inference
- Inferring that a word like ‘he’ or ‘she’ is used to avoid repetition and refers to a word used earlier in the sentence!
- Even when used incorrectly, we can usually infer what words like this are referring to!
Understanding Stories w/ Inferences: Instrument Inference
- We often infer what instruments people are using even if they’re not explicitly mentioned!
- i.e., john pounded margarette until she came (with his penis is inferred)
Understanding Stories w/ Inferences: Causal Inference
- We often infer what caused the effect, even if it is not explicitly stated!
- i.e., john took his shirt off, margarette got wet as fuck (cause is inferred here!)
Understanding Stories: Situation Model
- Describes the way we picture a situation in our head while reading
- Simulates the perceptual and motor characteristics of the objects and actions in a story
Having Convos: The Given-New Contract
- States that a speaker should construct sentences so that they include two kinds of info
1. Given Information: Info that the listener already knows
2. New Information: Info that the listener is hearing for the first time
Having Convos: Common Ground
- The mental knowledge and beliefs shared among conversational parties
- As we chat, we learn what the other person knows about and factor that into our conversation
- I.e., John finds out that Margrette also enjoys c&b torture so now he can discuss apparatuses with her
Having Convos: The Referential Communication Task
- 2 P’s have cards with fuckin weird shit on them
- They have to communicate what the shit looks like, and they make names for the funky shit
- This means they’ve established common ground and they can communicate easily about the weird shit
Having Convos: Entrainment
- Synchronization between two conversational partners
- The process of creating common ground
Having Convos: Syntactic Coordination
- How conversational partners can end up coordinating their grammatical constructions
- We often use the same wording or phrasing as the people we’re talking to
Having Convos: Syntactic Priming
- Hearing a statement with a particular syntactic construction increases the chances that a sentence will be produced with the same construction
Having Convos: Theory of Mind
- The ability to understand what others think, feel, or believe
- Helps us have conversations because we can infer things about what people be thinking
Music & Language: Prosody
- The pattern of intonation and rhythm in spoken language
- Often responsible for emotion in language
- Actors often utilize prosody in order to convey emotion in their lines
Music & Language: Broca’s Aphasia
- Difficulty in understanding sentences with complex syntax
- Patients did worse in language trials (syntax) and in music trials (off-key chords)
- May show a connection between brain mechanisms involved in music & language!
Music & Language: Congenital Amusia
- Patients who are born with problems in music perception (can’t recognize simple melodies or common tunes)
- Typically good language-wise
- Shows that music and language also use different mechanisms
